Object Status:
Unlocated
Accession Date:
March 29, 1807
Primary Source Reference:
Peale Museum Accessions Book, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, p. 21
Notes:
Stereotyping, an innovation in typesetting, created a solid plate of type cast from a mold taken from the form containing the individual characters and was capable of reproducing an entire page.
Joel Barlow (1754-1812) while in England in 1805 visited Lord Stanhope, who showed him the mechanism of the Stanhope Press and gave him stereotype plates to take back to America. John Bidwell, "Joshua Gilpin and Lord Stanhope's Improvements in Printing," Papers ofthe Bibliographical Society of America 76 (1982): 146.
Two months later C. W. Peale wrote to John Isaac Hawkins, "I should like to know the mode of Casting the Sterio type, if it is not a difficult process, as I might apply it to some purposes for the Museum -- Would it not answer for a Catalogue that should receive the additions by additional pages from time to time." Selected Papers, 2, pt. 2: 1015 and 1017n
