Rubbing Readers the Wrong Way? Materiality and the Case of Ink Rub-Off

A search of academic literature on “materiality” will produce a dizzying array of results. The vast body of works, too large to review in full detail here, encompasses terms such as artifacts, durability, technologies, inscriptions, economies, bodies, and embodiment. At first blush, materiality might appear to refer simply to things or stuff that exists in the world. Yet recent scholarship, emanating from fields as diverse as science and technology studies (STS), media studies, communication studies, anthropology, and organization studies, among others, asks us to go far beyond “thingness” when it comes to material investigations.¹ While it is clear that materiality matters, surveying this interdisciplinary landscape reminds us that when we begin speaking of “materiality,” we first must ask: Whose version of materiality? How might journalism historians think with and through this concept?

Materialist inquiries have assumed a dominant position in scholarly discourse across disciplines in recent years. A chorus of scholars, particularly those in communication and media studies, has suggested that the “material turn” resulted from “fatigue” with constructivism and text-centered analysis. This fatigue led theorists to reach out to “grasp ‘the real’” and to express a “desire for firm foundations.”² Concerns about materiality have also formed a central part of STS investigations for some time, responding to Bruno Latour's notion that “technology is society made durable.”³ Media historians across disciplines have likewise attended to the “medium,” offering accounts of typewriters, QWERTY keyboards, computer mice, and paper, among others.⁴ If preoccupations with “the material” already were numerous, a growing emphasis on digital and virtual technologies at the turn of the twenty-first century has intensified debates about the extent to which “new” media technologies offer radically immaterial, disembodied experiences in contrast to those of “old” or traditional media technologies.⁵

Although a focus on materiality offers a compelling alternative to textual analysis alone, recent interventions remind us of potential pitfalls when romanticizing “materiality” as theory, approach, and method. Finn Brunton and Gabriella Coleman, for example, warn that a “dive” into hardware “is not a simple revelation of some true, foundational reality.”⁶ Likewise, Mary Gray argues that the centrality of objects “distracts us from the social context that animates the work of any technology.”⁷ Similarly, Jeremy Packer and Stephen Wiley suggest that “‘going back’ to the corporeal, the physical, the infrastructural, or the economic ‘base’ as a recuperation of what really matters […] fails to recognize the materiality of discourse itself,” which may lead to artificial separations of the textual or discursive from the material.⁸ Caught between technological determinism and social constructivism—between the longstanding binaries of subjects and objects—it seems that studies of materiality simultaneously intrigue and provoke indignation from all sides.

This leaves us with the vexing question of how to think through and what to do with materiality. Perhaps most relevant for journalism historians, a number of scholars whose work crosses disciplinary boundaries have offered inroads for conceptualizing materiality in journalism studies. A recent special issue of Journalism focused explicitly on the question of materiality in journalism, with the editors concluding that “the ideas embedded in journalism studies’ understandings of materiality could use some further fleshing out, along with greater focus on historicization, power, and culture.”⁹ They note that the majority of journalism studies based on actor-network theory (ANT) take a “presentist” approach, and thus they call for a “reintegration of history” into the science and technology studies tradition that has produced so many contemporary accounts of newswork.¹⁰ Journalism historians seem particularly poised to intervene in these discussions by historicizing sociotechnical practices and objects—but where to begin?

To avoid separations that privilege the material at the expense of discourse and sociality (or vice versa), scholars have identified the need for emphasizing complexity, entanglements, and co-construction. In particular, Katherine Hayles calls for analyses that simultaneously attend to “discursive constructions” and the ways that “embodied humans interact with the material conditions in which they are placed.”¹¹ Similarly, Ignacio Siles and Pablo Boczkowski advance a “texto-material perspective” that views content and materiality—or media-as-text and media-as-object—as interdependent and inextricably intertwined variables.¹² Finally, and importantly, Boczkowski particularly speaks in favor of materiality as a way to upend traditional studies of journalism that focus almost exclusively on journalists and newsrooms as the actors and spaces that “count.”¹³ Here again, journalism historians can make especially relevant contributions by offering historical accounts that acknowledge a rich socio-material world made up of diverse actors, practices, technologies, and protocols that fall under the umbrella “journalism.” To undertake material investigations of journalism history, a “cosmopolitan” approach that attends to production, consumption, content, and technology can help to move beyond the hard-and-fast distinctions that have often characterized previous works.¹⁴

