Reproducing the Defects

The first printing of the Declaration of Independence was, by any honest measure, a rush job. The manuscript reached John Dunlap's shop on the afternoon of July 4, 1776, and the 200 copies he was charged with producing had to be ready for distribution by the morning of July 5 — a window of roughly twelve hours, much of it spent setting type by candlelight. The pressure of that schedule left its fingerprints on the broadside in the form of small but unmistakable defects, and faithful reproduction meant reproducing those defects as well. The most obvious are letters that did not print cleanly: edges that fade, serifs that disappear, characters that look slightly chipped or worn. Examining a single eighteenth-century sheet, it is nearly impossible to tell whether such an imperfection was caused by uneven inking on that copy or by physical damage to the type itself. Because twenty-six original Dunlap Broadsides are known to survive, however, the question can be answered statistically: where the same character is malformed in the same way across all surviving copies, the cause must be damaged type rather than a one-time inking failure. We catalogued every such defect and introduced matching damage into our digital type so that the reproductions carry the same pattern of flaws in the same positions on the page. A second, subtler defect was geometric. Locking a chase of type tight against the press bed requires the careful tightening of small wooden or metal wedges called quoins, and in the dim light and haste of that night, the quoins around the Declaration's form were not driven home evenly. The result is a gentle but pronounced curve running through every line of text on the original broadside — lines that bow rather than sit perfectly straight. We deliberately replicated that uneven pressure in our forme so that the lines of our reproduction follow the same curve, completing a faithful copy not only of what Dunlap intended to print, but of what he actually produced on that particular night.