Recreating the Declaration using 250-year-old techniques
From papermaking to typesetting, Penn’s Common Press has been working to print the Declaration of Independence using the same methods as in 1776. Members of the public can sign up through December to print their own copies.
4 min. read
The first third of the Declaration of Independence lay on top of the 1889 black cast-iron handpress, the metal type set backwards and waiting for the next line.
At a nearby table, the metal type issued a soft “clink” as each character was taken from the typecase and placed into composing sticks by three volunteers. One brought over line 22 to be added to the press. “Great! ‘He has dissolved’ is on the next line,” says Jessica Peterson brightly.
The director of Penn’s Common Press, Penn’s printing and bookbinding studio in the lower level of the Fisher Fine Arts Library, Peterson was leading one of the final steps in the Press’ ongoing project—“Typography of Independence”—to mark the semiquincentennial leading up to the printing of the Declaration using roughly the same methods applied by printer John Dunlap in 1776.
On July 4 of that year, Dunlap set and printed the first copies of America’s founding document in about 12 hours, producing a limited number of what would be known as the Dunlap Broadside on single sheets of paper.
Last fall, Common Press set out to do the same thing, beginning with gathering scraps of cloth from across Philadelphia to make the paper. Workshops on topics including typesetting took place over the academic year, the papermaking was held at Historic Rittenhouse Town this spring, and volunteers gathered around Alumni Weekend to make the Declaration ready for printing. Common Press is now open by appointment on Fridays through December for the public to stop by and print their own copy, with slots now open starting at the end of July.
The version replicated by the large team of students, faculty, staff, and alumni was modeled after the American Philosophical Society’s copy of the Declaration, line by line, including Dunlap’s odd spacing. Peterson says the 29-year-old printer usually did better work, and the spacing reflects the immense pressure he was under to produce the broadsheet as quickly as possible, with copies for distribution ready on July 5, 1776.
“We know that he’s a very skilled typographer and printer, because there are documents he printed before this that are beautifully justified,” Peterson says. “I imagine that the inconsistent spacing between words indicates that Dunlap wasn’t given the time he needed to perfect the typesetting, and that somebody in the Continental Congress was like, ‘It’s fine as is, just print it now,’ so I feel really empathetic to Dunlap. … What was it like to have members of the Continental Congress up in your face when you were trying to run a printing press?”
The Common Press Declaration includes one extra item that Dunlap’s copy didn’t: A statement at the bottom about the 90 volunteers who helped set the type.
Some key letterpress lessons learned from the project:
Time. The typesetting process took much longer than Dunlap’s 12 hours to correct typos and other errors. “I felt confident that after 12 hours of typesetting it would be perfect,” Peterson says. “After 28 hours, this is the most complete and perfect it’s been, but it still has a lot that needs fixing. … It’s been fun to talk to people who are excited about the flawed copy, because they’re like, ‘Oh, this is actual history,’ and it reminds them about the process.”
Type. This new Declaration was set in Caslon, but a shortage of certain letters meant some words had to be set in Garamond. That would never have been done in 1776, as Garamond was viewed as a typeface reserved for French-language works, Peterson says.
Letters. Despite having the original text enlarged, some volunteers had difficulty seeing the “long S”—the letter that looks to modern readers like a stylized F, Peterson says. “The long S doesn’t have the crossbar going all the way through the stem,” she explains. “It’s a very small piece of type and it’s really hard to tell.”
Leading. To properly separate and align individual lines, printers put thin and narrow sheets of metal, known as leading, between them. Common Press found that using the metal leading made the text of the Declaration about three inches longer than Dunlap’s broadside and was forced to replace them with thin strips of paper to fit all the text on one page. “I’ve seen other examples of 18th-century printing where they used paper or cardboard between the lines, but I was really surprised,” Peterson says. “You can barely perceive the difference in thickness between these two materials.”
Ideas. Despite the lofty language of the Declaration’s start, Peterson says the last paragraph—the language of independence and the formal declaration of war—was the most important part in 1776. “The people who wrote this and printed this had no idea what was going to happen,” she says. “The idea that this loose group of states would declare war on the most powerful empire in the world through a paper document was so exciting and revolutionary at the time.”
The Typography of Independence project has expanded the horizons of Common Press, which is often thought of as a place for creativity and making art, says Peterson. “The foundation of the humanities and academia is based in letterpress printing, because that’s how books were printed and how knowledge was passed for about 400 years,” she says. “It’s been really great to have a project based around a historical and important letterpress-printed document.
“There’s something for everybody to access in this document or in the story related to it.”
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