In the case study outlined in the following sections, this essay builds on these hybrid approaches by arguing for a definition of materiality based on an interview with N. Katherine Hayles by Lisa Gitelman about printed and electronic literature. In this interview, Hayles argues that,

materiality, as I use the term, does not simply mean all the physical, tangible aspects of the construction, delivery, and reading apparatus. […] These properties cannot be determined in advance of the work […], rather, they emerge from the interplay between apparatus, the work, the writer, and the reader/user.¹⁵

Gitelman elaborates by noting that materiality is “something that happens rather than something that exists.”¹⁶ This dialogue between the two scholars imagines an active conception of materiality where materiality comes to be or arises through the interactions of object/text/producer/reader. This definition stands quite in contrast to materiality as a property of things or “thingness” outside of text, producer, or consumer. By thinking about the ways that materiality-as-outcome “happens” at different historical moments, journalism historians are uniquely positioned to make meaningful interventions. The remainder of this essay examines how materiality emerges in the intersections between newspapers, newspaper technologies, newspaper industry organizations, newspaper content, journalists, publishers, and readers.

Newspapers are “evocative objects.”¹⁷ Malleable and multipurpose, users incorporate and reimagine them through their everyday practices both in relation to—and against—their “intended” purposes as vehicles for news. To think about newspapers’ materialities is to recognize their tangibility and multiplicity of meaning, but it is also to wrestle with the notion that their materiality emerges at the site or interface between paper, ink, printing press, newsroom, content, journalists, publishers, and readers. In the pages to come, I consider how newspapers become material by examining the issue of ink rub-off, which refers to the transfer of printing ink from newspapers to readers’ bodies, clothing, and furniture. I offer one possible way to imagine an active, embodied, historically situated theory of materiality.

The “Problem” of Ink Rub-Off and Newspapers

Let's be honest with each other. You, the newspaper consumers, have a problem with us, the newspaper producers. Our product rubs off on you. Literally. Ink rub-off, as frivolous as it may sound, is one of the major problems faced by modern American newspapers. For our industry, it's a chronic, irritating but non-debilitating ailment, sort of like halitosis or body odor; we’re constantly trying new gargles and mouthwashes and deodorants, and a breakthrough may be near, but we still haven't cured our offensive little problem. —Doug Bates, Eugene Register-Guard, March 15, 1987¹⁸

The above quote, referencing the newspaper industry's “offensive little problem,” reflects a common sentiment expressed in 1980s newspapers: news ink, rubbing off on its readers, diminished—even destroyed—the newspaper reading experience. Interestingly, before the 1980s, the issue received little attention in newspapers or other print accounts, though occasional mention appeared. As early as 1859, in fact, a popular etiquette manual warned that women should “Always object to a parcel being put up in newspaper—as the printing-ink will rub off, and soil the article inclosed [sic].”¹⁹ It is rare, however, to find more than passing acknowledgment of rub-off in the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, as, in fact, newspaper ink—applied primarily with letterpress technologies—hardly rubbed off before the 1960s. The letterpress process, which involved using a printing plate with relief and recessed areas, ensured that the oil-based ink dried rapidly. When the newspaper industry began shifting to an offset printing method, however, the new process, which combined water and oil-based ink and relied on repelling and attracting ink, meant that newspaper ink never fully dried.²⁰ Still, publishers and advertisers migrated toward offset printing because it offered cheaper reproduction of black and color ink; it afforded all-gray newspapers an inexpensive opportunity to print in color; and it reduced time to put news into print.²¹

