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Samuel F. Royall Jr, of Williamsburg, Virginia, died on Wednesday, 29 May
2002. He was 81, and he had been in poor health for the past several
months. He was a great friend of Rare Book School virtually from its
inception, and he had many friends among its participants.
Bill Royall was born and brought up in Tidewater Virginia. His ancestors
sailed to Virginia on one of the first boats (they were in Jamestown by
1619), and Royall liked to say that his family had only managed to move
about 12 miles in nearly 400 years, from Jamestown to Williamsburg, where
he and his wife Mae lived for more than 40 years.
A graduate of the College of William & Mary, Royall taught
letterpress printing at South Dakota State University. He served in the
U.S. Army during WW II, and he was in the Philippines shortly after the
Japanese left, where one day he saw some kids retrieving some small wrapped
packages out of a gully by the road: they were collecting packages of
unused Japanese Occupation paper money. The Japanese had no further use for
it, and neither did the Filipinos (the kids were going to try to sell the
packages of bills as souvenirs, they told him), and Royall talked the kids
out of several packages.
He recently gave Rare Book School (RBS) a couple of unbroken
packages (which he had carefully saved for more than 50 years), as well as
a selection from several other bundles (among the last in his long line of
generous gifts to RBS). The design of this money is unnervingly similar to
US dollars, though smaller in size: the amounts are generally in centavos
and pesos, and the words on most of them are in both English and Spanish
(some of them have the amounts in cents and the words in English and Dutch).
After the War, Royall returned to Virginia, where he was
production manager for the Virginia Gazette for several years before
setting up in business in Williamsburg as an independent job printer. His
firm, the Williamsburg Press, was well-known in the region for its
high-quality and innovative work. The Press provided Rare Book School with
steady supplies both of schematic chainline paper and of the facsimile
sheets accompanying the Format videotape.
Back in the 1980s when RBS’s progenitor, the Book Arts Press, was
still at Columbia University, Royall would occasionally drive from
Williamsburg to Norfolk Airport, take a $29 People’s Airline flight to
LaGuardia and then a cab to Columbia, where he’d attend a 50-minute Book
Arts Press evening lecture and the reception following – and then return to
Virginia the same night via another People’s Airline flight.
Royall was unusual in that he was a working printer with a broad
interest in the history of his craft. Over a period of more than 15 years,
he took RBS courses from Greer and Sue Allen (he was particularly
interested in the history of American cloth bindings, and eventually gave
us his notable collection of books designed by Margaret Armstrong), Nicolas
Barker, Timothy Barrett and John Bidwell, Brett Charbeneau, Christopher
Clarkson, John Dreyfus, Mirjam Foot, James Mosley, Paul Needham, and
Michael Twyman.
In his later years, after the Book Arts Press moved from New York
City to Charlottesville, Royall was a frequent volunteer and consultant in
our pressroom, making proofs of our extensive collection of wood-engravings
and other relief blocks, sorting and setting type, and maintaining our
Vandercook proof press; he was always ready to answer our “what’s this?”
questions when unfamiliar equipment or printing surfaces arrived.
My UVa undergraduate students’ average age is 20; they were born in the
early 1980s. To put their age in context, most of them have never sat down
at a typewriter: when I show them a bunch of IBM Selectric typing
elements, they generally don’t know either what they are, or what they were
used for. My students think that a machine is beige, and that it hums
quietly and produces letterforms, and that every two or three years you buy
a new machine that will cost considerably less than the old one and work
considerably better. A fair number of my students have automobiles, but
they can’t fix them; indeed, their quite understandable supposition is that
most things that hum can’t be fixed: when they get old – three years is old
– you buy a new one.
Bill Royall had an elegant suggestion for showing our
undergraduates what a machine used to be: the Linotype. In 1964, he had
purchased a Linotype 1907R in Plymouth, North Carolina, and put a lot of
upgrading on it; it had a lot of old features, “but it cast a very good
slug,” he said. He loaded it up to 21-pt Caslon and used it as a job
printing machine, with 13 magazines in a very handy swing-out rack.
Mergenthaler Linotype made Royall’s machine in 1903, and
reconditioned it in 1907. “The helpful part,” said Royall, “is that they
were still selling parts for it, sixty years later … I loved that old
machine, because of all the upgrading and matrix fonts I assembled, though
I have run many machines from a model K and Model 15 to a Blue Streak ad
machine.”
Royall used his Linotype 1907R until 1976, when he moved his shop
from an area zoned for manufacturing to a commercial zone that wouldn’t
allow Linotype machines (the Williamsburg city fathers put Linotype
machines in the same class as foundries and abattoirs, he said).
Royall didn’t have the heart to junk the machine, so he took it
home and stored it broken down in a shed in the back yard. At some point he
offered it to the Book Arts Press, but somehow I didn’t want to see the
expression on the faces of the folks in the university library where the
Book Arts Press and RBS are located when I informed them I wanted to
install a working Linotype in my office.
Then Royall had another idea: what if we took his Linotype and
cross-sectioned it to show how it worked: one section showing the assembly
of matrices and spacing bands in a line, another section showing the
registration of italic words in Roman lines, ready for casting the slug;
another section showing the keyboard with keys that would no longer really
do anything, but felt right when you pressed them – and finally (and most
important) the distributor bar, powered by a sewing machine motor so that
you could send matrices down the line and watch them fall off the
distributor bar at their appointed places into the chutes.
No sooner said than done: Royall took a band saw to his Linotype
Model 1907R and turned it into a collection of teaching opportunities that
we collectively call Heart of Linotype … Heart o’ Linotype. Over the past
decade, hundreds of RBS students have had a chance to play with the result,
and my undergraduates have seen at least one instance of a tool that is not
beige, and that does not hum quietly, and that did not get thrown out after
two or three years of service.
An unpretentious man, Bill Royall was unfailingly modest about what was in
fact an enormous knowledge of practical printing in the 20th century. He
was always a delight to talk to: a genuinely curious man, his interest in
both history and literature was wide-ranging and unflagging. He will be
greatly missed here.
Samuel F. Royall Jr is survived by his wife of 61 years, Mae H. Royall (233
Christopher Wren Road, Williamsburg, VA 23185); two sons, Samuel Royall III
of Williamsburg, William E. Royall and wife, Carol, of Rochester, N.Y.; and
three grandchildren, Jennifer, Hagen and Samantha. A funeral service will
be held at 11 a.m. Monday, June 3, in the Williamsburg Baptist Church.
Interment will follow in the Williamsburg Memorial Park. There will be no
visitation at the funeral home. Memorial donations may be made to the
Williamsburg Baptist Church, Richmond Road, Williamsburg, VA 23188.
[Based in part on information published in the Williamsburg Daily Press on
31 May 2002.]
Terry Belanger : University Professor : University of Virginia : Rare Book
School : 114 Alderman Library : Charlottesville, VA 22903 : Telephone
434/924-8851 fax 434/924-8824 email belanger@virginia.edu : URL
<http://www.rarebookschool.org>
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