Page 10 - Print 21 Magazine Sep-Oct 2021

Leading Article
Learning from history
It may be overstating the obvious, but being an editor at large in a pandemic lockdown presents certain difficulties. Unable to travel, to visit printing facilities, to see new presses come on stream, to meet with industry professionals, all contribute to problems in performing the role. It highlights how important it is to do what you can; to seize the day, while you may.
The Penrith Printing Museum has been on my ‘must visit’ list of industry sites for a couple of years, shamefully avoided for many reasons, always put
offin avourofdoingsomethingelse.Nowit’s out of reach for the foreseeable future. I note the good guys, and gals there – too many to single out any one individual for naming – are celebrating 20 years of existence. It’s a noble volunteer enterprise that deserves support, especially now when visitors must be few and far between.
Preserving printing technology, old presses, linotype machines, letterpress typefaces, platen die cutters and the like strikes me as a worthwhile, if quixotic pursuit. It calls into question the role of history, of what’s gone before, and how much it matters in a technology-driven, future-facing industry such as printing.
Printers are facing crucial investment decisions to deal with changing markets.
They must choose between serious alternative technologies when they decide to stay in the game. Off et versus digital, and then within digital - inkjet, toner or HP Indigo?
How does history help in making such a choice? Last time there was such a defin tive alternative was the arrival and eventual triumph of off et over letterpress in mid-
20th century. Anyone who tried to stay with letterpress was on a hiding to nothing. Off et became the dominant printing method right up to the 1990s when digital began staking its claim as a viable alternative.
Death exaggerated
Since then, the death of off et printing has been exaggerated. While the major press manufacturers – Heidelberg, KBA, MAN Roland and Komori – are nowhere near as powerful or as profitable as they were even 20 years ago, they still enable a technology that produces the vast majority of all commercial printing, as well as a growing amount of packaging. (Flexography and Gravure, the other two printing methods, serve specialist markets.) Presses still wear out and are replaced by printers who are making the call that off et is still the most appropriate printing method. These printers rely on reading the market, knowing their own business, and playing to strengths
built up over years of experience. They have obviously considered moving to a digital alternative and decided against it.
However, if there is anything to be learned from history it’s the imperative of change. We live in a computer age where everything we do
is enabled by the microchip. It’s a total digital landscape where all machinery, including
off et presses, is controlled by computers.
It seems inevitable to me that inkjet will become the dominant means of putting marks on paper, as well as everything else. That’s not to denigrate off et printing, which is still the benchmark of quality
and productivity – and it has never been developed to such a superior level as now.
But it seems as though we’re living through the end of an era, where a new landscape is emerging through the mists of the future. Inkjet printing can only get better. It’s a relatively simple technology, and can print on anything; it’s the printing technology of the future.
My understanding is that new technologies never completely replace old ones; there are always some pockets where practicalityorenthusiasmcontinuestofi d a place for the older methods.
Why, there are even some letterpress printers still around . Not many it’s true, but it’s a craft that will not disappear. Just ask the Penrith Museum of Printing. 21
Patrick Howard
— Editor-at-large
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