William Bradford (1663-1752) was born in village of Barwell, Leicestershire, where his father was a printer and a member of the Society of Friends (Quakers). As a youngster, he was apprenticed to Andrew Sowle, London’s foremost Quaker printer, and subsequently married his master’s daughter. In 1682, the couple joined William Penn’s new North American colony.
Eight years later Bradford set up Pennsylvania’s first printing press, but continuous interference by the authorities and attempts to curb his independence made him decide to move to the city of New York. In 1693 he was appointed official printer to the Colonial government. He settled in Pearl Street, Manhattan; his offices were located at Hanover Square.
With the expansion of the city, the demand for professional printers increased. Historians have tended to concentrate their narrative on Bible, book and newspaper production, ignoring the fact that the emerging business world demanded a wide variety of printed materials (advertising, stationary, financial records, etc.).
The buzzing Port of New York boosted the industry. In South Street, the “Street of Ships,” printing offices proliferated. By the end of the century, New York City was home to over seven hundred printing houses.
The impact of a flourishing trade is reflected in numerous everyday phrases and sayings: “coming a cropper, coin a phrase, out of sorts, hot of the press, make an impression, typecasting” – to mention but a few. The metaphorical application of one particular technical term has kept its global relevance.
Edinburgh, Paris & Manhattan
In 1739 a small book entitled Belli Catilinarii et Jugurthini historiae (History of the Wars of Catilinari and Jugurthini) by the Roman historian Sallust was published in Edinburgh. The duodecimo consisted of a title leaf and 150 pages of text set in tiny type. The imprint informs the reader that the book was printed “not from movable type, as is commonly done, but from cast plates.” This simple statement reflects the most significant innovation in printing history since its invention.
William Ged (1699–1749) was a goldsmith in Edinburgh with an interest in the printing process. Local craftsmen experienced practical problems as there were no professional letter-founders working in Scotland and type had to been imported from England. This motivated him to search for an alternative.
In 1725 he patented the process of “stereotyping” whereby a whole page of type was cast in a single plaster mold and then turned into a metal printing plate. Up until this invention, type had to be reset if a second printing was made.
Printers were not interested in associating themselves with an “outsider” in their profession. By 1729 William Ged had moved to London to join in a partnership with stationer and financier William Fenner. In 1730 Cambridge University granted them a license for printing prayer books. Ged began casting plates, but difficulties with his unreliable partner and opposition from hostile type-founders forced him to return to Edinburgh.
The process he had set in motion was continued by the Parisian printer and type-founder Fimin Didot (1764-1836). Having patented the process in 1797, he introduced the term “stereotyping” into the jargon. From then onward, French printers applied two words for the cast metal plates they used to reprint books without needing to reset the type.
The plates were “clichés” and books produced in this manner were named “Éditions stéréotypes” (a combination of the Greek words “stereos” meaning fixed or solid, and “typos” meaning impression). It has been suggested that “cliché” is an onomatopoeic word for the noise of the matrix hitting molten metal in the process, known as “dabbing” in English.
Challenged by its complexity, Didot first used the process in his edition of François Callet’s Tables portatives de logarithmes (1795). He was able to secure an accuracy that was until then unattainable.
The achievement established his name as a master printer. He subsequently published stereotyped editions of French, English and Italian classics at competitive prices that outrivaled his competitors.
The rapid spread of the process was largely driven by the popularity of the novel. Stereotyping revolutionized the book trade as it allowed for mass production and cheap editions. Previously, publishers had to learn to look ahead and “play” the market. If they did not correctly predict sales, they were forced into the expense of resetting type for subsequent editions. Didot solved that problem.
America ran behind, but not by far. Stereotyping was introduced from Europe in order to satisfy the demand for religious literature. In June 1813, printers John Watts & Co. of New York produced The Larger Catechism Agreed Upon by the Assembly of Divines at Westminster (1647) on behalf of the “Religious and Classical” booksellers Whiting & Watson at 96 Broadway.
Above the imprint it states in tiny type, “The first book ever stereotyped in America.” More precisely: the book was printed in Manhattan from stereotype plates produced in America. The previous year the Philadelphia Bible Society had published a stereotype Bible printed from plates that were imported from England.
News & Liberty
Once the new printing process was accepted, the word’s metaphorical possibilities proved irresistible. By the mid-nineteenth century the term stereotype was used for anything “continued or constantly repeated without change,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The contemporary meaning of the word as “preconceived and oversimplified notion or characteristic typical of a person or group” was first recorded in 1922.
