New York Times Calls Kingsport "A Wilderness"
In 1923 Feature Story
About Recently Opened Kingsport Press
1923 New York Times headline over story about new Kingsport Press
The New York Times published a feature article about Kingsport's newest industry, the Kingsport Press, on January 14,1923. Nine days later the article
was republished in the Kingsport Times.
Here is the Kingsport Times reprint of what the unnamed New York reporter found at
the new plant.
Biggest Printery in a Wilderness
Classics at Ten Cents
All Materials at Hand for an Integrated Industry
Model Tennessee Town
Related Interest Operate Concerns – All Workers Are
Insured
In the heart of a mountainous Tennessee wilderness,
at the centre of the book-buying population of the United States, one of the
world's greatest printeries has been completed. Tomorrow its presses will begin
to hum with their first run, and the product will be the New Testament, for the
Bible is still the “best seller." Ford methods of efficiency in quantity
production will be applied there, and books will be supplied at prices within
the reach of the poorest. Behold, the library flivver!
So remarkable is the enterprise that it merlts an
introduction to the public somewhat more sedate. Its daily capacity, including
the output of specially made machinery, will be 100.000 volumes. Moreover, for
the first time in history the business of book manufacturing has been
integrated.
The Kingsport Press is the core of what Hugo Stinnes
would call a “vertical" industry. It is not within single management, but
friendly groups own its units. They own forests near et hand which will supply
paper pulp for the next ninety years. They own abundant coal fields forty miles
from the printing plant. They control the railroad running through Kingsport,
on which this coal and books must be moved—the only railroad which crosses - or
punctures - the Appalachians. They own paper and pulp mills, glue and ink
factories, a cloth-finishing plant, bookbindery and plate-making and shipping
departments. The things which go to make a volume need no longer be assembled
from many diverse quarters. In effect, the physical book is to brought out of
the earth itself, with the sources of power and the raw material close at hand.
Not long ago a representative of Hachette et Cie.,
Paris publishers, came to New York. He had heard of this extraordinary Yankee
undertaking, and he wanted to visit it, to study it, to estimate its importance
to the reading world. He went to Brentano's to inquire about it, supposing
that, of course, this publishing and bookselling house would have heard of it.
He had heard of it in Europe. Brentano's was in ignorance, so quietly had the
work gone ahead. This is the first detailed publication regarding it.
The Paris publisher finally set himself right by
applying to L. I. Adams, President of the J. J. Little & Ives Company,
bookmakers, who will retain that post, although he is now in Kingsport as the
President of the new concern ; and his new work will be the realization of a
dream he has cherished for a long time, of producing textbooks and Bibles and
the classics at prices so low the poor need not borrow them but might buy them.
Let us go back of the dream and see how events
shaped themselves for its realization. Back in 1900 a Wall Street banking
house, Blair & Co., financed a group of men in the purchase of 500,000
acres of coal fields on what is known as Clinch Mountain, in Tennessee. To get
that coal out to the country on both sides of the range they built the
Carolina, Clinchfield & Ohio Railroad, 340 miles through the Appalachians;
and the difficulties of the task will be realized when you are told that there
are sixteen tunnels in one stretch of fifteen miles. Thus they opened up an
almost virgin country and built two towns Kingsport is one, Irwin, N. C., the
other which are not satellite settlements, but municipalities with their own
charters end their own City Governments.
Industries sprang up rapidly at Kingsport. A cement
plant was established in 1910, and turns out more than 4,000 barrels a day.
George H. Mead, pulp end paper maker at Chillicothe, set up a pulp mill. An
extract plant was built to make acid for tanning hides, because that is a
cattle country, and the “chips."' or logs after the tanning, had been
extracted, were a useful byproduct for the pulp mill.
Adams, through his acquaintance with the men already
interested at Kingsport, saw the possibilities for supplying to the public
inexpensive books manufactured there, in association with pulp and paper
manufacturers. "That is the place where the thing can be done,” he said.
“Everything we need to make a book is there. We can get gray goods from the
South and finish it for the bindings; we have coal. forests. transportation.
Why not do it?
And so he awoke from his dream to find it almost
come true. And one of the first things he did was to find out how cheaply the
classics could be produced.
"Treasure Island" will be the first of a
series of twenty classics, and sample volumes are already at hand; but owing to
the time required to manufacture so many volumes, distribution to the public
cannot begin before April. It is a neat little volume for the side pocket, a
fraction more than four inches wide, a little more than six and a half laches
long, and it is bound, not in paper but in cloth; not in an imitation, but in
real cloth; it is printed on book paper, not paper with a wood fiber; it is
printed from new plates, in type agreeable to the eye. Its binding is red and
gold.
"By using special machinery," said Adams,
“we can produce this book to sell to the public at ten cents, but only if we
print in millions."
But who would order so many books? The Woolworth
Company, with its chain of a thousand stores, was the only concern capable of
ordering and absorbing at a single stroke and distributing throughout the
country so stupendous an output. And so the deal was made not as quickly and
easily as it is set down here, but after many conferences. And along in the
Spring, when the fancy of a certain age turns lightly, not to love but to
adventure, every small boy may, if he choose, travel with Stevenson to a fabulous
island and traffic with pirates, and sing of fifteen men on the dead man's
chest all for a round-trip carfare.
Sixty thousand of these books can be produced daily
by The Kingsport Press, in addition to 40,000 volumes by the ordinary
processes. No other single plant in this country probably can turn out more
than a third the total. Ford produces 100.000 automobiles and tractors a month;
at Kingsport they will produce 100,000 books a day,
And Tennessee mountaineers, many of them illiterate,
but sure to absorb in time something of what they produce, will help to turn
upon the country this Niagara of print.
The Kingsport program calls for a minimum annual
output of 3.500,000 books. One-fourth of the pulp to be used will be made from
a by-product of the tannin factory-chips from which the tannin has been
extracted. Identical trucks will be used throughout the entire vast plant, and
in many of the processes the material will not be handled by men, but will be
lifted by machinery from the truck, put through a process and delivered to
another truck. The first “run " calls for 50,000 Testaments, but the usual
order will be for 500,000 books; and since orders for such quantities can be
obtained only for dictionaries, primers, grammar school textbooks and certain
classics, the plant will be restricted to work of that character. It is
doubtful whether the short runs to which most current fiction is restricted can
be undertaken there.
The size of the printing plant may be gauged from
the fact that its concrete foundations are a mile and a half around. The
building covers three and a half acres, and is so large that no photograph
conveying an adequate notion of its size has yet been taken. Adams intends,
however, to have pictures made from an airplane.
In connection with the enterprise there is a
2,700-acre farm where there are blooded horses and kennels of fine dogs, and
where the supply of vegetables and dairy products is used, not for sale to the
population of the town, but for its protection; it will be sold there only if
merchants in Kingsport betray an inclination to profiteer. Otherwise it is
shipped to other markets. There is an old mansion on it where guests and
visitors of the plant may be entertained.
Among publishers and printers in New York gossip had
it at first that the Kingsport Press was a Standard Oil enterprise; but as a
fact the Kingsport Press is owned by J. J. Little & Company, Inc., and
Adams is credited with having been the directing intelligence back of it. The
cost of the building and equipment was $3,000,000.
Kingsport was the first town in the United States,
and may still be the only town, where every worker was insured. All the
employers accepted the proposal of a great insurance company and issued
policies without examination, owing to the remarkable work which has been done
to make Kingsport a health centre. Physicians, dentists and nurses are provided
without charge in the factories, and they also do infant-welfare work. There
are baby clinics and domestic science classes, with an elaborate educational
program. Experts made a careful analysis of the town's health conditions, and
on their recommendation sanitary and hygienic improvements were made. Before
this was done the infant death rate was 81 per thousand in a year, and this was
speedily reduced to 62, and the adult death rate was reduced from 14 to 11
annually of every thousand.
Thirteen years ago there were two farmhouses on the
site of what is now a town of 10.000. planned so as to accommodate 50,000
should the occasion arise. Dr. John Nolen of Cambridge, Mass., who prepared the
design for the new town, divided it into zones, setting aside certain areas for
factories and other industrial plants, certain districts for wholesale
establishments and others for retailing, still others for residences and sites
for parks, playgrounds, churches and schools. To each school is allotted four
acres of ground, and the Gary system is in effect. | Experts were employed to
draft a charter for the town, and after their work was done the document was
submitted to the Rockefeller Foundation's Bureau of Municipal Research for
approval. The Government consists of five Councilmen, elected for four years, who
elect one of their number to be Mayor. The Mayor in turn appoints a city
manager, who employs and dismisses all other employes of the city. The Mayor
appoints a School Board, consisting of three men and two women.
Landscape engineers direct the planting of trees and
shrubbery in this unusual town. An improvement corporation owns most of the
land and the city's power plant, and it builds homes which it either rents or
sells at cost on long terms. It has built a nine-hole golf course and has
surveyed nine more holes, which probably will be put in soon.
Although the enterprises in the town are separately
owned, they are closely linked, and endeavor by co-operation to eliminate waste
as well as to effect economies. The brick and cement companies supply themselves
and the others with building materials. A dye factory supplies dye to the hosiery
mill and bleaching powder to the pulp mill.. The tannery supplies wood chips to
the pulp mill, and the cement plant furnishes lime for the dye works, the
tannery, the pulp mill and the industrial alcohol plant. The tannery supplies
the saddlery and harness factories with leather. And so it goes.
Primarily Kingsport was planned to supply additional
tonnage to the railroad, which was an expensive enterprise. The country is rich
in natural resources, kaolin and stone and feldspar and silica and sand, aside
from the coal and timber; and it has the advantage - of cold, pure mountain
water. But it was developed into an extremely interesting s civic experiment,
where healthfulness was encouraged because healthfulness makes for efficiency
and contentment, and where spotlessness was encouraged because it makes for
healthfulness.
It was an interesting town even before Little and
Ives decided to build there a printing plant of unprecedented size. The new
undertaking makes it still more remarkable. Its population is wholly
American-born. That the town is at the centre of the book population of this
country is a coincidence which makes it a little the more remarkable.
It may not be amiss to explain how publishers
differentiate between the centre of population and the book-buying centre. It
is possible, by examining the annual turnover of booksellers in each State and
the business of mail order houses, to learn just what the “consumption" of
books is throughout the country. Los Angeles, for instance, exerts a pull to
the West of the book buying centre, for in proportion, to population Los
Angeles buys and presumably reads more books than any other large city in this
country. The centre of population is in Indiana, but the centre of book buying
is a little to the west and south, probably within a hundred miles, Adams
thinks, of Kingsport.
The new press will have therefore an advantage in
economy in distribution. But by some publishers the whole business of book
distribution in this country and elsewhere is considered illogical and
antiquated. Why, it is asked, must a schoolgirl seeking textbooks and a
physician seeking a medical treatise go to the same shop for then? Why must a
book on tea be sold in a bookstore instead of a tea shop? Fiction and
philosophy belong in bookstores and should be sold there, these men think, but
other volumes should be departmentalized and put within readier reach of the
prospective purchaser. And that is one of the problems which may approach
solution through the Kingsport experiment.
Kingsport Press in 1925
