All unambiguous end-of-line hyphens have been removed and the trailing part of a word has been joined to the preceding line, except in the case of those words that break over a page. Every effort has been made to preserve the Māori macron using unicode.
Some keywords in the header are a local Electronic Text Centre scheme to aid in establishing analytical groupings.
Typo. A Monthly Newspaper and Literary Review [1887-1897] is a landmark in New Zealand printing and publishing, famous in its time, then forgotten, and now re-discovered. In addition to a wealth of information ranging from the latest domestic and international news about printing and the allied book trades, Typo includes book reviews such as Anno Domini or Women’s Destiny
, tipped in specimens featuring a full-colour cover design for
This digital edition of Typo makes the complete journal available widely for the first time. There are less than a dozen sets extant worldwide; each set is a unique artifact in its own right, with many variations in the printing, binding, and marks of transmission. This edition combines copies found primarily in the
Typo is the centerpiece of a three-year research project on typographical journals funded by the Marsden Fund of the Australasian Typographical Journal with the
Typo. A Monthly Newspaper and Literary Review. This journal represents the pinnacle of a career devoted to the world of visible language.
Robert Coupland Harding was born in Wellington in 1849, son of The Hawkes Bay Times which he transformed into the first east coast daily. Coupland Harding worked alongside his father and brother as compositor and journalist. During the Maori wars, he enlisted in the Napier Rifle Volunteers, saw active service during the Poverty Bay engagements of 1868/69 and was New Zealand’s first war correspondent. Unusually for the time, he lobbied for Maori rights during the subsequent land confiscations, printed a Maori newspaper, and retained more than a passing ethnographic interest in and enduring sympathy for the tangata whenua, their language and their culture.
Harding’s political sensibility was matched by an equally strong commitment to social activism and cultural engagement, a pattern replicated by many, often dissenting or non-conformist, members of the book trades in the settler colonies. In Napier, he was the sometime Head, District Deputy, and Secretary of the Imperial Order of Good Templars [IOOG], Secretary of the Hope of Napier Tent No. 2 of the Independent Order of Rechabites, and Napier agent for the Dunedin-based monthly journal The Temperance Herald and Good Templar Record. He was also a member of the Hawkes Bay Philosophical Society, then Ordinary Member of the
Harding cut his typographic teeth on a series of eleven local directories entitled Harding’s Almanac [1880-91]. Essentially a textual microcosm of East Coast New Zealand, this combination calendar, diary, year book, local guide, gazetteer, and directory enabled Harding to showcase his copious stock of international typographic specimens, both ornamental and alphabetic, collected since his apprenticeship days. Florid trade advertisements are joined by triglot calendars in Maori, Danish, and Jewish. Sophisticated tabular display alternates with astute literary analysis. Harding even experiments with his own typographic identity. The pages of Harding’s Almanac bear witness to the increasingly assured hand of a master “artistic printer” and from later editions emerges the template for the journal Typo. From the outset, the inclusion of press reviews foregrounds the importance of his typographic enterprise and demonstrates the impact Harding made both at home and abroad. As the London-based Printing Times and Lithographer remarked:
Its literary matter is fully up to the standard of similar compilations: but what we would specially draw attention to is the superior manner in which the work has been got up. It is altogether unlike the ordinary productions of colonial printing offices. The advertisements are displayed in a highly creditable manner, and … bear testimony to the fact that Mr. R.C. Harding, of Hastings-Street, Napier, is a lover of his art, and that his printing office is one that contains an exceptionally good store of jobbing types, ornamental borders, &c.; and what is more, that his workmen know how to use both to advantage. [
Harding’s Almanac, 1882, 270]
Without registering the fact that “Imperial Spaces, imperial subjects” in David Lambert & Alan Lester, eds., Harding’s Almanac like the later Typo was actually a one-man band, the reviewer’s surprise at the quality of work emanating from a colonial outpost is echoed in comments by the British and Colonial Printer and Stationer: “It is very characteristic of New Zealand enterprise, and quite an achievement, considering the position and condition of the locality in which it has been produced” (Harding’s Almanac, 1882, 266). Both writers share imperialist assumptions about economic, social, and cultural relationships between metropole and periphery based on mere physical geography, yet the Almanac, like Typo, redefines if not collapses this territorial imperative. This is all the more remarkable when we consider that Harding never left New Zealand, even to visit Australia, during his working life. Instead, unlike those epitomes of what David Lambert terms “imperial careering”Colonial Lives across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the long nineteenth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 21.
