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Jeremy Norman Collection of Images - Creative Commons
Jeremy Norman Collection of Images - Creative CommonsThe imprint at the foot of the title page featured Gilpin's machine made paper. See the enlargement below.
Jeremy Norman Collection of Images - Creative CommonsGilpin's machine-made paper is very high quality; the selling price of a copy of this book, $30, was huge for the time. Copies were sold nicely bound. The publisher also featured the detail that this large book was printed on an unusual and new style of printing machine designed by Ruthven.
Jeremy Norman Collection of Images - Creative CommonsA typical page opening in the Lavoisne atlas. The maps were colored by hand. This was an exceptionally elaborate book, with very involved typesetting. The price of $30 per copy was very high for the time.
Ruthven press as illustrated in Johnson, Typographia, or the Printers' instructor.... London: Longman Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, 1824.
A: Wilmington, Delaware, United States
Gilpin's Mill on the Brandwine painted by Thomas Doughty in 1830. Doughty (1793-1856) was one of the earliest American painters to devote himself exclusively to landscape painting.
In 1817 American papermaker Thomas Gilpin set up the first papermaking machine in America at his mill on Brandywine Creek downstream from the duPonts Mills, in Wilmington, Delaware. Gilpin obtained the U.S. patent for the first continuous papermaking machine in the U.S., based on information secured by his brother in England. According to Dard Hunter, the machine, which was based on the Dickinson cylinder-mould principle, did the work of ten vats in the handmade mills.
The first newspaper to use Gilpin's machine-made paper was was Poulson's American Daily Advertiser published in Philadelphia on April 15, 1818. Probably the first American book printed on American machine-made paper was Mathew Carey's General Atlas, Improved and Enlarged (Philadelphia: M. Carey & Son, 1818).
The first American book to advertise that it was printed on Gilpin's machine made paper was Carey's edition of Lavoisne's A Complete Geneological, Historical, Chronological and Geograpical Atlas (1820). At the foot of its title page the book indicated that it was "Published by M. Carey and Sons and printed by T. H. Palmer on the Ruthven Press, and on J. & T. Gilpin's Machine Paper."
Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (1947) 538.
Thanks to John Bidwell, who informed me by email in January 2015 that Carey's 1818 book was the earliest American book that he had seen printed on American machine-made paper.
Also thanks to Bryan L. W. Draper, for pointing out in April 2024 that the Gilpin mill was in Wilmington, and supplying a copy of the manuscript map of the mill from the Hagley Museum and Library.
