Background

Theodore Low De Vinne was born on December 25, 1828, in Stamford, Connecticut, United States. He was the son of Daniel and Joanna Augusta Low De Vinne. Theodore was one of eight children. His father a Methodist circuit rider, abolitionist, and author of The Methodist Episcopal Church and Slavery and The Irish Primitive Church emigrated from Ireland. His ancestors had emigrated from Holland to Ireland in the sixteenth century to escape religious persecution.

Education

Theodore Low De Vinne got his early education in public schools in Catskill, Amenia, and White Plains, New York.

Career

At the age of fourteen, Theodore Low De Vinne began an apprenticeship with the Newburgh, New York, Gazette's printer. After the marriage, he found work as a journeyman compositor for Francis Hart in New York City. Hart made him a partner with one-third ownership of the firm in 1858, renaming it Francis Hart & Company. Once established as a printer, De Vinne helped organize his trade. In 1865 a group of printers with whom De Vinne had been meeting formally organized as the Typothetae of the City of New York. De Vinne was the group's secretary and was president of the Typothetae of America when it began in 1887. De Vinne helped his fellow printers set realistic prices when he produced The Printers' Price List: A Manual for the Use of Clerks and Book-keepers in Job Printing.

Meanwhile, Francis Hart & Company became the printer for Scribner and Company’s St. Nicholas, the nation’s foremost children’s magazine at that time. Scribner and Company, pleased with the printing quality, awarded Francis Hart the printing of Scribner’s Monthly in 1876. The magazine was renamed Century in 1881. Frank Luther Mott called Century the best-printed magazine in the world in his History of American Magazines (1938-1968). After Hart died in 1883, De Vinne purchased the balance of the firm and renamed it the De Vinne Press. He soon gained a reputation as the prime source for quality printing and at the firm’s peak employed more than three hundred people in an attractive seven-story building designed by George Fletcher Babb.

De Vinne invented two types of fonts, the Century family and the Renner. De Vinne and Linn Boyd Benton created the Century family specifically for Century in 1896 and is consistently rated highly readable in legibility studies. De Vinne and Henry Brehmer designed the Renner typeface in 1898. Inspired by a typeface invented by Venetian printer Franz Renner in 1472, and by William Morris’s work at England’s Kelmscott Press, the design inspired De Vinne’s foreman, Mark Harvey Liddell, to declare: "We have secured the prime beauty of early printing without having to resort to medieval man's revisions, and so far we have beaten William Morris at his best - no borders, no black illegible type, no crowding of matter, no sacrificing of sense to aesthetic demands - all clear straight legible printing - single, direct and forceful." The typeface called De Vinne, which he did not invent, was named in his honor. De Vinne had functional tastes; his slogan was legibility first, decoration last.

De Vinne readily adapted to advances in printing methods. Francis Hart & Company had a reputation as the first printing firm to use dry paper and a cylinder press for quality work. De Vinne invented the use of coated paper for printing woodcuts in 1875 and experimented with coated paper and photoengraving. He also collaborated with the Hoe brothers in designing printing presses. In 1891 he was among the first printers to use the Linotype machine for quality bookwork.

De Vinne authored other important books and lectures on this history and contributed articles to general-interest periodicals - especially Scribner's Monthly and Century - and to historical books, compilations, and trade publications.

Achievements

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  Theodore Low De Vinne was one of America’s most important printers, not just for his workmanship and innovations, but also for his contributions as historian and book collector. His collection was grouped into three categories: his typographical library maintained at the De Vinne Press, his American history books, and his printing history books. The typographical library went to Columbia University’s library and the Newberry Library of Chicago acquired most of the printing history books.
  
  In the early twentieth century, De Vinne was among the first to experiment with color printing, and De Vinne Press won the gold Special Medal of Award of the American Institute of Graphic Arts in 1908 for its work in four-color-process printing. He received honorary degrees from Columbia and Yale universities.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Invention of Printing

    (The Invention of Printing has always been re­cog­nized by...)

    1876
  • The Printers' Price List: A Manual for the Use of Clerks and Book-Keepers in Job Printing Offices 1869
  • Historic Printing Types: A Lecture Read before the Grober Club of New York, January 25, 1885, with Additions and New Illustrations 1886
  • Christopher Plantin, and the Plantin-Moretus Museum at Antwerp 1888
  • The Roman and Italic Printing Types in the Printing House of Theodore L. De Vinne & Co. 1891
  • The Practice of Typography: A Treatise on the Processes of Type-Making, the Point System, the Names, Sizes, Styles, and Prices of Plain Printing Type 1900
  • The Practice of Typography: Correct Composition; A Treatise on Spelling, Abbreviations, the Compounding and Division of Words, the Proper Use of Figures and Numerals, Italic and Capital Letters, Notes, etc., with Observations on Punctuation and Proof-Reading 1901
  • Title-Pages as Seen by a Printer, with Numerous Illustrations in Facsimile and Some Observations on the Early and Recent Printing of Books 1901
  • The Practice of Typography: Modern Methods of Book Composition; a Treatise on Type-Setting by Hand and by Machine, and on the Proper Arrangement and Imposition of Page 1904
  • Notable Printers of Italy during the Fifteenth Century, Illustrated with Facsimiles from Early Editions and with Remarks on Early and Recent Printing 1910

Views

In the mid-nineteenth century, a debate was raging among international historians and printers over who invented modern printing. Theodore Low De Vinne decided "the invention of printing" must be defined before identifying its inventor. In his book The Invention of Printing, he narrowed this to the invention of the type mold, which enabled the mass production of interchangeable pieces of type. Once he determined this, he documented evidence pointing to Johannes Gutenberg as the inventor of the type mold - and printing as we know it.

Membership

Theodore Low De Vinne was a co-founder of the Typothetae, a trade organization of master printers, and the Grolier Club.

Personality

In researching the invention of printing, Theodore Low De Vinne amassed a large collection of books on its history. He also collected books on Americana. Among the collection are Joseph Moxon’s Moxon's Mechanick Exercises, Theodor Goebel’s Friedrich Koenig und die Erfindung der Schellpresse, Claude Dablon’s Relation de ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable aux missions des pères de la compagnie de Jésus en la nouvelle France, and Williams Hubbard’s A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New England.

Interests

• book collecting

Connections

On December 25, 1850, Theodore Low De Vinne married Grace Brockbank. In 1905 his wife died.

Father:

Daniel De Vinne

Mother:

Joanna Augusta Low De Vinne

Spouse:

Grace Brockbank

References

• No Art Without Craft: The Life of Theodore Low de Vinne, Printer
  2005
• Contemporary Authors
  2011