Open Writing

I have always wanted to be a printer because then I would be assured that my words, worthy or not, would get into print. My first foray into writing, if you discount English Composition, one of my favourite school subjects, was as the Assistant Editor of "The Pickwick Papers," edited by Walter Fox, one of my classmates at Spring Grove School. The "Papers" ran to one issue and that one took so long to get out that a lost animal advertised on the front page had arrived back home on the fourth and last page. The issue not only ran to a single issue, but what we professionals call the ‘Print Run" stood at one. Printing by pen and ink is labour intensive and we had neither the training nor the vocation of our forerunner on Holy Island.

Despite the disappointments of the Pickwick Papers, printing continued to fascinate me. It could not have been long after Walter and I dissolved our literary partnership that I was introduced to the joys of the hectograph. That was in a time when you could walk into a chemist’s shop and buy potassium nitrate, magnesium ribbon, iron filings, isinglass, sulphuric acid, flowers of sulphur, potassium cyanide, and hectograph jelly.

The hectograph was a wooden frame in which a special jelly was set as a flat bed. The original document had to be written with special hectograph ink, which was then placed face down on the jelly and rolled with a rubber roller. Subsequent blank papers placed on the jelly and rolled over with the rubber tool received a copy of the original in hideous purple ink. Nevertheless, it worked!

The major problem with the hectograph was the awful mess attendant on its use. Hectographers were instantly recognisable from the permanent purple patches on their hands, clothes, and faces, and their work areas can only be described as purple patches, even when their final products were not.

My attention wandered from jelly printing to a novelty called "The John Bull Printing Outfit." I imagine that few manufactures today would label their products an "Outfit," but those were different days, and the temper of the times was not so easily ruffled by inelegance in the service of accuracy.

The John Bull printing sets were wooden galleries into which rubber moveable type was set with a pair of tin tweezers, and then the type’s face was stamped onto an ink pad for a wetting with purply-blue ink before being applied to whatever goods or papers the printer wished to mark. There is no mistaking printwork done by this means. I suppose on balance John Bull was just ahead of the hectograph but oddly enough, I had no desire to own one.

The next higher step for the aspiring printer was the hand-cranked duplicator. A stencil made from extremely fibrous material was ‘cut,’ either on a typewriter whose ribbon had been removed, or with a stylus that left an impression that permitted the thick black ink to pass through and onto the blank printing paper. With skill, the operator could avoid soaking his person, clothes, and environment, but the ink came in huge lead tubes and had to be squeezed out into the machinery, and then spread to make an even film that would be pressed through the stencil web to leave its impression.

I had a hand-cranked duplicator at one time, and it served me well. When my business failed, the company willingly took it back. There came electrically driven duplicators that produced thousands of copies an hour, but the capital cost was prohibitive.

Probably the most efficient and professional printing machine to be available to the amateur was the Adana. This was a miniature table model that had the most important features of massive commercial machines. With an Adana, and some good business sense, a person could make a significant addition to ordinary wages, and because the operating costs were so low, many local clubs and dance halls benefited from knowing someone with an Adana printer. Although I would have dearly liked one, I never had one.

Dymo Labelmakers were not really printing, although they were useful tools in the right circumstances. When I needed a label, I used a mapping pen, Indian ink, and self-adhesive labels.

I once looked through the open door of the Huddersfield Examiner printing press room when it was down Victoria Lane. I saw what looked like the engine room of the Queen Mary. Massive cast iron machines with acres of paper shooting through its innards at what seemed intergalactic speed. "Now that’s a printer!" I told myself.

I finally caught up with printers when I got my first computer. It was slow, sluggish, unfriendly, and produced poor quality documents. Four printers later, I have a near-laser printer whose output quality would please the most fastidious of printer’s devils and ink imps. I make invitations, programmes, business cards, photographs, greeting cards, pamphlets, brochures, and books.

My current ‘one-machine-does-everything’ printer is a miracle of technology, and a fitting reward for a wannabe printer from way back, that illustrates what schoolteacher Charles Brummit told me one fine day in the third form of nineteen forty-eight: "All things come to those who wait." This could be a good time for Walter Fox and me to think about the second issue of the "Pickwick Papers." We could do it. We have the technology!

Copyright © 2006 Ronnie Bray

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED