Old Believer Printing House of D. D. and I. D. Krupin in Moscow

Abstract

The article is devoted to the attribution of publications from the “Christian Old Believer printing house in Moscow”, which operated in the early 20th century. Based on a comprehensive analysis of decorative elements, type materials, and documentary sources, the author establishes the printing house’s affiliation with the Krupin family. The starting point for this conclusion was the publication of “The Verse of a Hermit Christian” (1912/1913), on the cover of which an advertisement for the book warehouse of Ivan Dmitrievich Krupin was given. Studying the corpus of books sold from this warehouse made it possible to identify consistent features of the printing house’s output. Additionally, archival files (of the Central State Archive of Moscow, and Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts), as well as data from the “All Moscow” Reference Book, and previous research on the history of Old Believer book printing were used.

As a result of the research, a hypothesis is put forward and substantiated that the orga­nizer of the printing house was not I. D. Krupin, as previously assumed, but his father Dmitry Dmitrievich Krupin, who had experience in illegal book printing since the late 1880s to 1902 and likely recovered previously confiscated equipment in 1909. After D. D. Krupin’s death (ca. 1912), his son Ivan Dmitrievich continued the business. Special attention is paid to the attributing features of the publications. It is no­ted that the decorative elements of the Krupin Printing House mostly copy the ornamentation of the Ovchinnikov Printing Houses, which is characteristic of many Old Believer typographies of that time; therefore, the main identifying feature should be not so much the ornamentation as the typefaces. Two varieties of the Krupin typeface are distinguished (1910–1913 and 1915–1917). The article includes tables with type samples and illustrations of original printing plates. Clarifications are made to the dating of collections of spiritual verses previously proposed by L. A. Petrova. The observations made allow for a more accurate attribution of defective copies of publications and lay the foundation for a future catalog of typefaces and ornamentation of Old Believer printing houses.