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