Once Harding begins to publish Typo, his world both narrows and broadens. On the one hand, apart from some instances of quality jobbing work and printing in Maori, he leaves the mundane world of print to his brother ‘on the hill,’ to his father in the adjacent stationery shop, or to the firm of Dinwiddie, Walker & Co., to whom he sells his copyright in the Almanac. On the other hand, he establishes a thriving business in the exchange and circulation of trade information and becomes a recognized player on the international market. There is no corner of the globe to which his visual sensibility does not extend. And his network expands to include a significant extra-imperial dimension; France, Germany, Denmark, America, Japan, and Russia, all figure in his networked world of print.
Harding also establishes a robust network of trade correspondents throughout New Zealand and the Australian colonies to report on the burning issues of the day: industrial relations, boy labour, sweatshops. He reprints the latest news from trade journals such as the Scottish Typographical Journal, the British and Colonial Printer & Stationer, and various American book trade organs. He profiles the latest technological advancements, large and small, and is not adverse to facilitating the secondhand market for older equipment. Without sharing in the rabid politics of radical unionism, he reasons with his peers about the benefits of unionism and the need to cultivate productive relationships with employers, and speaks eloquently to the commercial and ethical implications of government legislation such as the Press Act. He calls for the establishment of the
Significantly, in a period of disrupted professional training and uninformed aesthetic exuberance, Harding embarks on a series of monthly articles entitled “Design in Typography.” He introduces specific ornamental types from various foundries, whether English, German, or American, provides an overview of their history, and most importantly, demonstrates their use step-by-step in display work. Here we find everything from the orientalist-inflected cuts then in vogue to historiated initials, from the ribbon border to the book border, designed by Harding and put into commercial circulation by the Johnson Brothers of Philadelphia, in 1879.
Like his compadres at the Australasian Typographical Journal, Harding is also very aware of the value of maintaining an historical consciousness and memorializing the trade. He publishes a history of printing in New Zealand and writes his friend Typo around the world, in part through his London agents, John Haddon & Co., Harding also contributed reviews to the American journal Inland Printer: that is, until his incisive, balanced, and devastatingly accurate remarks were perceived to damage the reputation of American typefounders who shut him out from further publication.
Unfortunately, like many popular journals of the day, Typo was a victim of its own success: glowingly praised and read to death by the trade, but infrequently purchased. Harding found he could not sustain his typographic enterprise solo. He moved to Wellington, the capital city, in 1890, thinking to resuscitate his business from the consequences of the long depression in the land of urban opportunity. However, his decision turned out to be disastrous. Harding tried to diversify by taking on some large book jobs, entered into partnerships with local printing establishments to spread economic risk, and endeavoured to sustain a typographic aesthetic and practice which was patently uncommercial in a world of global industrialisation. Despite lobbying with the Typo as their official trade journal and thus underwrite its cost, his brainchild became more and more erratic in its publication until it ceased completely in 1897.
But Harding remained very much a presence in Wellington. He was hired by the The Evening Post
as leader-writer, reviewer, chief corrector and reader and remained a player in the cultural economy of trade memory and practice. He continued to build up a remarkable library, exchanging bibliophilic correspondence and print materials with those significant New Zealand collectors,
When he died in 1916, Harding was memorialized as “one of the ablest native-born printers and journalists in the Dominion … he simply revelled in intricate and difficult typography … his store of knowledge on remarkably wide range of subjects made him a colleague of exceptional value. His versatility was, indeed, remarkable.” The Evening Post
, 18 December 1916, 8.
George Osborne’s obituary of Robert Coupland Harding, The Triad, January 10, 1917, 65.
Whether published in Ireland, Scotland, or England, Canada, the United States, or South Africa, Australia or New Zealand, nineteenth-century typographical journals were far more than vehicles for the latest in domestic and international trade news, technical information or wrinkles. They connected journeymen in what the historical geographer Alan Lester has termed the “trans-imperial discourse of colonialism” which produced an “imagined geography of empire” facilitated by an ever-expanding suite of communication technologies. “Materials, people, and above all ideas continually flowed through this [imperial] network. Although, in many respects, Britain was at its hub, the trans-global constitution of the network rendered the boundaries of the imperial ‘centre’ remarkably permeable.” Alan Lester, “British Settler Discourse and the Circuits of Empire,” Peter Putnis, “The British transoceanic steamship press in nineteenth-century India and Australia: an overview,” History Workshop Journal 54 (2002): 24.Journal of Australian Studies 91 (March 2007): 69-79, 70-1.