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Show uo THE PRINTER OF TODAY AND OF YESTERDAY. That the biggest penitentiary in Illinois, Illi-nois, situated at Joliet, is without printers, is made the subject of a tribute trib-ute to the present-day printer by the St. Louis Globe-Democrat that the Standard takes pleasure in reproducing: reproduc-ing: - The prisoners at Joliet started a paper recently, called the Prison Post, and an announcement on the first page of the first Issue was that due to the fact that there was not a printer print-er among the 1,200 convicts, the mechanical me-chanical work on the paper had to be done by outstdert, but the writing was done by the Inmates. The printers of the United States constitute a considerable part of those In the skilled trades, but It Is not supplying Its quota to the penitentiary. peni-tentiary. The reason is not hard to find. The printing trade requires that those who follow It have high skill of the moBt Intelligent sort; it begets a sense of responsibility, an a standard Ib required which cannot be met by the incompetent, the shiftless, shift-less, the irresponsible or the vicious For a number of years a process of elimination has been going on In the printing trade, the incompetentB, the lazy ones, the poorly equipped, giving place to Bober, Industrious and reliable reli-able men. The St. LouIb Globe-Democrat truly says that before typesetting machines were invented, when type was set by hand, and lack of Individual Bpeed could be easily compensated by putting put-ting on more "cases," and when there was a substitute ready to take th case of any man who was alcoholic-ally alcoholic-ally indisposed, it did not so much matter whether a typesetter was either sober or reliable. Those were the days when tramp printers abounded, abound-ed, men who went from town to town and worked as substitutes for a few days and then passed on. With the coming of machines coating 3 000 each, sobriety and reliability on the part of printers became an economic necessity. Also the need to work the plant at top speed and highest capacity to get out the various edl tions of the modern paper left nc room for the tramp, the alcoholic 01 the shiftless. The printer had to make good as an Individual In a generation this has 60 completely com-pletely changed the personnel and the spirit of the printing office, that, combined with the high intelligence and good education necessary for effective ef-fective work, not alono the compost tors, but the craftsmen in all branches branch-es of the printing business, have reached such a general high average of character as is Indicated by this absence of a single one of them from the 1,200 men in Joliet It Is pleasant pleas-ant to say this about them, because there still lingers In the public mind some of the impressions put there by the bibulous printer of former days. |
