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Ko Te Ako Poto: Making Books at Pompallier
To better understand the bookbinding techniques of the French printers on the Catholic mission now known as Pompallier, National Library Senior Book Conservator, David Ashman, was invited to run a three-day workshop for Pompallier staff. The intention was to continue developing on-site interpretation and to have the ability to create accurate reproductions of those first books. The ensuing physical inspection of some of the remnants of this printery's opus has given us a deeper insight into the missionaries' daily work. When we add to this the understanding of their lives in the rapidly-changing pioneer colony, never mind the complexities of publishing in our indigenous language at that time, we begin to comprehend something of the sheer determination of those Frenchmen. David Ashman prepared by inspecting copies of the main Catholic publication held at the Turnbull Library and on site at Pompallier. Titled Ko Te Ako me te Karakia o te Hahi Katorika Romana - The Teachings and Prayers of the Roman Catholic Faith, these are part of an edition of 6,000 leather-bound, 648-page volumes published in Kororareka/Russell, 1847. Research has shown that teacher Jean Yvert, recruited in France to run the Catholic mission printery in New Zealand, was given a mere three weeks training instead of the usual 7-year apprenticeship. His achievement in organising the equipment and supplies needed to set this printery up in the nether regions of the earth, in training two of his confreres once here, and then in putting out at least 12 publications totaling well over 30,000 volumes during the turbulent 1840s is extraordinary. It is not surprising, then, to find that the surviving copies of Ko Te Ako hold characteristic idiosyncrasies. Some of the finishing work is poorly done: sewing stations are not evenly distributed along the spine, end papers are distinctively wrinkled, sewing cords are not laced in the usual fashion. Debate over whether the missionaries used gold tooling has been answered: it was economically used to simply mark the title onto the spines. Another token decoration was that the outer front edges of the pages were sprinkled with red. While inspecting Ko Te Ako as a means to learn missionary book-binding techniques, another, more intriguing, discovery was made. Extensive conservation work at Pompallier was marked in 1993 by the Catholic Bishop's presentation of an original copy of another of Yvert's productions: 46-page Ko Te Ako Poto or The Shorter Teachings, also published 1847. This humble little book was compared with the bigger leather-bound volume. It became clear that Ko Te Ako Poto was written as the first chapter of the larger Ko Te Ako yet at the same time designed to be printed in larger numbers so that an extra 3,000 could be bound and distributed as separate booklets. Page numbers in the shortened version are marked with Roman numerals while other chapters in the extended version are given Arabic numerals. The shortened version has an extra half-title page added, and three pages are guarded (cut off) to remove the table of contents only used in the extended version. So here we find evidence of the detailed planning needed to produce these two publications in tandem. Careful drafting of the texts and equally careful typesetting must have been vital. And, knowing that the paper and ink supplies were brought in from France and greatly limited, the edition numbers must have been worked out prior to printing. Perhaps
we will never know if the shortened version of Ko Te Ako, the last publication
of the soon-to-be-disestablished Kororareka printery, was simply a clever means
to use up extra paper supplies. Either way, we must salute the enterprise and
economy of those pioneer printers who were so evidently on a mission! |
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