G.P. Puntam’s Sons publishing house owned and ran its own printing press called Knickerbocker Press. The Putnams helped to set a new precedent in American publishing in this, “we were one of the few publisher with our own printing establishment” (Putnam, G.H., 1942, p.18) The Historical Society of Westchester, New York speculates that the factory was named in honor of Washington Irving, who in the beginning of his literary career had gone by the pen name “Diedrich Knickerbocker”. G.P. Putnam was founded on Washington Irving’s writings, and without the valuable ownership of the rights to Irving’s work, G.P. Putnam may have not outlasted the Civil War. Ironically, Irving had poked fun at Dutch colonial society in New York at the time he wrote under the pseudonym, Knickerbocker, yet when the building was designed it was in the style of Dutch colonial revival. Construction for the Knickerbocker Press building began in 1891 in New Rochelle, New York, and was headed by John Bishop Putnam, who usually tended to the manufacturing areas of running the family business. In his memoir, Wide Margins, Bishop’s son George reminisces about visiting the shop with his father,
“As a boy I loved the K.P. The smells were good. There were the odor of ink in the press room; glue and paper in the bindery; and the special fragrance of leather in the corner by the west window looking out over the New York, New Have and Hartford where the Mc Leans, father and son, worked at a bench with rolls of levant, calf-skin and buckram, and sheets of cunningly “marbled” paper and binder’s cloth on racks above them, and the tell tools, as fine as dentist’s instruments, at hand with mallets and presses and thread for hand-stitching, all components of their craftsmanship. The best smells of all, perhaps, were in the foundry, on the top floor next to the composing room, where the mysterious electrical processes that created plates for the presses. (Putnam, G.P., 1942, p. 20)
The Knickerbocker Press operated in this location for thirty years; after the Putnams left the American White Cross moved in and used the space to manufacture bandages (Brenner, 2007). Throughout the 1980’s and 90’s the building was inhabited by many artists who used it for studio space. The building was converted into living and working loft space, and opened for residential sales in 2007. “The press building in New Rochelle, originally meant to hold the equipment used a century ago for printing books, has 14-foot-high ceilings and gouges in its floors”(Brenner, 2007). The physical reminders of the craftsmanship often attract creative people. If one so desires they can now live where the Putnam family used to work.
“As a boy I loved the K.P. The smells were good. There were the odor of ink in the press room; glue and paper in the bindery; and the special fragrance of leather in the corner by the west window looking out over the New York, New Have and Hartford where the Mc Leans, father and son, worked at a bench with rolls of levant, calf-skin and buckram, and sheets of cunningly “marbled” paper and binder’s cloth on racks above them, and the tell tools, as fine as dentist’s instruments, at hand with mallets and presses and thread for hand-stitching, all components of their craftsmanship. The best smells of all, perhaps, were in the foundry, on the top floor next to the composing room, where the mysterious electrical processes that created plates for the presses. (Putnam, G.P., 1942, p. 20)
The Knickerbocker Press operated in this location for thirty years; after the Putnams left the American White Cross moved in and used the space to manufacture bandages (Brenner, 2007). Throughout the 1980’s and 90’s the building was inhabited by many artists who used it for studio space. The building was converted into living and working loft space, and opened for residential sales in 2007. “The press building in New Rochelle, originally meant to hold the equipment used a century ago for printing books, has 14-foot-high ceilings and gouges in its floors”(Brenner, 2007). The physical reminders of the craftsmanship often attract creative people. If one so desires they can now live where the Putnam family used to work.