Hebrew Orphan Asylum | Sheaff : ephemera

Hebrew Orphan Asylum

Trade card. In the first issue of The American Model Printer in 1879, Kelly rails against all sorts of "amateur" printers: "spawned" printers, producers of "cheap and nasty work", "visiting card printers", "religious charlatans", "barnacles", "self-taught printers", "boy-amateurs", spouters of "bombastic oratory", "know-it-alls", middlemen who call themselves printers, and "charity printers" . . . juvenile and orphan homes who have in-house print shops and claim to be providing vocational training. Kelly says those graduates are just not competitive in the market. Yet he does praise the program at this institution, The Industrial School Steam Printing Office of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, though not entirely. He says: "One of the most efficient institutions in the matter of educating a portion of its inmates in the printing art is the  Hebrew Orphan Industrial School. This insitution has a remarkable corps of educated practical men in every department . . . Work is done at fair prices, and the business conducted on as nearly a legitimate scale as can be attained by an institution of this kind; yet, with all these advantages in its favor, it has not come up to the mark of pecuniary success or thorough workmanship. . . . Printing is an art, and the coaching of a boy—often without intelligence or taste—for a couple of years or more, under the tutorage of cheap talent, will never make printers."


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