Jacob Eaton Faulkner

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

Jacob Eaton Faulkner was born in 1777 in Salem Town, Massachusetts, the son of two vampire slayers of the Red Ledger, and he chose, against every expectation of his household, to become a printer. He spent forty years setting type, pulling proofs and binding pamphlets in the mill towns and harbours of New England, never married, left no children, and died in 1823 at the age of forty-six in an outbreak of what the Salem papers called the plague. He is remembered in the Faulkner family as the man who printed the family's private book of remembrance and who, in a household of hunters, kept the records straight. His father was Ebenezer Whittier Faulkner, born in 1749 and dead in 1814, a carpenter by day and, in the language of the Ledger, The Steady Lamp, a slayer whose patient night watches were entered year after year in the same unhurried hand. His mother was Betsey Eaton, born in 1752 and dead in 1801, a dairywoman who, as the Ledger says, was The Gentle Bell: she carried a cow bell on her belt on her night rounds, for reasons that her husband said were a joke and she said were not. Jacob's younger sister, Mary Eaton Faulkner, was born in 1781 and became a hunter herself. The household in which the two children grew up was a busy, crowded, slightly chaotic one, with a carpenter's shop at the front, a dairy at the back and a pistol on a high shelf in the kitchen. Salem in the late 1770s was a port at war. Its ships were privateers, its wharves were loud with prize cargoes, and its newspaper, the Salem Gazette, had been running its presses through the whole of the Revolution. Jacob was a boy of four when the British surrendered at Yorktown and eight when the peace was signed, and what he remembered was less the fighting than the printed news, the broadsides nailed to doors, the notices of ships taken and lost, and the smell of the printing house on Essex Street, which drew him like a magnet. He was apprenticed, at fourteen, to a printer there. Printing in the 1790s was a craft of patience and muscle. The compositor stood at a case of lead type, picking out each letter by hand from its compartment, setting it backwards and upside down in a composing stick, and justifying each line with thin spaces. A page of text took hours to set. The forme, a frame of locked type, was carried to a hand press, inked with leather balls, covered with a sheet of damp paper and pressed down with a heavy screw. A good pressman could pull two hundred sheets an hour. Jacob was a compositor of the first rank, fast, exact and almost never guilty of a misprint, and he was proud of a particular rule of the trade: a printer should print what he was given and keep his opinions to himself. That discretion made him valuable to his family. In the summer of 1798 his mother asked him to print a small book for the Faulkner household, a book of remembrance in which the names and dates of the dead, and a few notes on their work, would be kept in a durable form. He set it in a plain, handsome roman face, on good paper, in an edition of twelve copies, and he bound it himself in sheepskin. It was the first of a series. Over the next twenty-five years he printed, always in small runs and always without a title page, a number of family papers: a table of the Faulkner lines, a little manual on the use of silver shot, an index of the Ledger's entries, and a pamphlet of rules for the writing of reports. Only a few copies survive, and each is prized. His trade also carried him around New England. The decades of his working life saw the rise of the mill towns, the spread of the country newspaper and the flowering of the printing trade in places like Newburyport, Worcester, Northampton and Hartford. He worked in a dozen shops, and in each he kept his ears open. Printers heard everything, because every notice, every advertisement and every sermon came through their hands, and a man who set type for the weekly paper knew when a stranger had been seen in the parish, when a cow had been found dead in an odd way, when a family had left in the night. More than once he wrote to a Faulkner cousin to say that a particular paragraph in a local paper was worth a look. One of the reported cases, in 1811, is the only entry in the Ledger that is credited to a printer's tip. He never married. His nieces and nephews in the wider family remembered him as a tall, narrow, ink-stained bachelor with a squint from years at the type case, who brought them a sheet of the alphabet in woodcut capitals and a twist of sugar. His own mother, who died in 1801, had hoped to see him settled; his father, who died in 1814, had joked that he was married to the press. He lived in a room over a shop in Salem when he was in town and in lodgings elsewhere when he was not, and he owned fewer things than any man in the family, apart from a chest of type. The War of 1812 closed the ports and gave him a good deal of work printing handbills for the privateers and the militia. The sickness came in the late summer of 1823. It was called the plague by the newspapers, who used the word freely for any fever that spread through the wharf district, and it killed a hundred people in Salem in six weeks. Jacob, who was working a printing shop on Derby Street, caught it in September and died within the week, aged forty-six. His sister Mary nursed him. He was buried in the Charter Street burying ground, and the printers of the town closed their shops for a morning. Jacob Eaton Faulkner is remembered in the Faulkner line as the printer of the family's records, the quiet man who turned a hunting household's scraps into books. In the Slayerverse he represents the literate, careful side of the Red Ledger, in which a good compositor could be as useful to a family's survival as a good shot.