Cloisters Ephrata Pa Johann Peter Miller and Family
The story of the Ephrata Cloister, in Lancaster Canton, is 1 of the virtually colorful stories of Early American printing. (Cloister Website: Here )
It is the story of radical Christian Pietists who created one of the most boggling books of colonial America, the Märtyrer Spiegel (the Martyrs' Mirror).
This book is the largest volume printed in colonial North America, and is often considered the most ambitious American printing project of that era.
Fifteen Cloister Brothers worked three years (from 1748 to 1751) to print this mammoth tome. Iv of these Brothers manned the printing press, four Brothers set type, and vi Brothers fabricated the paper. (Not to mention the Brothers who made the ink at the oil mill, and the Brothers who did the bookbinding.)
This gargantuan printing project was supervised by Johann Peter Miller, a premier linguist and scholar of early Pennsylvania.
Peter Miller attended the University of Heidelberg, Gemany. He was ane of the greatest linguists in the American colonies at that fourth dimension. Peter translated this Martyrs' Mirror from the original Dutch to German, considering this volume had been requested by Pennsylvania's German language-speaking Mennonites.
These ambitious printers eventually printed 1,300 copies of the Martyrs' Mirror. Each book contained more than than 1,500 folio pages. That's more than a million and a half pages, all hand-pulled on a creaking, wooden press. (ane,950,000 pages). No small accomplishment!
Legend has information technology that Peter Miller slept simply three or four hours each night during this printing project. I hope they allowed him true cat-naps at noon.
Above: The 1748 Märtyrer Spiegel (the Martyrs' Mirror) is an extravaganza of blackletter typography.
Some eight years earlier, the Germantown (near Philadelphia) printer Christopher Saur had printed the first type specimen printed in Colonial United states of america. Information technology was a sample canvas of his fonts, to show off the fraktur fonts he had purchased from the Egenolff-Berner-Luthersche blazon foundry of Frankfurt, Germany. The type used to impress the Ephrata Martyrs' Mirror had been cast in Europe also. (Perchance at the same type Frankfurt foundry?)
Within xxx years, Germantown printers would principal the art of casting their own fonts, to create the first books printed in America with our own American-made types.
Above: This beautiful Martyrs' Mirror binding is a knock-out. It is the best bounden I have seen for an Ephrata martyrs' book. This brass-and-leather masterpiece feels heavy and Medieval, like the thick blackletter fonts inside. It looks similar Jakob Böhme'due south alchemy manual.
This Martyrs' Mirror was spring for the Christian Meyer family unit, around the time of its publication in 1748. Christian Meyer was a wealthy Mennonite farmer in Manheim Township, Lancaster County. This bounden probably was created in the Ephrata Curtilage bookbindery.
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Beneath: Benedict Hershey'south Martyrs' Mirror (Dandy-Corking-Bang-up Grandfather of Mr. Chocolate: Milton Hershey)
Higher up: Bearding Cloister members used quill pens and ink to inscribe the flyleaf of this Martrys' Mirror with the name of the book's possessor, Benedict Hirschy (Benjamin Hershey) (born 1697 - died 1789). He was a prominent Mennonite bishop in Lancaster County.
Hirschy and his parents immigrated here from Friedelsheim, Frg in 1719. His 500-acre subcontract includes the land that is today's Conestoga Business firm, the celebrated family home of the Steinman family unit, owners of the Lancaster Newspapers today. This same Bridegroom Hirschy (Hershey) was the swell-great-great gramps of Milton Hershey, the founder of the Hershey's candy visitor.
This is the first time this Hershey fraktur has been published or exhibited. It is nifty fun to showcase it here.
P.Due south. Milton Hershey was a printer's apprentice, earlier he became a candy maker. Fortunately for chocolate lovers everywhere, Milton failed miserably in his brusque-lived printing career.
Above: The Martrys' Mirror of Mennonite Bishop Benedict Hirschy (Benjamin Hershey) The Hershey family had this book rebound in this binding in the early 1800s. The Hersheys chose to Americanize this book with an English-language spine label. Medieval binding was Out; Anglicized binding was In. Out with the old. In with the new.
