Before Rubber made the city, Akronite Paul E. Werner was making a name for himself in the printing/publishing business. In 1886 he began building the Werner Printing and Lithograph Co. which, for a time, was the nation’s largest book publishing company. Rapid changes to international copyright laws in the early 1900s swept Werner’s company into a series of lawsuits by Encyclopedia Britannica. Werner won nearly every suit, but the cost of fighting these legal battles forced his company into bankruptcy and ultimately destroyed nearly everything Werner had built.
