The Black Art

Mystical Monks create a Masterpiece of American Book Arts: The Martyrs' Mirror

The story of the Ephrata Cloister, in Lancaster County, is one of the most colorful stories of Early American printing. (Cloister Website: Here )

It is the story of radical Christian Pietists who created one of the most extraordinary books of colonial America, the Märtyrer Spiegel (the Martyrs' Mirror).

This book is the largest book printed in colonial North America, and is often considered the most ambitious American printing project of that era.

Fifteen Cloister Brothers worked three years (from 1748 to 1751) to print this mammoth tome.  Four of these Brothers manned the printing press, four Brothers set type, and six Brothers made the paper. (Not to mention the Brothers who made the ink at the oil mill, and the Brothers who did the bookbinding.)

This gargantuan printing project was supervised by Johann Peter Miller, a premier linguist and scholar of early Pennsylvania.

Peter Miller attended the University of Heidelberg, Gemany.  He was one of the greatest linguists in the American colonies at that time. Peter translated this Martyrs' Mirror from the original Dutch to German, because this book had been requested by Pennsylvania's German-speaking Mennonites.

These ambitious printers eventually printed 1,300 copies of the Martyrs' Mirror. Each book contained more than 1,500 folio pages. That's more than a million and a half pages, all hand-pulled on a creaking, wooden press. (1,950,000 pages).  No small accomplishment!

Legend has it that Peter Miller slept only three or four hours each night during this printing project. I hope they allowed him cat-naps at noon.

Above: The 1748 Märtyrer Spiegel (the Martyrs' Mirror) is an extravaganza of blackletter typography.

Some eight years earlier, the Germantown (near Philadelphia) printer Christopher Saur had printed the first type specimen printed in Colonial United States.  It was a sample sheet of his fonts, to show off the fraktur fonts he had purchased from the Egenolff-Berner-Luthersche type foundry of Frankfurt, Germany. The type used to print the Ephrata Martyrs' Mirror had been cast in Europe also. (Perhaps at the same type Frankfurt foundry?)

Within 30 years, Germantown printers would master the art of casting their own fonts, to create the first books printed in America with our own American-made types.

Above:  This beautiful Martyrs' Mirror binding is a knock-out. It is the best binding I have seen for an Ephrata martyrs' book.  This brass-and-leather masterpiece feels heavy and Medieval, like the thick blackletter fonts inside. It looks like Jakob Böhme's alchemy manual.

This Martyrs' Mirror was bound for the Christian Meyer family, around the time of its publication in 1748. Christian Meyer was a wealthy Mennonite farmer in Manheim Township, Lancaster County. This binding probably was created in the Ephrata Cloister bookbindery.

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Below: Benedict Hershey's Martyrs' Mirror (Great-Great-Great Grandfather of Mr. Chocolate: Milton Hershey)

Above: Anonymous Cloister members used quill pens and ink to inscribe the flyleaf of this Martrys' Mirror  with the name of the book's owner, Benedict Hirschy (Benjamin Hershey) (born 1697 - died 1789).  He was a prominent Mennonite bishop in Lancaster County.

Hirschy and his parents immigrated here from Friedelsheim, Germany in 1719.  His 500-acre farm includes the land that is today's Conestoga House, the historic family home of the Steinman family, owners of the Lancaster Newspapers today. This same Benedict Hirschy (Hershey) was the great-great-great grandfather of Milton Hershey, the founder of the Hershey's candy company.

This is the first time this Hershey fraktur has been published or exhibited. It is great fun to showcase it here.

P.S. Milton Hershey was a printer's apprentice, before he became a candy maker. Fortunately for chocolate lovers everywhere, Milton failed miserably in his short-lived printing career.

Above: The Martrys' Mirror of Mennonite Bishop Benedict Hirschy (Benjamin Hershey)   The Hershey family had this book rebound in this binding in the early 1800s. The Hersheys chose to Americanize this book with an English-language spine label. Medieval binding was Out; Anglicized binding was In. Out with the old. In with the new.

