Sometime during or after 1879 Henry A. Burr purchased the S. W. Green typesetting machinery business from Green and renamed it the Burr Printing House. Richard Huss, in his book,
The Development of Printers' Mechanical Typesetting Methods 1822-1925 (1973) indicated in his entry No. 70 that Burr acquired the Green business in 1875; however, a copy that I own of the
Record of a Life of Mercy by Stephen Tyng published in New York in 1879 by S. W. Green's Type-Setting Machinery, 18 Jacob St., would strongly suggest otherwise. When I searched in December 2020 it turned out that Google had digitized a few other books printed for others in 1878 and 1879 by S. W. Green's Type-Setting Machinery at the same address. Another one that I purchased was
Mrs. Cornelius Lawrence's Do They Love Us Yet? My impression was that possibly the only reason for owning this book is its significance as an early book typeset by a typesetting machine. From Google Books I also noticed that Green's Type-Setting Machinery also typeset for New York publisher John Wiley an edition of at least one volume of
Ruskin's Modern Painters also published in 1879. This confirms that mainstream publishers were also using the system, at least to a limited extent.
Undoubtedly Henry Burr acquired Green's type-setting machinery business around 1880, and changed the name of the business to The Burr Printing House, at the same address, where he advertised "Large Facilities for Hand and Steam Compositing. Printing, Electrotyping, and Binding. On a copy of his billhead from 1882 which I acquired Burr illustrated the two machines developed by Green that became known as the Burr Typesetter and the Burr Distributor. Notably, as much as Burr undoubtedly wanted to promote the typesetting and distributing machinery he also advertised typesetting by hand.
Jeremy Norman’s
Jeremy Norman Collection of Images - Creative Commons
