This series of 14 articles was written by Edward Gallaway, aka S. W. Erdnase. It is a compact but thorough introduction to estimating for printers. For many years, Gallaway taught estimating to printers at the then largest privately held printing company, R. R. Donnelley. He was an instructor in their apprentice school and was at the same time the chief estimator of the company. He would later found his own School for Print Estimating in Chicago, the only such school solely dedicated to teaching this subject. He wrote the textbook for his school Estimating for Printers as well as other works on how to accurately price print jobs. This series of articles is likely modeled after the actual classes Gallaway held in his school.
The series appeared in The Printing Industry trade journal from January 1930 to May 1931. Part of the articles appeared posthumously. Edward Gallaway died May 1930. Included in the fifth installment is a short bio and photo of Edward Gallaway.
One of the remarkable elements of this series is Gallaway's incredible ability with words. Not only is his writing pedagogically and technically sound and clear, but the lectures are delivered with a linguist flourish rarely found in technical texts. Would you expect to find expressions such as "epistolary erudition", "solemnly asseverates", "bring their grist to his mill", "emanated from the phantasmagorical imagination", or "qualify as a contortonist with Ringling Brothers' greatest show on earth"? Hardly! The linguistic style mirrors the only known writing under his S. W. Erdnase pseudonym in The Expert at the Card Table.
1st edition 1930, PDF 60 pages.
word count: 18794 which is equivalent to 75 standard pages of text