Mary Dickson's Extra-Tidy Print Shop: "Fit for a Parlor"

Mary Dickson was a printer, a power broker, and the owner of a very-tidy print shop.

When her husband died in 1823 (William Dickson the Printer), Mary took charge of the print shop and the Intelligencer newspaper.  She kept the ball rolling.

One of Mary's journeyman printers in the late 1820s was Abel C. Thomas, the future Universalist pastor. Thanks to Abel Thomas's 1852 autobiography we have a detailed description of Mary's very-tidy, Lancaster print shop in the 1820s.  Abel writes:

• "The printing-office was in a two-story back building, -the upper room being for the types and the lower for the press-and never have I seen another establishment kept so clean and tidy.  The credit did not belong to the printers, but to the neatness and care of the proprietor [Mary Dickson].  How could we put pi [spilled type], and broken leads, and battered types on the window-sills, or paste pictures and scraps on the wall, of a room that was fit for a parlor!"

Abel Thomas also gives us a uniquely-poetic description of Mary's printing press:

• "The press was of the ancient order.  It was a super-royal, stone-bed, wooden-platten, two-pull 'Ramage' -all the elasticity of the return motion being in pieces of felt inserted in the frame.  The form was inked with balls.  Many a weary arm and sore hand tested the qualites of that olden affair and its accompaniments.  Printers will understand my description, and only for them has this paragraph been written."

In 1829 U.S. President Andrew Jackson appointed Mary Dickson postmaster of Lancaster ...Mary's reward for being a very smart (and tidy) Jacksonian.

Ten years later, in 1839, John Forney merged this Intelligencer newspaper with the Lancaster Journal.  Mary's former newspaper continued its evolution into today's Intelligencer Journal.