An exhibit without a rival is unique. It means there is nothing
like it, and the visitor who does not see it, misses a distinct
feature of the Exposition. Visitors to the Graphic Arts Building find such an
exhibit before them, as they enter from the esplanade. It is of both industrial
importance and artistic beauty. They see the name, The J. N. Matthews Company,
whose offices are in the Madison Square Tower in New York and the Matthews Building
in Buffalo, with a great plant in the city of the Exposition. The space occupied
is triangular, with a setting, memorably original, of Flemish furnishings in
black and flame-red, enclosed by heavy red ropings. On carved tables and desks
are hundreds of creations of the company's handiwork, exquisite examples of
the printer's progress in the graphic arts.
A column in the centre serves as the support for a mammoth
book, eight feet high, five feet wide and two feet thick, bound in red and gray,
and inscribed "The J. N. Matthews Company - The Complete Press- The Buffalo
Express: The Matthews Northrup Works." It is a miniature volume of the
achievements of the company. It contains triumphs of artistic workmanship; not
specially selected success, but everyday, general work showing that excellence
is not an exceptional rarity, but a universal characteristic. Pages show the
Buffalo Morning Express daily and Sunday, with its illustrated supplement, a
newspaper that tells the truth and prints the news as the world makes it. The
Matthews-Northrup Works have filled the other pages with creations of all varieties,
from the elaborately ornate in many colors, to models of simplicity in black
and white or gray and gold. There are maps of continents, countries and cities.
Great railroads and steamship lines, coming to where the maps are made to have
their printing done, show the maps of their lines, the stories of their work,
the pictures of their property, the souvenirs of their success, all made by
the Matthews-Northrup Works. Captains of industry, raisers of cattle, makers
of machinery, builders, creators, producers, financial and commercial institutions
have had the Matthews-Northrup Works portray what they desire the world to know.
The prominence of these patrons and the magnitude and success of their enterprises
are proof of merit and superiority, for they go where they get the best. They
want character in their printing. The J. N. Matthews Company is an organization
of the best workmen in the various lines of graphic arts. It has its own staff
of artists, its own corps of photographers, its own group of writers, its own
engravers, its own map makers, its own binders and printers and workers from
the highest specialty to the least details. It makes an art-folder of two pages
with the same care and skill manifest in its great volumes of 800 pages and
myriad maps. There is no section of the earth it has not mapped, there is nothing
picturable it cannot show, there is nothing to be described it cannot tell.
This is the essence of the graphic arts. This is the secret of its success. |
