HERALD Official Or g an Of The Sla vonic Benevolent Order Of The State Of Texas. Founded 1897. BENEVOLENCE HUMANITY BROTHERHOOD VOLUME 53 — No. 4
Postmaster: Please Send Form 3579 with Undeliverable Copies to: SUPREME LODGE, SPJST, P. 0. Box 100, TEMPLE, TEXAS
JANUARY 27, 1965
FROM THE EDITOR'S DESK IT ALL STARTED WITH GUTENBERG " It is an old and true maxim that 'a would stick only to the crayon marks, not the rest of the stone. A few years before Christopher Co- drop of honey catches
lumbus was even a gleam in his father's eye, a young German named Johann Gutenberg was secretly working on an invention — the western world's first movable type printing press. The importance of Gutenberg's invention gets special emphasis by the more than 600,000 men and women in America's printing and publishing industry during Printing Week, January 17-23. Herr Gutenberg's press was a marvelous breakthrough. It was destined to have more effect on man's mind than any other machine invented. But, of course, there were no newspapers in 1446 to herald its arrival. Using small, wooden blocks of type, Gutenberg could put together a whole page of reading matter far more quickly than the artisans of his day could carve the same word on a single large block. What's more, he could reuse the letters to print other pages. The first major printing job using movable, re-usable type was a large Latin ! Bible. Gutenberg began this work about 1450. By that time, he was using ',metal type. Still, it took five years to hand set and print 300 copies of the 'famous Gutenberg Bible. The art of printing grew, but the need for printing grew even faster. In Bavaria, some 300 years after Gutenberg's innovation, a young actor and playwright named Aloys Senefelder found reason to ponder the need for inexpensive printing.
more flies than a gallon of gall.' So with men — if you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart; which, say what you will, is the great high road to his reason." —Abraham Lincoln • "Loyalty to principle, readiness to give of one's talents to the common good, acceptance of responsibility — these are the measure of a good American, not his age in years." —Dwight D. Eisenhower Alas, Aloys had never been terribly successful as an actor or an author. He often found he couldn't afford to have his plays printed. So he began to search for ways to reproduce his scripts by some means less costly than the method Herr Gutenberg had conceived. One day in Munich, in 1796, he found what he was looking for. He had slabs of limestone ground flat and polished. Then he wrote on the stone with a greasy crayon. After that, he would sponge the 'entire surface of the stone with water ; which contain_ed a little gum arable. Because grease and water don't mix, the water wouldn't stay on the crayon marks. Aloys found he could moisten the whole stone, run a greasy ink roller across the Wet surface, and the ink
Quickly he pressed a sheet of paper against the inked stone surface . . . and sure enough, the lines he had drawn on the stone were reproduced on the paper. Aloys ;Senefelder had invented lithography. Later he devised a lithographic press large enough to hold a sizeable stone. A whole new method of printing was born. The excitement Of those first days has marked the 'entire history of printing. As early as 1530, authorities in Great Britain realized the press could greatly influence the public mind, and the first censorship was introduced. Still, the art of printing grew. By 1620, the rolling bed platen press was developed in Amsterdam. Early in the 1800's came the cylinder press. Around 1860, steam power was first used to run presses. And in 1889, metal plates were first used in lithography. 'LIFE INSURANCE HITS PEAK IN TEXAS Ownership of life insurance in Texas rose to a new high in 1964, the Institute of Life Insurance reported. Life insurance in force in the state reached $39 billion at the end of 1964, according to the Institute's estimate. This is a rise of more than $3 billion over the previous year. Purchases of life insurance in Texas also rose significantly during the year. According to the Institute, Texas families bought an estimated 4.5 billion dollars worth of ordinary life in-