Pulitzer Prize winning political commentator Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) was born on September 23, 1889, in New York City’s Upper East Side as the only child of affluent Jewish parents of German origin. He was educated at Sachs Collegiate Institute (now Dwight School), a secular private school in the German Gymnasium tradition run by the classical philologist Julius Sachs (his wife Rosa was the daughter of investment banker Marcus Goldman).
Having studied at Harvard, Walter became a member of the New York Socialist Party. In 1911 he briefly served as secretary to George Lunn, the first socialist Mayor of Schenectady, NY. Lippmann was co-founder and editor of The New Republic beginning in 1914. With a series of contributions to the nation’s most distinguished newspapers, he was an acknowledged expert in international relations (he would give currency to the term “Cold War” after publication of his book of that title in 1947).
In 1920 Lippmann published Liberty and the News in which the author warned of the threat to democracy if the press were to pursue an agenda other than the free flow of ideas. Liberty is at stake if the press exists primarily for its own purposes rather than using its reach to benefit the critical interplay of facts and ideas. The crisis in politics at the time was inseparable from corrupt or
sensationalist journalism.
Lippmann identified the self-importance of the press (the promotion of the journalist from hack to “Personality”), the corrosion of rumors and innuendo, and the spinning of news by political powers as tendencies that threatened democracy and made the “hard-won rights of man” utterly insecure.
Fixed Impressions
Stereotyping is not a contemporary issue. Stereotypes were ubiquitous in the early modern period. They dominated the sphere of religious politics and were manifest in almost every other domain of discourse. Examples of stereotypical representations of beggars, criminals, foreigners (in which food played a large part) as well as those of the physically or mentally disabled, are omnipresent.
Liberal thinkers of the Enlightenment had suggested that education would eradicate superstitions and remove prejudices. They firmly believed that empirical knowledge would triumph over vulgar errors and popular beliefs. Their optimism was unjustified.
In 1922 Lippmann published his book Public Opinion in which he argued that not a single person, from the man in the street to the President of the United States himself, can have an adequate
knowledge of the exterior world in its complexities. He denied the possibility of an authentic “Public Opinion,” that is: a well-informed and shared view by people with a comprehensive insight in public affairs.
Lippmann was the first to use the printing stereotype in its contemporary metaphorical sense, describing it as a rigid “picture in our heads.” As we learn about the world before we see it, we imagine most things before we experience them. Preconceived images act as mental concepts that offer a manner of structuring reality, but when this “order” degrades into simplification or distortion, they become vehicles of prejudice to which individuals or groups tend to cling, even if confronted with contrary evidence.
Fixed impressions abound in reference to people grouped by race or nationality. Ever since the early 1830s when Thomas Dartmouth Rice introduced his blackface “Jim Crow” character to audiences from Louisville to New York City (and later in London and Dublin), the popularity of minstrelsy had spawned an entertainment sub-industry by the middle of the century. The influence of such racial stereotyping on society cannot be overstated.
Walter Lipmann did not focus on antecedents. Writing in a post-war context, he considered stereotyping a particularly modern problem as its diffusion was driven by the emergence of a multitude of mass media outlets. The number of readers eager for news and info had grown exponentially.
Recent events seem to reinforce that view. Both the British Brexit “debates” and the 2016 and 2024 elections of Donald Trump to the White House were battles in which a flood of familiar and newly formulated stereotypes were employed (immigrants, foreign criminals, religious intruders, civil servants, or metropolitan elites).
News manipulation, targeted information and hate speech were pushed forward under the freedom of expression banner. The use of stereotypes was a standard strategic ploy in a largely unregulated social media environment, degrading political debate.
The threat to democracy is intensified by the added dimension of artificial intelligence (AI). By making predictions with algorithms based on data, AI has been trumpeted as a tool that will enhance
human capacities, improve services and redefine the future of work.
There is a major obstacle. The system is not neutral; it is what humans design it to be. Gender, race and other prejudices are entrenched in the algorithms that AI applications rely upon. Biased systems produce inaccurate results that amplify stereotypes. Lippmann’s warning remains relevant.
Illustrations, from above: The type of printing press William Bradford (1663-1752) would have used; 1744 stereotype edition of Sallust’s histories, the first book produced in that manner; Fimin Didot’s first stereotype publication; The Larger Catechism, printed in 1813 in New York; and Walter Lippmann, ca. 1920 (Library of Congress).