This initial shift in printing press technology partly explains why concerns about rub-off began to appear preliminarily in text accounts in the 1960s. At this historical moment, onlookers such as Carl E. Lindstrom worried that the housewife's experience with early color-ink newspapers would diminish her “good will […] when she discovers that these primitive yellows and reds and greens rub off on her dress.”²² He continued, somewhat despairingly, “She must wash her hands after reading the paper […].” Despite a comment here or there about rub-off, by and large newspapers and reporters did not view ink rub-off with much concern until the 1980s, when, seemingly all of a sudden, the transfer of ink to readers’ fingers, clothing, and tables represented a “blight.”²³

At this point, dozens of stories in national and local newspapers addressed ink rub-off as a worrisome side effect of newspaper printing, even though most of these papers had switched to offset printing years earlier. One author in Fortune magazine imagined readers freed from “one of life's petty annoyances.”²⁴ Countless headlines such as “Seeking Ink Rub-off Relief,” “The Real Dirty News: Rub-off Creates Ink-stained Wretches,” “Out, Out Damned Spot!,” and “A Very Smudgy Issue” framed rub-off in terms that positioned readers’ bodies in antagonism with their newspapers. Constructed in this way, rub-off began to transform from a little-discussed and unintended consequence of offset printing into a stumbling block for the future of newspapers. Journalists, readers, and other actors such as newspaper publishers and ink producers co-constructed ink rub-off within the pages of newspapers, transforming discourse about rub-off from mild side effect to a time-sensitive problem. This shift prompts questions about why and how a specific newspaper materiality began to emerge around the idea that dirty newsprint needed to clean up its act.

A Technical Problem or a Political Problem?

Just as important as the newspaper content, really, is the ink rub. What's the use if ink rubs off on you and you can't read the paper? —X. Kayser, quoted in Shelby Siems, Christian Science Monitor, 1992²⁵

Journalists and readers did not conjure the issue of ink rub-off from nowhere, nor did rub-off as a technical side effect drastically begin to worsen in the 1980s. Rather, a number of political actors involved with newspaper production latched onto the issue of solving rub-off as a useful motive for achieving other gains. These gains primarily related to reducing newspapers’ dependency on the petroleum industry for its oil-based inks. In 1979, the American Newspaper Publishers Association (ANPA), fed up with oil prices and shortages, began seeking an alternative printing ink. Tasking chemists with creating a new ink formulation, the ANPA tested more than two thousand concoctions before arriving at soybean oil ink—or soy ink—as its preferred product. The Cedar Rapids-Gazette piloted the first commercially available soy ink on March 24, 1987, after the ANPA urged Sun Chemical, the largest ink producer, to output an initial quantity of its new product. The soybean farming industry quickly spoke in support of the ink, citing its positive effect for the American economy, environmental benefits, and better press “mileage,” which meant that papers could apply less ink.²⁶ The industry also touted the benefits of low-rub soy ink, though this characteristic applied primarily to color ink and not to black.

As papers slowly began to adopt soy ink, another printing process—flexography—emerged as a viable alternative to offset printing. Although flexography (often referred to as “flexo”) existed since the 1890s, the water-based ink originally smeared significantly, printed slowly, and could not effectively reproduce color.²⁷ The smearing effect of flexo was indeed so significant that flexographic printing came to be known as “Bibby's Folly”—a negative reference to one of the press's inventors and his smudgy printing technology. By the late 1980s, however, improvements both in the printing process and its ink made flexography a newly attractive choice for newspapers. This triggered “a vigorous technological counterattack” launched by offset machine manufacturers to hold onto their profitable printing market.²⁸ A fierce competition ensued in the late 1980s and early 1990s over ink and various printing methods. While the question of rub-off did not cause this sociotechnical struggle, it did transform into a key point in the debate. Soy ink promised reduced rub-off for color ink, while water-based ink used in flexography allured with a no-rub solution; these alternatives to traditional offset printing stimulated ink manufacturers for offset to develop low-rub inks as well.