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Above: 1920s - 40s postcards of Ephrata Cloister buildings. Plus a reenactors postcard by Mel Horst.

 

Musical Turtle Doves at the Ephrata Cloister

The Brothers and Sisters of the Ephrata Cloister created a treasure trove of Early American music. Conrad Beissel, their brilliant, spiritually-androgynous leader, wrote some of the earliest music in colonial America. Beissel's ethereal, other-worldly choral compositions survive today in song books that were penned and printed at the Cloister.

In 1747 the Brothers printed a landmark book of American musicology, the Turtel-Taube (Turtle Dove) hymn book. In this book, Beissel explains his unique theories of music composition.  This is the first American essay on music harmony.  The book also includes the lyrics to hundreds of hymns sung at the Cloister.  Many of these hymns were composed by Beissel, who wrote their lyrics and scores.

In the previous year, 1746, three Brothers had worked most of the year to produce an ornate hand-written music book, on which this printed music book is based.  The Cloister gave that manuscript music book to Ben Franklin, who in turn gave it the the Mayor of London.  In 1927 that hand-written Turtel Taube book was purchased by the Library of Congress, where you can see it Here and Here.

The book I show here, on my site, is the second printed edition (1749) of this iconic Turtle Dove music book. The margins of many pages in this printed edition have hand-written musical notation, penned by anonymous Cloister scribes. 

P.S. The turtle-dove fraktur drawing shown above is a from another Cloister manuscript. (Unfortunately, it is only one page.)

Above: An anonymous Cloister scribe penned music notation onto the margins of this Turtle Dove book.

Below: "Sing-Arbeit": This is the first page of Conrad Beissel's dissertation on choral harmony, which is printed in this hymn book as a preface to the hymns.  This work is the first treatise on music harmony published in America.

Above: An anonymous Cloister scribe penned music notation onto the Turtle Dove hymn book's margins. He or she also inserted these manuscript music pages, looseleaf, between the pages of this book.

Below:  This is the first hymn printed in the Turtle Dove hymnbook.

Above: A cloistered Turtel Taube printer gets slightly exuberant with his printers' ornaments. (Looks like letterpress exuberence was O.K. there, as long as it was ascetic exuberence.)

Below:  In 1747 this species of Turtel Taube (Turtle Doves) sang their songs in the apple trees at the Ephrata Cloister, competing with Beissel's chorales. White-robed reenactors continue singing at the Cloister today.  So do these turtle doves.

Susanna Kreider's Birth Certificate

Above: Click Image to Enlarge.

Collectors of American folk art love the Ephrata Cloister. Ephrata's mystical Brothers and Sisters created icons of Early American art ...masterworks of Pennsylvania German calligraphy and pen-and-ink design, including the earliest fraktur drawings created in America.

The Brothers of the Ephrata print shop were no slouches in the masterworks department. In addition to creating landmarks of American book arts, these printers also produced fraktur taufscheins (letterpress birth and baptism certificates).  Local scriveners infilled these fraktur-font documents with color and calligraphy, to record, forever, the birth or baptism dates of their neighbors.

In the early 1780s, the Ephrata printers created the first printed American taufscheins (birth or baptism certificates). Sometime circa 1784, a teen-aged Mennonite girl named Susanna Greider (Kreider), living in Lancaster Township, received one of these first taufscheins, which I show here.

Susanna's family purchased this fraktur document from the eccentric scrivener Henrich Dulheuer, who penned Susanna's birth details onto the paper in red ink. Durng this time, Henrich was living in East Hempfield Township, with the Musselmans, a Mennonite family.

The Ephrata printers had already jazzed up this document by using two woodblocks to print vineing flowers and long-necked birds in the margins. The Brothers used another woodblock to print the flower-filled  lower border. (For that border, they apparently recycled a woodblock that was previously used for printing textiles.)

The Ephrata print shop had commissioned a local, non-Cloister artist, Henrich Otto, to paint horizontal bands of ink-and-watercolor vines and flowers to this document.

