Nathaniel Brewster Faulkner was born in 1782 in Wilmington, on the Brandywine, the elder son of a blacksmith and a shopkeeper, and he worked for twenty-five years as a printer in the canal towns and iron country of Pennsylvania. He never married, had no children and was not a hunter, though his younger brother Jacob Brewster Faulkner was a vampire slayer of the Red Ledger and his father's forge made more silver bullets than anyone in the county realised. He died in 1827, aged forty-five, in a fall from a horse, and it fell to his brother to sort the papers in his shop, which were, to everyone's surprise, a complete index of the Faulkner family's western correspondence.
His father, Joseph Faulkner, born in 1754 and dead in 1830, was a blacksmith of the Brandywine mills, a thickset man with forearms scarred by sparks who made nails, hinges, mill fittings and, in the evenings, more delicate things. His mother, Phebe Brewster, born in 1749 and dead in 1798, kept a shop on the main street of Wilmington that sold cloth, tea, sugar, buttons and needles, and whose back room served, in the family's understanding, as a message post for the Red Ledger's Delaware cousins. She was a few years older than her husband, a shrewd woman with a good head for money and a good eye for a stranger. Nathaniel was the first child. His brother Jacob was born a year after him, in 1783, and the two grew up as close companions in a household of anvils and account books.
The Wilmington of the 1780s was a Quaker mill town rising from the ruins of the war. The Brandywine's flour mills, which had supplied Washington's army, were running at full stretch, and ships from the Delaware carried their flour to the West Indies. The streets were filling with new brick houses, the Friends' meeting house on Fourth Street was the centre of the town's moral life, and a young man who wanted to get on could find a place. Nathaniel's parents had ambitions for him. His father wanted him to take over the forge, and his mother wanted him to be a clerk, but he wanted neither. At eleven he discovered the print shop on Market Street, and from that day he could not be kept away.
He was apprenticed at thirteen to a printer of the Delaware Gazette, and he learned the trade in the fashion of the day. He learned to set type from a case, to justify a line, to lock up a forme, to ink with the leather balls and to work the wooden press. He learned, too, the odd intimacy of the printer's life, in which a man handles every word that passes through the town, the notices, the advertisements, the sermons, the lottery tickets, the election broadsides, and forgets most of it by morning. By eighteen he was a journeyman, and by twenty-two he had set up for himself, in a small shop in Lancaster, in the heart of the canal and iron country, where a new turnpike and a new canal were bringing business faster than the town's two presses could handle.
He was a dry, private, bespectacled young man with a precise manner and a dislike of fuss, and he made an excellent printer. His work was clean, correct and handsome, with well-spaced lines and margins that were just right. He printed almanacs, hymn books, bills of lading, advertisements for the ironworks, proclamations for the county and handbills for the canal company. Among the ironmasters and canal men he had a reputation for reliability, and they sent him work from as far away as Harrisburg and Reading.
He also became, without much fuss, the Faulkner family's printer in the west. His cousin Jacob Eaton Faulkner, a printer in Salem, had run off the first small editions of the family's private papers, and Nathaniel took up the tradition in Pennsylvania. He printed the Red Ledger's indexes and the copies of its rules, in tiny editions of a dozen, for the use of the family's Pennsylvania and Ohio branches, always at night and always without a title page. His brother Jacob, who came through Lancaster now and then, acted as courier. Nathaniel kept a correspondence file, tied with tape in a japanned box, in which each letter from a Faulkner cousin was docketed with the date, the place and a short description of its content, and he kept a running index in a notebook. It was the most complete record of the family's western dispersal that anyone had made, and it was found in his shop after his death.
He never married. The reasons are not recorded, though his brother remarked that he had been disappointed early and recovered slowly. He lived above the print shop, took his meals at a boarding house across the street, walked for an hour every evening along the canal towpath and read widely, especially the Latin poets, whom he had taught himself out of a borrowed grammar. His brother Jacob visited when he could. His father came to see him once a year, bringing a parcel of nails and a bottle of his own cider.
He was in his forties when his father's health began to fail, and he travelled more often to Wilmington, a day's ride each way. In the autumn of 1827, on the road back from one such visit, his horse shied at a cart on a wet bank and threw him onto the stones. He died two days later, at forty-five. His father, then seventy-three, came to Lancaster to bury him and to sort the shop. The index was sent to Jacob, who added to it for years.
A few particulars of the shop survive in the family's memory. He kept a cat named Caxton, after the first English printer, who slept on the warm stone of the press and was said to have a professional opinion about margins. He never allowed a sheet with an error to leave the shop, and his wastepaper basket, which his apprentices emptied every Friday, was usually the fullest in town. His dry sayings were collected by a cousin and written on the flyleaf of a hymnal, where they still stand, among them the remark that a good printer is one whose work nobody notices, and a bad one is one whose work nobody forgets.
Nathaniel Brewster Faulkner is remembered in the family as the printer of Lancaster, the man who kept the western letters in order. In the Slayerverse he is honoured for a service that seems small until one tries to do without it: the plain, accurate keeping of a family's records, long before anyone thought of them as history.
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