The Press: Hoe Under

"If it's a Hoe, it's the best." Not every pressroom foreman agrees with this proud motto of R. Hoe & Co., Inc., maker of presses since 1803. But the company's long history has been replete with startling achievements. The many presses it has sold make Hoe as synonymous for press as Gillette is for razor, Baldwin for locomotive, Colt for pistol. It was news last week when old R. Hoe & Co. bowed to the inevitable and passed into a receivership. Company officials blamed the decline in newspaper lineage, the fact that publishers are using their old presses to the limit, that "machinery is the last thing people buy in hard times." Yet publishers guessed that competition was also a cause for Hoe's plight, for the company has earned money on its common stock in only three of the past eight years.

The Hoe business dates from 1803 although the company as a corporation is much younger. In 1803 one Robert Hoe, fresh from England, began making wooden hand presses in Manhattan. The company made the first flatbed and cylinder presses in the U. S. and in 1861 built the first curved stereotype-making machinery for the New York Tribune. Ten years later it built for the same paper a stereotype rotary press which had a run of 18,000 eight-page papers an hour. Four years later it built for James Gordon Bennett's Herald a four-page wide supplement press with a run of 24,000 12-page papers per hour. In 1893 it made the first rotary colored press (for the New York World and Herald) and two years later it made the first octuple (64-page) newspaper press. In 1899 it introduced "Late News" devices; used chiefly for baseball scores at first. Soon after Arthur Brisbane became editor of the New York Journal, Hoe made a colored press for that paper which was the largest printing press ever built. In 1908 the perfection of a high-speed folder enabled it to enter the modern "high-speed era" in printing. At present the Philadelphia Bulletin has the largest individual plant using Hoe equipment (128 units) while the Chicago News has the largest Super-Production Press Hoe has yet installed. Several of the Hearst papers use big 24-cylinder Hoe presses. After 1927 Hoe stopped giving its sales figures. That year it produced 218$ new newspaper and magazine presses and 62 used ones, 425 small presses. Pride of the Hoe line is the Super-Production Press (1928) which can turn out 56,000 48-pagers hourly. Incidental to its main business, Hoe makes circular saws and during the War made guns for the Navy.