R. Hoe and Company Records, 1824-1953

R. Hoe and Company, which operated from circa 1805 until 1969, was an American firm of printing machine manufacturers located in the Bronx, New York, whose rotary press became important in the field of newspaper printing. Richard March Hoe (1812-1886) took over the firm in 1833 and was especially interested in experimental and manufacturing phases of the business.

The R. Hoe Company was, for 164 years, one of the country's leading manufacturers of printing presses and similar equipment, and in the nineteenth century in particular there was scarcely any innovation in the printing processes that did not originate from, or at least stand considerable improvement by, the company. In 1969, however, financial troubles forced the plant to close, and some of its business records were rescued in a last-minute raid before the building was demolished.

In 1805 Robert Hoe, a recent emigrant from Leistershire, England, formed a partnership with his brothers-in-law Peter and Matthew Smith to manufacture printing presses under the name Smith, Hoe & Co. At that point, very little progress or improvement in the printing processes had been made since Gutenberg's time. Hoe and the Smiths, however, set to work, and through a combination of their own mechanical ingenuity and their talent for recognizing marketable ideas of others, they developed a number of important improvements. A patent purchased from Samuel Rust was the basis of the Washington Hand Press, a landmark press that utilized a more efficient toggle-joint instead of a platen screw, which was first produced in 1827. In 1832 the company (by now renamed, after the death of both Smith brothers, R. Hoe and Co.) produced the first cylinder press in America, a marked improvement over the European model by Napier.

Richard March Hoe, Robert's son, assumed the presidency of the company on his father's death in 1833, and under his leadership a number of significant changes in the newspaper press were made. There appeared in 1846 the Type Revolving Machine, a forerunner of the modern rotary press, and in 1871 the first web press; but perhaps the flashiest accomplishments of the company were its continual increases in the size of its presses. In 1887 the first quadruple press was marketed, capable of printing 48,000 eight-page papers in one hour. Four years later, Hoe produced a sextuple press that could print 72,000 papers in an hour. Four years after that, the octuple press was developed, which printed sixty-four pages in a single manoeuvre. In 1901 the imaginatively-named double sextuple press was perfected. And in 1907, the company dazzled the industry with a double octuple press.

By the early years of the twentieth century, however, the era of great accomplishments seemed to be waning. The second Robert Hoe, nephew of Richard March and a prominent figure in the elite world of the great book collectors, died in 1909, and from then on the company seemed important more for its large size than its innovativeness. It continued to manufacture presses throughout the twentieth century until 1969, when to the great surprise of most observers, the firm was sued by two stockholders on the grounds that it had issued false financial reports. In July the firm filed for bankruptcy, claiming that its "failure to land new orders in significant volume had left it unable to meet current obligations" and citing its closing market average at 13 ¾ a share, as compared to the year's high of 57 ⅜. In June of 1970 the newspaper and press division was bought by Hood Industries of New Jersey. The plant in the Bronx stood empty for several years before it was demolished.