Although publishers, journalists, readers, and ink producers acknowledged rub-off well before the 1980s, discourse on the subject remained sparse, disorganized, and largely apolitical. Due to the ANPA's efforts to break free from petroleum's stronghold on the ink market, a series of renegotiations in the newspaper industry took place to define a new kind of reader, reading experience, and material read. The search for “smudgeless ink” came to dominate conversations about printing techniques, with headlines such as “At Last, a Clean Read”; “Newest Newspaper Ink Won't Smudge on Fingers”; “Paper to Clean Up Act; Newer Ink Less Messy Ink”; and “With Smudgeless Ink, You Could Read Your Paper with Your Clothes On.”²⁹ To achieve a technical shift in the way newspapers were made writ large, a host of actors constructed the problem of rub-off through newspaper discourses. Low-rub and no-rub ink became a bargaining chip in a broader economic, technical, and social conversation about printing, but the consequences extended far beyond the question of ink or printing methods and into the realm of a new newspaper materiality.

Embodied Reading

The clapping of palm to forehead, the stroking of chin and nervous scratching associated with newspaper reading spreads the gunk to other parts of the body. Left on the skin for any period of time, ‘rub-off’ begins to feel something like a well-aged mixture of shortening and soot. […] This writer can personally attest to instances in which a forearm rested on an Op-Ed page has picked up an exact replica of Evans’ and Novak's cherubic faces. —Jody Powell, Philadelphia Inquirer, 1986³⁰

As a result of technical changes and political conversations occurring within the newspaper industry, a significant spike in discourse about rub-off can be charted in the 1980s around the same time of experimentation with soy ink. Reporters consistently began to remark about dirty fingers and clothing, offering anecdotes in their columns about readers’ physicality and their painstaking efforts to avoid rub-off. According to a story in Newsweek, in fact, “the nation's publishers say that dirty hands are their No. 1 consumer problem.”³¹ Some papers proposed that this “problem” had cultivated a market for selling gloves to readers, enabling a contact-free experience.³² In these reporters’ attacks on the messiness of their own format, the underlying message suggested that reading should be clean and not dirty, that bodies should maintain a sterile distance from the texts they consumed, and that readers would take their business elsewhere if newspapers did not “clean up” their acts.³³

Not only did discussions focus on readers’ bodies interacting physically—especially tactilely—with a newspaper and the ink applied to it—but the theme of news itself transferring onto one's body also surfaced on occasion. Newspaper abstainer and fiction author Samuel F. Pickering surmised that he had never subscribed to a newspaper, for he concluded after a trial reading period that “I don't like to scratch my nose and later look in the mirror and discover ‘Libya’ and ‘Margaret Thatcher’ printed on it.”³⁴ Pickering objected to a form of reading that required “blue jeans and rubber gloves” in order to consume the material. This critique not only denigrated a physical absorption of news onto the reader's skin, but it also subtly gestured toward a distinction between “lowbrow” newsprint and “highbrow” books and magazines. Readers and journalists often referred to the rub-off quality of newspapers as a defining characteristic of the genre that set it apart from others as the speed of printing and timeliness of their news necessitated an inexpensive, messier format.

Newspapers often boasted that a cleaner reading experience meant a better reading experience, but some countered this dominant message by equating cleanliness with lowbrow reading and low-quality content. In one instance, media commentator Linda Ellerbee critiqued USA Today, one of the first national papers to employ a low-rub ink solution, by sniping that “USA TODAY doesn't rub off on your hands or your mind.”³⁵ Others—particularly journalists—feared that a “clean” read would eradicate newspapers’ unique and vital material form for delivering quality investigative news. So wrote Powell (1986), “Newspapers that don't produce a powerful urge to take a shower would be too much like newsmagazines, which don't make you want to bathe or do much of anything else.”³⁶ Similarly, journalism scholar Kevin Barnhurst idealized the newspaper, “a far cry from the stately book or chic magazine,” for its “big, fat, and dirty” interface that literally left its mark upon readers.³⁷ These comments speak to an anxiety about sanitized reading experiences with a format always considered qualitatively and physically different from its counterparts. They also demonstrate conflicting constructions of materiality, where ink transfer could take on varied meaning[s] in the course of a reader's experience: Did ink rub-off signify the “trashiness” of newspapers compared to novels, or did it identify the raw, muckraking journalism that set newspapers apart from “soft” newsmagazines?

