Daniel Berkeley Updike
| Daniel Berkeley Updike | |
|---|---|
| Born |
February 14, 1860 Providence, Rhode Island |
| Died | December 29, 1941 (aged 81) |
| Occupation | Printer. historian |
Daniel Berkeley Updike (February 14, 1860 – December 29, 1941) was an American printer and historian of typography. In 1880 he joined the publishers Houghton, Mifflin & Company, of Boston as an errand boy. He worked for the firm's Riverside Press and trained as a printer but soon moved to typographic design. In 1896 he founded the Merrymount Press.
Daniel Berkeley Updike was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on February 24, 1860; he left school when his father died on October 9, 1877. Updike first assisted at a local library after the librarian had taken ill. In the spring of 1880 he relocated to Boston and began work in the publishing office of Houghton, Mifflin and Company, at the lowest level.
Daniel Berkeley Updike's parents were both English. His mother, who held more traditional views of life, strongly influenced the young Updike. His father's family had left and returned to New England, not liking it the second time and more than the first. Unfortunately, the fact that both his mother and father came from England, was the only thing that these two had in common.
Updike's work as an errand boy for Houghton, Mifflin and Company introduced him to the publishing trade, and he rapidly took an interest in the process of book-making. Mature for his age, the young man was socially accepted at the firm. Updike was responsible daily for carrying proofs from the printer's offices on Park Street on Boston's Beacon Hill to the Riverside Press overlooking the Charles River in Cambridge. Traveling by horse-car, Updike made the most of the time: he studied the proofs he was delivering and imagined the changes that he himself would make. At the Press, he would wait for the corrected prints and quickly developed an interest in print-making.
In 1893 Daniel Berkeley Updike opened his own studio, designing type fonts; in 1896 he founded a printing company, the Merrymount Press (named in honor of Mount Wollaston--the original Merry Mount--an early settlement south of Boston). One the first works issued with the Merrymount Press imprint was "In the Old Days, A Fragment," a remembrance of her youth by Updike's mother, Elisabeth Bigelow Updike. Daniel Updike was well-known and respected as a printer in the twentieth century; he was also known for his rejection of the philosophy of William Morris. Initially he followed the style of William Morris and the Kelmscott Press but soon turned towards historical printing styles of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries.
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