To top it all off, the Brothers printed their favorite winged angel, top and center. (Or is it the Virgin Sophia?) Whoever he/she is, she apparently was composed of lead: a type-metal cut. She was a popular angel; Christoph Saur and Francis Bailey both printed her countenance in their print shops.

Susanna probably didn't care about her taufschein's printing details. She was just glad to know that someday someone would be reading about her on the Internet.

P.S. Thanks to the late Klaus Stopp for publishing his monumental, 6-volume study of Pennsylvania tauf-scheine.

An 1766 Ephrata Indenture: A Fancy Cut and Caslon Fonts

Beginning in the mid 1700s, American printers became enamored with the finely-crafted British fonts designed by William Caslon, an English gunsmith and typeface designer. Caslon fonts became some of the most popular typefaces of that century, throughout the English-speaking world.  ...and the Pennsylvania-German speaking world.

The Ephrata print shop printed this indenture in 1760s using Caslon fonts (or perhaps Caslon-wanna-be fonts from a competing type foundry in London or Glasgow, Scotland.)

A Caslon type specimen sheet is Here, if you want to try to figure out if these Cloister fonts are "real" Caslon or "competing-with" Caslon.

In 1766, John Dunlap used Caslon fonts to print the Declaration of Independence. Even today, Caslon is always a safe bet.

Ephrata Cloister: Five Brown Books in a Basket

The Ephrata Cloister was an Early American powerhouse of printing and publishing.

The Arndt and Eck bibliography lists 68 German-language books, pamphlets, and almanacs printed at the Ephrata Cloister between 1745 and 1792.

The Cloister printed only one English-language book, a 1767 hymnal for the Episcopal churches in Lancaster, Pequea, and Caernarvon.  Only one copy of this book is known.  It is in California's Huntington Library.  The book's title is The Family Prayer-Book, Containing Morning and Evening Prayers...

Here are five German-language books printed at the Cloister.  The rye-straw breadbasket also is from the Cloister. 

These books are (left to right, back row first):

• Christliches Gemüths - Gespräch (Christian Spiritual Conversation) by Gerhard Roosen  1769.   Printed for the Mennonites.
• Creutz-Schule (School of the Cross) by Valentin Wudrian. 1762.
• Die Ernsthafte Christenpflicht  (The Earnest Christian Duty). 1785.  The most popular Mennonite and Amish prayer book, even today.
• Die Ernsthafte Christen - Pflicht  (The Earnest Christian Duty). 1770.   The most popular Mennonite and Amish prayer book, even today.
• Die Ganz Neue Testament (The Complete New Testament). 1787.

The Ephrata Cloister: .....the First Font on the First U.S. Type-Specimen Broadside

Above: Letters M and S, from the 1748 Märtyrer Spiegel (Martyrs' Mirror). (I used some red Photoshop ink to jazz up these letters.)

Peter Miller, of the Ephrata Cloister, used this display font in his 1748 Martyrs' Mirror, the largest book printed in Colonial United States.

This font is hugely important to the history of American printing, because it also appears as the first font on the first type specimen printed in Colonial United States: the ca. 1740 broadside printed by Christopher Saur in Germantown (near Philadelphia) to advertise his printing services.

Today, one of those Saur broadsides is in Philadelphia, in the collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 

These ornate letters M and S appear throught the Martyrs' Mirror, a book about Christian martyrs.

Saur identifies these large letters as "Sabon."  They were designed by an anonymous typographer in Germany, at the Luthersche type foundry in Frankfurt.

...so that makes this the First Photoshopped edition of the First font of the First U.S. type specimen.  (I'm riding this font as far as I can take it.)

Above: Alle Menschen sind Erde (All Man is Earth) 

Detail of the first type-specimen advertisement printed in Colonial United States.  It is a broadside printed by Christopher Saur in Germantown, near Philadelphia, ca. 1740.  Peter Miller used this same "Sabon" font in his 1748 Märtyrer Spiegel (Martyrs' Mirror).