E-Ink: Salvation or Suffering?

As a 30-year-old surrounded by instant news, I am grateful to The Des Moines Register for honest, engaged and thoughtful journalism that still finds its way into the newspaper format every morning. There's nothing quite like opening the paper and having a little ink rub off onto one's hands with every page turn. One can't get that with a smartphone. —Jerry Bertelson, Letter to the Editor, Des Moines Register, 2014³⁸

Although the question of ink rub-off may seem like a historical one, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, discussions about rub-off have persisted. Newspaper publishers continue to employ a variety of publishing technologies and ink mediums, none of which have put to rest the messier aspects of newspaper reading. While some highly visible national newspapers such as the San Francisco Chronicle made the switch to no-rub flexographic printing, many other smaller papers informed readers that they could never afford “the $15 million” it would cost to purchase such a press.³⁹ This variability in printing mechanism—leading to variability in rub-off and therefore variability in reading experience—has created a bifurcation of readers, reading, and reading experiences in which top, financially thriving papers can offer a “clean” read as opposed to the “dirty” read permitted by less endowed institutions.

At the same time, digital newspapers and e-readers have raised a new set of questions about embodied reading and to what extent news should “rub off” on its readers. Nostalgic responses to smudging ink have surfaced that proclaim the benefits of physical newspapers, particularly among journalists and “news junkies” who “prefer the tactile experience” of reading a newspaper.⁴⁰ One 2011 website, identifying a list of “1,000 awesome things,” similarly pointed to “reading an actual newspaper” as a defining experience for readers, where “It was like the newspaper marked you. […] In a way you touched each other, traded molecules, and became one.”⁴¹ This romanticizing of a reader's body leaving its mark on a newspaper and a newspaper leaving its mark on a reader's body speaks to a perceived immateriality of digital news and a longing for physical interconnection between text, ink, and reader. It also pits digital news in opposition to traditionally printed newspapers, portraying ink-smearing newsprint as a relic disconnected from the present moment.

Conclusion

Building from the historical case of ink rub-off and newspapers, it would make little sense to talk of newspapers’ materialities independently from their readers, their producers, the text imprinted on them, or the technologies that affix that text to paper (whether permanent or impermanent). Instead, as the discussion outlined in the introduction indicates, we might think about the ways that differing materialities emerge as an outcome from the quadrants of production, consumption, content, and technology that bring newspapers into being.⁴² The anecdotes provided in the previous sections carve out an initial history of ink rub-off by looking at the social and political negotiations around embodied reading and the extent to which newspapers should “rub off” on their readers. This history also generates interesting and fruitful questions about the present moment and its emphasis on digital news and e-ink. Rather than supporting a binary distinction—printed news is material and digital news is immaterial—we can begin to think about different materialities that emerge at these interfaces. In the past, journalists and readers often disagreed about whether the messiness of newspapers represented a boon or blight. Today, while digital news may seem ephemeral and immaterial in its bytes and pixels, in fact it might be considered more enduring and persistent in that it does not rub off from the screen through reading the way physical ink might. Based on these criteria, printed newspapers might offer a more ephemeral reading experience because the ink leaves its original medium, only to be washed off or wiped away. Thus, to think about materiality and newspapers means to move away from dualities such as digital/analog, material/immaterial, printed/electronic, or highbrow/lowbrow and toward a view of materiality that recognizes fluidity, change, and activity. It also means to acknowledge that history is never separated from the present. Indeed, as Amber Roessner wrote, “The end goal [for historians] should not be to recover the past so much as to forge a living relation among the past, present circumstances, and future prospects.”⁴³ The case of ink rub-off speaks to the need to move away from an isolated, remote view of history that cannot speak to the concerns of today.

