Ripon's 50th a Time to Reflect -Cagle

"Still, the person in charge of the local printing press must have possessed a type of authority that's difficult for us to grasp today. A printer was the hub, the establisher and keeper of records, the validator of all that was official, authoritative and lasting. The word imprimatur—from the Latin, "let it be printed"—connotes something being correct, proper, approved. The local printer did more than create documents; he created significance. Merely having a press lent importance to a town, and the more printers it had, the more important it was.