Cowan, John Franklin:

$2,500 · Offered by William Reese Company

THE YOU=OUGHT=TO=BUY=OGRAPHY OF AN INK=SLINGER. The very rare, humorous autobiography of Kohala Union Church's pastor, John F. Cowen, printed by "Chinese, Hawaiian, Japanese and other boys" at the mission school press. Cowan tells the story of his life in New York, Michigan, Boston, Jamaica, and Hawaii with a fair share of intentionally overblown self-aggrandizement, but the text was mainly incidental to the act of printing it. As the author writes about his newly established "Midget [or Midgit] Press," the indigenous Hawaiian and immigrant children at the mission school "were eager to learn printing...Why not use this demand for printing to develop a manual training school in which at least twenty boys of Kohala might try themselves out?...the business men of the community...have taken enough stock to equip a printing plant, with cylinder power press, power job press, paper-cutter...etc.This book was done by the boys in this shop." The proceeds for this book (a suggested donation of $1.00) went entirely to outfitting the print shop, and the rear wrapper contains an advertisemenet and mission statement for the Midget Press. Nor was this the only publication of that little press, which produced a temperance catechism the same year (in English and Hawaiian) as well as a newspaper from 1913-17. One of the earliest (and in fact only) Kohala imprints, printed by journeyman Hawaiian printers on a small press. OCLC locates five copies: Cornell, UCLA, University of Hawaii at Manoa, U

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.