Discussions about “materiality”—and its value and place in scholarship—are likely to continue. Journalism historians can and should intervene at the forefront of this dialogue, as questions of historicity, negotiation, culture, continuity, and change already inform their work. They can aid scholars in other disciplines by thinking carefully about materiality not just in moments of “innovation,” but also through longitudinal studies that chart the ways that attitudes sediment, shift, and reappear. At the same time, journalism historians might take a cue from other fields such as communication studies, media studies, and science and technology studies, where scholars have rigorously debated the meanings of “objects,” “things,” “technologies,” and “practices.” These works can help historians to move beyond accounts of journalism that only refer to journalists, to newsrooms, or to newspaper content, and toward journalism histories that embrace complexity and ambiguity.

Notes

These include Lisa Gitelman, “Media, Materiality, and the Measure of the Digital; or, the Case of Sheet Music and the Problem of Piano Rolls,” in Memory Bytes: History, Technology, and Digital Culture, ed. Lauren Rabinovitz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Paul M. Leonardi, “Digital Materiality? How Artifacts without Matter, Matter,” First Monday 15, no. 6 (2010), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3036/2567; Daniel Miller, Materiality (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); and T. J. Pinch and Richard Swedberg, Living in a Material World: Economic Sociology Meets Science and Technology Studies (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).

Jeremy Packer and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley, Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks (New York: Routledge, 2013), 7; Jonathan Sterne, “What Do We Want?” “Materiality!” “When Do We Want It?” “Now!,” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014), 128. Also see Diana H. Coole and Samantha Frost, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

Bruno Latour, “Technology Is Society Made Durable,” in A Sociology of Monsters? Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, Sociological Review Monograph, ed. John Law (London: Routledge, 1991), 103–131.

Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2000); Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 1999).

See, for example, N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Paul Dourish, Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001); Ken Hillis, Digital Sensations Space, Identity, and Embodiment in Virtual Reality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and Anna Munster, Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics (Dartmouth: Dartmouth College Press, University Press of New England, 2006).

Finn Brunton and Gabriella Coleman, “Closer to the Metal,” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski and Kirsten A. Foot (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014), 77.

Mary Gray, quoted in C. W. Anderson and Juliette De Maeyer, “Introduction: Objects of Journalism and the News,” Journalism 16, no. 1 (2015): 3–9, 4.

Packer and Wiley, Communication Matters, 7.

Anderson and De Maeyer, “Introduction,” 6.

Ibid., 4.

Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 6.

Ignacio Siles and Pablo Boczkowski, “At the Intersection of Content and Materiality: A Texto-Material Perspective on the Use of Media Technologies,” Communication Theory 22, no. 3 (2012): 227–249. Also see Sonia Livingstone, “On the Material and the Symbolic: Silverstone's Double Articulation of Research Traditions in New Media Studies,” New Media and Society 9, no. 1 (2007): 16–24.

Pablo J. Boczkowski, “The Material Turn in the Study of Journalism: Some Hopeful and Cautionary Remarks from an Early Explorer,” Journalism 16, no. 1 (2015): 65–68.

Pablo J. Bockzowski and Ignacio Siles, “Steps toward Cosmopolitanism in the Study of Media Technologies: Integrating Scholarship on Production, Consumption, Materiality, and Content,” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014), 53–76.

Lisa Gitelman, “Materiality Has Always Been in Play: An Interview with N. Katherine Hayles,” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 2 (2010), http://www.uiowa.edu/∼ijcs/mediation/hayles.htm.

Ibid.

