Page 58 - Print21 November-December 2022

At Large
Preserving
a passion for print
Printing is moving further away from its craft-based origins with
every step into the digital universe. For four hundred years printing remained largely unchanged using letterpress technology. Then came lithography, closely followed by digital. Now it’s difficult to find a commercial letterpress printer. It seems like a total technology wipe out, but passion for the letterpress craft remains, and is sustained by dedicated enthusiasts like those who maintain the Penrith Museum of Printing. Patrick Howard joined an LIA tour of the endangered facility.
Fonts: The Museum has an impressive collection of handset type and Ludlow fonts as well as antique display type.
used to be called ‘the black art’. All retired industry professionals, they not only
know the history of printing, but can also operate the line up of letterpress presses and Linotype machines that survive in the building on the Penrith Paceway. It’s a living museum, able to produce printed pages the same way they’ve been done for centuries.
Bob Lockley has a fine line in shtick when he presents to groups at the Penrith Museum of Printing. A natural showman, the former head
honcho of Fairfax Printing, entertains visitors to the Museum with an introduction to the origins of letterpress printing. He demonstrates one of the antique letterpress presses, before introducing his latest invention, the NPad. This marvellous invention, he tells the audience, is able
to record and store information, doesn’t require power, never needs rebooting, cannot be hacked, can be used portrait or landscape, in colour or black and white, and when you want to erase an entry, you simply tear out the page.
He’s holding up a small notebook, a tribute to the power of writing on paper. Cute.
It’s just one example of the light-hearted presentations that greet visitors at the Printing Museum. The four volunteers who entertained and educated an LIA tour that visited in October – Lockley, Stefan Peters, John Berry and Wal Sadlo – almost perform like a vaudeville troupe, poking fun at one another and leavening the information with laughter and fun. It’s a good act that entertains as well as informs.
It masks the fact that the presenters are deeply versed in the mysteries of what
“The term linotype was coined to describe the ambition to set lines of type rather than single words.”
LIA: Ironically, the Lithographic Institute
of Australia (LIA) is representative of offset printing, the technology that led to the demise of commercial letterpress, which the Penrith Museum of Printing preserves. There were no hard feelings on the night.
From Gutenberg to
Heidelberg
Visitors are taken on a journey from the invention of moveable type and the early letterpress invented by Jonas Gutenberg
in the 15th century to the arrival of the Heidelberg platen in the 1930s. According to Lockley, printing technology remained unchanged for 400 years. He demonstrates how early handset letterpress type was composed into formes using wooden fonts, before moving on to metal and Ludlow fonts. The museum has an extensive collection of all types of these fonts, that were the backbone of printing for centuries. Then, in the 19th century, the Linotype was invented.
John Berry is a skilled linotype operator, replete with knowledge of how and why the invention superseded letterpress handset type. He explains how the term linotype was coined to describe the ambition to set lines of type, rather than single words. Composing on a specialised keyboard, the machine used molten metal to create the lines of type, or slugs, that were delivered to the compositors to place into page formes, or frames. When the pages were printed the metal was melted back into the pot to be recycled and reused.
At the height of the machine’s popularity,
58 Print21 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2022