Saturday Links

The forgotten 19th-century Jewish printer in Palestine, the oldest prison newspaper, Rachel Cusk’s "Parade," Balzac’s Paris, walking-related books, and more.

Honoré de Balzac’s house in Paris. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Good morning! Let’s talk about print. First, Alan B. Abbey writes about the mostly forgotten nineteenth-century printer in Palestine who had an “enormous” impact on Hebrew-language culture:

Unlike other 19th-century figures who pioneered the newspaper and publishing industries in Palestine, such as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the printer Israel Bak has remained under the radar. As far back as 1936, his lack of notoriety was noted in the Hebrew newspaper Davar: “In vain you will try to find his name in the Jewish reference books … and even in the books devoted to the history of the Land of Israel. They pass over him a little in silence.”

But Bak was a pivotal figure. He returned printing to the Land of Israel after an absence of 250 years. He pioneered Jewish farming colonies in the Galilee. He pleaded on behalf of Palestinian Jews accused of blood libels and Arabs who had lost their land in local uprisings before representatives of Imperial Ottoman Turkey. He probably saved the life of an ailing Egyptian pasha who liberalized religious practice in Palestine. He became a leader in Jerusalem’s Hasidic community and established and printed Ottoman Palestine’s second Hebrew language newspaper. A synagogue that carries his son’s name in the Old City of Jerusalem is under redevelopment. Single pages of Bak’s beautifully printed prayer books and religious tomes sell for thousands of dollars on international auction sites . . . He designed striking Hebrew fonts and published prayer books and volumes on Hasidism, Kabbalah, and Halacha . . . After 17 years developing his skills in Berdichev, Bak made the unlikely decision to move to the Land of Israel. Facing bankruptcy from lawsuits from other printers and the forced conscription into the czar’s army of his only son, Nissan, Bak trekked more than 2,000 miles to Safed, high in the Galilean hills in 1832, after financing his trip by building a clock for the tower of Berdichev’s Catholic church. He brought with him his son, some of his assistants, and the first printing presses in the Land of Israel since an itinerant printer had produced six volumes back in 1587.

Meg Anderson writes about the prison newspaper that has been in print for 130 years and counting: “Inside a state prison near Stillwater, Minn., past the guards and the wings of cells stacked one on top of another, tucked in the corner of a computer lab, Richard Adams and Paul Gordon are fervently discussing grammar. Both men are on staff at the Prison Mirror, a newspaper made by and for the people held at the Minnesota Correctional Facility – Stillwater. Gordon had written a profile on the prison art instructor.”

Finally, Charlotte Allen reviews Adam Smyth’s The Bookmakers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives: “The “History of the Book” part of Smyth’s subtitle is misleading. He has no interest in the first 1,400-odd years of the codex book form per se, pages bound together inside covers, that started to displace rolled scrolls as a reading medium during the early years of the Roman Empire. Smyth’s focus is strictly on the printed book that Gutenberg invented and nearly as strictly on the handset type that Gutenberg pioneered. He devotes only a page or two to the mechanized ‘hot metal’ and ‘hot lead’ typesetting methods (such as the Linotype machine) that largely supplanted labor-intensive handsetting of individual letters during the late 19th century and were, in turn, supplanted by computerized typesetting during the second half of the 20th century.”