Gideon Hale Faulkner

Member of the Faulkner (Lancastrian) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Gideon Hale Faulkner was born in 1787 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and worked for forty years as a printer in the towns of the Massachusetts coast. He married the schoolteacher Hannah Dunlap in 1812, raised two children, Cora and Lewis, and outlived his wife by thirteen years, dying in 1849 at the age of sixty-two after a last illness. He was not a hunter. His elder sister was the midwife and vampire slayer Sally Faulkner Hale, and his son Lewis followed her into the work, but Gideon stayed at his press and held that his business was to print what was true, which in his family was a more dangerous undertaking than it sounds. His father, William Hale, was born in 1759 and died in 1799, a carpenter of the Connecticut valley who was killed in a fall from a meeting house scaffold at Hadley when Gideon was twelve. His mother, Polly Faulkner, born in 1757 and dead in 1805, was a dairywoman and the source of the Faulkner name in the household. The family had moved from Northampton, where Sally was born, to Worcester in the mid-1780s, following work, and Gideon, the youngest child, was born in a rented house on the Boston road above the town. He had one sibling. Sally was four years older, dark-eyed, long-legged and sure of herself, and she took charge of him from the first. Worcester in the late 1780s was the shire town of a hill country in ferment. The county's farmers were in debt, the courts were in the hands of the lawyers, and a few months before Gideon's birth an insurrection of the western Massachusetts farmers, led by the veteran Daniel Shays, had shut down the courts at Worcester, Springfield and Northampton before it was put down. The town was full of newspapers, broadsides and pamphlets on the subject, and it was in this loud, argumentative atmosphere that the boy grew up. The town's leading printer, Isaiah Thomas, ran one of the largest presses in the country from a shop on Main Street, and the sound of it, a regular thump and rattle, carried down the road. Gideon said that he learned to read from the signboards and the handbills, and that he never afterwards lost the conviction that a thing printed was a thing to be taken seriously. His father's death in 1799 left the family poor. Sally, then sixteen and already an apprentice midwife, went out to work, and Gideon, at twelve, was apprenticed to a printer in Worcester, in the trade that had been calling to him. The apprenticeship was a rigorous one. For seven years he served his master, sweeping the shop, inking the forms, carrying paper and wetting it down, and learning, slowly, to set type. A young compositor had to read upside down and backwards, to spell correctly and to keep his hands steady, and he had to work fast. Gideon was a neat, quick, determined boy with very black eyebrows, and by sixteen he was setting two pages a day. By twenty he was a journeyman, and he travelled to Boston and Salem looking for better work. He found it at a printing house in Salem, where he set the type for the port's newspaper, the almanacs and the schoolbooks of the North Shore. It was there, in 1811, that he met Hannah Dunlap, a schoolteacher six years older than he was, who was taking delivery of a box of primers and corrected a misprint in the title page before she signed for them. He was twenty-four and unused to being corrected. He asked her, stiffly, whether she was always right, and she said that she was right when it was about spelling. They were married in 1812, in the same week that the United States declared war on Britain. Their daughter Cora Faulkner was born in 1813 and lived until 1868, a schoolteacher like her mother. Their son Lewis Faulkner was born in 1814 and lived until 1894, and was called to the work as a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger, a long-lived and methodical hunter who took his first vampire in his early twenties. Gideon raised them in a house on the green at Newbury, near the school where Hannah taught, and he commuted to his press in Newburyport by a coach that left at six and returned at eight. The household was full of paper, chalk and argument. As a printer, he was at the centre of the family's written record, though this was not the work for which he was best known in the town. His trade was the printing of handbills, tickets, sermons, almanacs and the weekly notices of the Newburyport market, and he did it well. The Faulkner connection was a secondary commission, taken on at night. His cousin Jacob Eaton Faulkner had printed the family's private books in Salem, and after Jacob's death in 1823 the task passed to Gideon and to another cousin, Nathaniel Brewster Faulkner, in Pennsylvania. Gideon printed the Red Ledger's indexes, its hunters' rules and the small pamphlets that went from hand to hand among the coastal cousins, always in editions of a dozen, always without a title page, and always on the best paper he could find. He had a flair for getting a hard thing said plainly. When his wife died in 1836, in an outbreak of fever, he set the notice in type himself, at night, in his own shop, and printed a hundred copies. It ran to eleven lines, and it was said by the Newbury clergy to be the best thing of its kind they had seen. He did not remarry. He went on printing, and in his sixties, when his eyes began to fail, he took on a young apprentice who turned out to be the best compositor he had ever trained. He died in 1849, at sixty-two, of an illness that kept him in bed for most of the winter. His son Lewis, who was thirty-five and already an established hunter, came home to sit with him. The last piece of work he did, three days before the end, was to correct the proofs of a small book of his sister Sally's notes on the art of reading a quarry, which he said was the only thing in his life that he had ever wanted to print twice. Gideon Hale Faulkner is remembered as the printer of Newbury, the man who put the family's knowledge into type. In the Slayerverse he stands for the trade that gave the Red Ledger its literate side, in which a good compositor's patience was as necessary as a hunter's.