The Harrows of Spring Read Online Free PDF Page A

came to be called. Daniel had seen a number of broadsheet newspapers as he made his way through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and the Foxfire states and he imagined that this was a business he would like to try his hand at, a good alternative to manual labor on some rich farmer’s land or at a trade such as carpentry, like his father. He had to find a livelihood somehow. In the new times there was no other way.
    Rummaging through decades of accumulated junk in the Union News Leader office on Elbow Street—originally a temperance hall, built in 1883—Daniel found an 1891 Albion nonelectric hand-operated flatbed proof press, along with drawers of movable type and related equipment for typesetting. The discovery helped reanimate him and he became determined to produce a regular broadside for a county starved for news, information, commercial advertising, and public notices. He set about cleaning up and reorganizing the old newspaper office, a massive job in itself. He arranged for Frank Ramsdell, the “salvage wizard” of Battenville, to fabricate a sheet metal woodstove for him. His father gave him three ounces of silver to pay for it and Robbie Furnival gave him three cords of stove wood on a note. He rounded up a few pieces of furniture, a bed, a long plank table, and some chairs and cast-off sofas. A fine oak rolltop desk was hidden behind the junk he cleaned out. His father’s girl, Britney, gave him a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet. It was the first home of his very own.
    Once the place was warm, tidy, and coherently organized, it took Daniel weeks to figure out how all the printing equipment worked. He sought help from the polymath Andrew Pendergast, who had some formal training in letterpress from his college days at the Rhode Island School of Design. Andrew suggested some recipes for a suitable printer’s ink that could be cooked up with materials at hand (linseed oil boiled and then burnt, lampblack, pine tar, and turpentine), and found the book The Practice of Printing, by Ralph W. Polk, for Daniel in the town library, which Andrew ran. Daniel read it backward and forward. He practiced setting type with the composing stick, and mounting the composed lines of type in the form case, and designed a four-column layout that would allow him to cram as much information on a single page as possible in 8-point type. He’d considered attaching a new name to the publication, but he’d found an elegant old engraved end-grain print block of the Union News Leader logo made decades before Paul Easterling’s time as publisher and so he decided to stick with the established name. Besides, he liked the idea of continuity. On fair days near the approach of spring, he went out of the office to collect items of news and gossip, notify local tradesmen of advertising opportunities, and went door-to-door soliciting subscriptions at one silver dime a month. By the vernal equinox, Daniel felt ready to produce a first edition, though he lacked a supply of newsprint paper.
    It was about that time that he was visited in the office one rainy night by a delegation consisting of his father, Robert Earle, Loren Holder, the Congregational Church minister (and his father’s best friend), and Brother Jobe of the New Faith brotherhood. In one corner of the office, Daniel had set up the old sofas and a battered club chair around his woodstove. When the three visitors stepped in, Daniel had been engaged in the never-ending task of sorting boxes of old odd-lot pied type into their proper upper and lower case drawers.
    â€œWe saw the light burning,” Robert explained. The light was a single beeswax candle.
    â€œDang,” Brother Jobe said, taking in the big old room with its fourteen-foot-high ceiling, tall arched windows, and small proscenium stage at the far end where temperance crusaders had inveighed against whiskey in another, different America. “Ain’t this a grand place.”
    Robert