By Bill Kovarik
By custom of time out of mind, every printing-house is called a chapel. And by the same ancient tradition, there is said to exist, within every chapel, a spirit who flits between the presses and the composing rooms and the book bindery.
St. Catherine
For reasons no one remembers, he is often known as “Ralph,” but sometimes they call him “Old John.” The spirit may also be known as St. Catherine of Alexandria or St. Bartholomew the Apostle.
Occasionally he (or she) pies the type or monks the ink, but usually there is no mischief afoot. The main preoccupation for Ralph — or Old John, or Kate or Bart — is vigilance in protecting the printers devils and the rest of the children of Prometheus.
The origin of this ancient spectral tradition is a mystery, but it may be a throwback to Roman or Medieval culture, and to the time when the “household deities,” or lars familiares, were thought to protect every family, so long as the lars were properly honored in the family’s daily meditations.
One of the best known ghost stories from this tradition involves a young American named Benjamin Franklin, who in 1725, at around the age of 20, found himself in London. He began working at John Watt’s company — one of the old city’s largest printing chapels.
Franklin began working in the press room, placing sheets on the frisket, mixing the ink and pulling the devils tail.
As was the custom, he paid his five shilling “bien venu,” or initiation fee, into the chapel fund. The members of the printing chapel used the fund to buy pitchers of beer at the local taverns, and since Franklin was saving money to return to America, he did not usually join them.
After a few weeks, Watts asked Franklin to move from printing to typesetting, where well-educated people were needed. That was fine — the pay was better — but the typesetters wanted another “bien venu.” Since he had already paid one to the printers in the same company, he thought it an imposition to pay a second time. John Watts agreed, and said he should not pay it.
Two or three weeks went by, and the other typesetters were growing angry at the way he was “standing out.” They managed to cause “little pieces of private mischief.” They pied (mixed up) his sorted type, transposed pages, and broke up type that was already set.
The other typesetters blamed it all on the spirit of the chapel, “which they said ever haunted those not regularly admitted,” which is to say, having not paid their bien venu to the brotherhood of typesetters.
Franklin finally decided that the five shillings were not worth all the bother. “I found myself oblig’d to comply and pay the money, convinc’d of the folly of being on ill terms with those one is to live with continually,” Franklin wrote in his autobiography.
He never saw the ghost, nor did he seem to believe in it, but the tradition of a chapel spirit appears to be universal in the older European and American craft printing establishments, at least to the extent that it might explain mistakes and irregularities in the work
Many older printing histories mention the spirits of the chapel, but few modern histories pay any attention to the old superstitions.
It may be that the advent of steam, or stereotyping, or the telegraph frightened off all the old ghosts, or perhaps a lack of proper regard for the lars familiares keeps them “standing off,” in hopes of better days and the return of craft printing.