Samuel Jacobs and Syriac linotype
One hundred years ago today … Samuel Jacobs, a polyglot and versatile printer and typesetter, reassigned three fonts he had patented to the Mergenthaler Linotype Company of Brooklyn, New York, with whom he had worked for several years. The fonts were for the Syriac alphabet, a derivation of the Aramaic.
S. A. Jacobs patent 55,049: a “font of Syriac type” designed for Mergenthaler Linotype Company (Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office 274, May 1920, p. 142). From Naby, Eden, “JACOBS, SAMUEL AIWAZ.”
The Syriac language is a dialect of Aramaic, still in use by Middle-Eastern Christian communities today, as it was in New York in 1920. It initially developed, Adam Becker writes, as “Latin did for the Catholic Church, as a language of liturgy and intellectual engagement, even while members of the Syriac churches increasingly became speakers of Arabic, Neo-Aramaic, and various other languages.”
Jacobs was an Assyrian New Yorker who had immigrated in 1906 from the Urmia region in what is now Iran. According to Walker Rumble, “In the years prior to World War I, Jacobs’s family was part of an immigrant Assyrian enclave gathered around Yonkers, New York. Apparently, young Jacobs arrived with skills sufficient to serve that community.” Jacobs worked at the weekly Persian-American Courier edited by Joel E. Werda and a 1916 translation into Neo-Aramaic of the theological Book of the Pearl by Mar Audisho.
In 1920, Jacobs founded the Syriac Press, headquartered in Greenwich Village on Lafayette Street.
Pamplet for the Syriac Press, 1920. Printed in Becker, “Assyrian Christians and the ISIS Assault on the Remains of Nineveh.”
In the ensuing years, Jacobs became a typesetter to the modernist poetry stars, so to speak. He is best known as e.e. cummings’s favorite printer, but also worked on publications of Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, and Eugene O’Neill.
Sources:
Becker, Adam. Becker, “Assyrian Christians and the ISIS Assault on the Remains of Nineveh.” Informed Comment. March 27, 2015.
Naby, Eden, “JACOBS, SAMUEL AIWAZ,” Encyclopædia Iranica, online edition, 2016.
Rumble, Walter. “Reclaiming S.A. Jacobs: Polytype, Golden Eagle, and Typographic Modernism.” American Printing History Association. March 20, 2014.