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To a higher place: 1920s - 40s postcards of Ephrata Cloister buildings. Plus a reenactors postcard by Mel Horst.
The Brothers and Sisters of the Ephrata Cloister created a treasure trove of Early American music. Conrad Beissel, their vivid, spiritually-androgynous leader, wrote some of the earliest music in colonial America. Beissel's ethereal, other-worldly choral compositions survive today in song books that were penned and printed at the Cloister.
In 1747 the Brothers printed a landmark book of American musicology, the Turtel-Taube (Turtle Dove) hymn book. In this book, Beissel explains his unique theories of music composition. This is the get-go American essay on music harmony. The book besides includes the lyrics to hundreds of hymns sung at the Cloister. Many of these hymns were composed by Beissel, who wrote their lyrics and scores.
In the previous year, 1746, 3 Brothers had worked most of the year to produce an ornate hand-written music book, on which this printed music book is based. The Cloister gave that manuscript music book to Ben Franklin, who in turn gave it the the Mayor of London. In 1927 that paw-written Turtel Taube book was purchased by the Library of Congress, where you can encounter it Here and Hither.
The book I show here, on my site, is the 2d printed edition (1749) of this iconic Turtle Dove music book. The margins of many pages in this printed edition take mitt-written musical notation, penned by anonymous Curtilage scribes.
P.S. The turtle-pigeon fraktur drawing shown above is a from another Curtilage manuscript. (Unfortunately, information technology is only one page.) 
Above: An anonymous Curtilage scribe penned music notation onto the margins of this Turtle Dove book.
Below: "Sing-Arbeit": This is the showtime folio of Conrad Beissel's dissertation on choral harmony, which is printed in this hymn book every bit a preface to the hymns. This work is the starting time treatise on music harmony published in America.
Above: An anonymous Cloister scribe penned music notation onto the Turtle Dove hymn book'due south margins. He or she also inserted these manuscript music pages, looseleaf, betwixt the pages of this book.
Below: This is the outset hymn printed in the Turtle Pigeon hymnbook.
Higher up: A cloistered Turtel Taube printer gets slightly exuberant with his printers' ornaments. (Looks like letterpress exuberence was O.One thousand. there, as long as it was ascetic exuberence.)
Below: In 1747 this species of Turtel Taube (Turtle Doves) sang their songs in the apple trees at the Ephrata Cloister, competing with Beissel'south chorales. White-robed reenactors continue singing at the Cloister today. So practise these turtle doves.
Higher up: Click Prototype to Enlarge.
Collectors of American folk fine art love the Ephrata Cloister. Ephrata'southward mystical Brothers and Sisters created icons of Early on American fine art ...masterworks of Pennsylvania German calligraphy and pen-and-ink blueprint, including the primeval fraktur drawings created in America.
The Brothers of the Ephrata impress shop were no slouches in the masterworks department. In addition to creating landmarks of American book arts, these printers besides produced fraktur taufscheins (letterpress birth and baptism certificates). Local scriveners infilled these fraktur-font documents with color and calligraphy, to tape, forever, the nascency or baptism dates of their neighbors.
In the early 1780s, the Ephrata printers created the kickoff printed American taufscheins (birth or baptism certificates). Erstwhile circa 1784, a teen-aged Mennonite girl named Susanna Greider (Kreider), living in Lancaster Township, received one of these first taufscheins, which I prove here.
Susanna's family purchased this fraktur document from the eccentric scrivener Henrich Dulheuer, who penned Susanna's nascence details onto the paper in blood-red ink. Durng this time, Henrich was living in Due east Hempfield Township, with the Musselmans, a Mennonite family.
The Ephrata printers had already jazzed upward this document by using two woodblocks to impress vineing flowers and long-necked birds in the margins. The Brothers used another woodblock to print the flower-filled lower border. (For that edge, they apparently recycled a woodblock that was previously used for printing textiles.)
The Ephrata print store had deputed a local, non-Cloister artist, Henrich Otto, to pigment horizontal bands of ink-and-watercolor vines and flowers to this document.
