This Week with Frank Romano

[Music Introduction]

Frank Romano:  Hi, this is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  I’m here at the Museum of Printing and I’d like to talk to you about the wooden press.  Why?  Well, why not?

[Music and Photo with Caption:  I wax philosophic.]

Gutenberg’s press was completely made out of wood.  You had a screw mechanism here that was created by a wood joiner.  Within about 50 years of that invention, you start to see some metal parts coming into the press and after 1700, there are large parts of the device that are made out of metal, but it’s still primarily wood.  After 1801, Lord Stanhope in England creates the first all metal press and they stay that way until the metal printing press yields to new technology, such as offset lithography.

This press is actually a model of the one at Williamsburg.  They took all the dimensions of it, they created an exact model in 1945.  It was acquired by Gary Gregory, who is the person who plays Ben Franklin in Boston, Massachusetts, his company is called Lessons In Liberty.  And when he brought it to the museum, it was all in pieces and of course there’s no manual on how to put it together.  Well, there is!  In 1682, Joseph Moxon in England wrote a series of books called Mechanick Exercises.

[Music and Photo with Caption:  I stood in line for the first edition.]

And in there, he documented various crafts, which was a great thing to have.  And it had actual details on how to put this press together, including how to tie this string that tied, that connected some parts of it together.  So it was a very interesting exercise to follow this 1682 manual in terms of assembling this device.

It is authentic in terms of every aspect.  It operates the same way every other common press would operate, and that is, you would have two operators, usually one who is positioning the paper and inking, they would do their inking with things called ink balls, where they would use horsehair and leather, or cotton and leather, and then impregnate it with ink and then use that to ink the type.  The paper usually was dampened to some extent, but didn’t have to be that way.  Instead of using metal points, of course they didn’t have them, so they used wooden wedges, that’s how they locked all their type up.

Now, Gutenberg’s press was only a one-page press, so he could print one page at a time.  Within 20 or 30 years, they discovered they could make the press bed bigger, but what they to do was essentially do two pulls.  And that is, they would move the platen in halfway, print one page, and then move it the rest of the way and print the second page.  But they got much more efficiency because it was essentially one “make ready” if you want to think of it that way and that gave them more productivity. 

I printed on a press from that period of time at the Platen Mauritius Museum a few years ago and they actually had to have these metal bars tied to the ceiling because the wooden presses, because of the pulls and the pressure that you were exerting, would actually sort of creep across the floor as they vibrated with printing.

[Music and Photo with Caption:  My chaise lounge does that sometimes.]

There are only two wooden presses in American that may have been touched by Ben Franklin.  One is in Newport, Rhode Island, it’s the press of his brother, James, and of course, Ben Franklin worked for his brother, James.  And the other one is in the Smithsonian, but it’s not on display, and it’s the one that supposedly he worked on when he was in England at a printing company there in his youth.  Many years later, somebody bought that press, shipped it to the US and somehow it got acquired by the Smithsonian.  Those are the only two.  There are about seven wooden presses in America, most of them tend to be in New England.  One of the oldest is the Stephen Day press, which is in Montpelier, Vermont, at their Historical Society Pavilion, which Stephen Day was the first printer.  He came here in 1680, I think it was, with Jose Glover, who was a reverend, Reverend Glover died on the ship and Stephen Day took over and set up the press at Harvard University.  Well, Harvard College in those days.  That press then got moved around a few times as it changed hands and wound up in Vermont.

There are a few wooden presses that you can see, for instance, at some newspapers, the Hartford Courant has one that usually is on display.  They’re very rare.  We actually print on this press, in fact, we run some workshops on how to print on a wooden press, not that you’ll ever find one, but some people find it interesting to print on something this antiquated.  But by the way—it still works.  Wooden presses and metal presses still work, they only require human energy, they don’t require electricity or any kind of technology, if you will.

In any case, from here at the Museum of Printing, with a wooden press, take care 

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[Caption:  Next time…]

…was a film positive.  Now, what everybody really wanted was a film negative.

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