Sherry Turkle, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007).

Doug Bates, “Seeking Ink Rub-Off Relief,” Eugene (OR) Register-Guard, March 15, 1987.

Eliza Leslie, Miss Leslie's Behavior Book: A Guide and Manual for Ladies as Regards Their Conversation; Manners; Dress; Introductions; Entree to Society; Shopping; Conduct in the Street; at Places of Amusement; in Traveling; at the Table, Either at Home, in Company, or at Hotels; Deportment in Gentlemen's Society; Lips; Complexion; Teeth; Hands, the Hair; Etc., Etc. (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson, 1839).

Bates, “Seeking Ink Rub-Off.”

Albert Scardino, “A New Way to Print News,” New York Times, November 23, 1985.

Carl E. Lindstrom, The Fading American Newspaper (Garden City: Doubleday, 1960), 109.

Jody Powell, “The Real Dirty News: Rub-Off Creates Ink-Stained Wretches,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 30, 1986.

Eleanor Johnson Tracy, “At Last, a Clean Read,” Fortune Magazine, March 17, 1986, accessed September 1, 2014, http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1986/03/17/67261/index.htm.

Shelby Siems, “Newspapers Get on Board with Soybean Oil Inks,” Christian Science Monitor, June 10, 1992, http://www.csmonitor.com/1992/0610/10132.html.

Richard Orr, “Versatile Soybeans May Turn Up in Print,” Chicago Tribune, August 29, 1987.

Scardino, “A New Way to Print,” 35.

Alex S. Jones, “The Media Business; The New Newspaper War: Flexo vs. Offset,” New York Times, July 24, 1989.

Tracy, “At Last, a Clean Read”; “Newest Newspaper Ink Won't Smudge on Fingers,” Spokesman-Review, March 3, 1986; Perry White, “Paper to Clean Up Act; Newer Ink Less Messy,” The Oklahoman, January 20, 1985; and David Climenhaga, “With Smudgeless Ink, You Could Read Your Paper with Your Clothes On,” Globe and Mail, April 16, 1986.

Powell, “The Real Dirty News.”

“All the Ink That's Fit to Print,” Newsweek, December 15, 1991, accessed September 15, 2014, http://www.newsweek.com/all-ink-thats-fit-print-200830.

“Out, Out, Damned Spot!” Time, December 16, 1991, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,974444,00.html; Scardino, “A New Way to Print,” 35.

“All the Ink That's Fit to Print.”

Samuel F. Pickering, May Days (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988), 22.

Al Neuharth, “Can ‘Old’ Newspapers Remain Relevant?,” USA Today, September 14, 2012, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/story/2012-09-13/anniversary-usatoday-al-neuharth/57777972/1.

Powell, “The Real Dirty News.”

Kevin G. Barnhurst, “The Great American Newspaper,” American Scholar 60 (Winter 1991): 106–112, 108.

Jerry Bertelson, “Ah, the Register…,” Des Moines (IA) Register, May 21, 2014, http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/opinion/readers/2014/05/22/instant-news-register/9401421/.

“Complaints and Comments,” Observer-Reporter (Washington, PA), August 13, 2007, http://www.o-ronline.net/weblog/grump/2007/08/complaints-and-comments.html.

Alan Janesch and Nichola Gutgold, “How Will Newspapers Survive in Internet Age?,” Morning Call (Allentown, PA), April 14, 2008, http://articles.mcall.com/2008-04-14/opinion/4049019_1_newspaper-junkies-newspaper-production-online-editions.

“#154 Reading an Actual Newspaper,” 1,000 Awesome Things, September 19, 2011, accessed October 1, 2014, http://1000awesomethings.com/2011/09/19/154-reading-an-actual-newspaper/.

Bockzowski and Siles, “Steps toward Cosmopolitanism,” 53–76.

Amber Roessner, “Revisiting a Cultural Approach to Media History,” American Journalism 30, no. 2 (2013): 263–267, 266.