To top it all off, the Brothers printed their favorite winged angel, acme and center. (Or is it the Virgin Sophia?) Whoever he/she is, she apparently was composed of lead: a blazon-metal cutting. She was a popular angel; Christoph Saur and Francis Bailey both printed her eyebrow in their print shops.
Susanna probably didn't intendance about her taufschein'south printing details. She was but glad to know that anytime someone would be reading most her on the Internet.
P.S. Thanks to the belatedly Klaus Stopp for publishing his monumental, half-dozen-volume study of Pennsylvania tauf-scheine.
Beginning in the mid 1700s, American printers became enamored with the finely-crafted British fonts designed by William Caslon, an English gunsmith and typeface designer. Caslon fonts became some of the most popular typefaces of that century, throughout the English-speaking globe. ...and the Pennsylvania-German speaking world.
The Ephrata print store printed this indenture in 1760s using Caslon fonts (or perhaps Caslon-wanna-be fonts from a competing blazon foundry in London or Glasgow, Scotland.)
A Caslon blazon specimen canvass is Here, if yous want to try to effigy out if these Cloister fonts are "real" Caslon or "competing-with" Caslon.
In 1766, John Dunlap used Caslon fonts to print the Announcement of Independence. Even today, Caslon is always a safe bet.
The Ephrata Cloister was an Early American powerhouse of printing and publishing.
The Arndt and Eck bibliography lists 68 German-language books, pamphlets, and almanacs printed at the Ephrata Cloister betwixt 1745 and 1792.
The Cloister printed only one English-linguistic communication volume, a 1767 hymnal for the Episcopal churches in Lancaster, Pequea, and Caernarvon. Merely one copy of this volume is known. Information technology is in California'southward Huntington Library. The book'due south championship is The Family Prayer-Book, Containing Morning and Evening Prayers...
Here are five German-language books printed at the Curtilage. The rye-straw breadbasket as well is from the Cloister.
These books are (left to right, back row starting time):
- Christliches Gemüths - Gespräch (Christian Spiritual Chat) by Gerhard Roosen 1769. Printed for the Mennonites.
- Creutz-Schule (School of the Cross) past Valentin Wudrian. 1762.
- Die Ernsthafte Christenpflicht (The Earnest Christian Duty). 1785. The well-nigh popular Mennonite and Amish prayer book, fifty-fifty today.
- Die Ernsthafte Christen - Pflicht (The Earnest Christian Duty). 1770. The almost pop Mennonite and Amish prayer volume, fifty-fifty today.
- Die Ganz Neue Testament (The Complete New Testament).1787.
Above: Letters 1000 and S, from the 1748 Märtyrer Spiegel (Martyrs' Mirror). (I used some red Photoshop ink to jazz upward these letters.)
Peter Miller, of the Ephrata Curtilage, used this display font in his 1748 Martyrs' Mirror, the largest book printed in Colonial U.s..
This font is hugely important to the history of American press, because it too appears every bit the first font on the first type specimen printed in Colonial United States: the ca. 1740 broadside printed by Christopher Saur in Germantown (near Philadelphia) to advertise his printing services.
Today, i of those Saur broadsides is in Philadelphia, in the collection of the Historical Lodge of Pennsylvania.
These ornate letters Chiliad and Southward appear throught the Martyrs' Mirror, a book about Christian martyrs.
Saur identifies these big letters every bit "Sabon." They were designed by an bearding typographer in Germany, at the Luthersche type foundry in Frankfurt.
...and so that makes this the Outset Photoshopped edition of the Showtime font of the Kickoff U.S. type specimen. (I'm riding this font equally far equally I can take it.)
Above: Alle Menschen sind Erde (All Man is Globe)
Detail of the start type-specimen advertizement printed in Colonial United States. It is a broadside printed past Christopher Saur in Germantown, near Philadelphia, ca. 1740. Peter Miller used this aforementioned "Sabon" font in his 1748 Märtyrer Spiegel (Martyrs' Mirror).
Source: https://www.lancasterlyrics.com/b_peter_miller_the_ephrata_cloister/
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