BOWNE & Co. Stationers at 211 Water Street is a working job print shop as well as a department of the South Street Seaport Museum. It was one of the first preservation projects undertaken by the Museum in 1975.
Two hundred years before, a dry goods store called Bowne & Company had opened, and it later focused on printing, especially financial documents like prospectuses and merger proxies. One of its customers was Lehman Brothers, the investment bank that collapsed in 2008. Today, Bowne Printers still works in handset type, as was done 200 years ago. The Bowne family has far flung holdings in the NHYC area; the John Bowne House, built in 1661, still stands in Flushing, Queens. Other Bownes settled in City Island, a spit of land in Eastchester Bay, and there, Bowne Street recollects their presence.
The museum says the original shop’s inventory was itemized in a city directory in 1829 as gilt-edge letter paper, straw paper, tissue paper, copying paper, drawing paper, blank books, bill books, cargo books, bankbooks and seamen’s journals.
Print shops of this type originated common phrases like “uppercase” and “lowercase” as the letters were once kept in 2 separate cases. “Mind your p’s and q’s” came about because the two lowercase letters are mirror images of the other. “Leading,” the space between lines of type, was once determined by inserting leaden slugs.
Lo and behold I actually came by on a day when the stationers was open, and I was able to come in and gawk at the printing presses, which are periodically demonstrated by store personnel.
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11/20/23
4 comments
I took an offset-printing evening class at Bowne back in the ’90s. Was fun.
I donated some old “cuts”— engravings—to them once, which I’d kept from my old advertising production life in trade magazines.
I wonder if there are Bowne descendants still involved in the business.
When I took printing shop at Montauk JHS in 1960, we each had our own California job case from which we took the individual pieces of type and loaded them into the composing tray. We weren’t none too careful about returning the letters to the correct slots. I guess the NYC Board of Ed figured if it was good enough for Gutenberg, it was good enough for us!