This Week - with Frank Romano

Hi.  This is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  We're going north in New Hampshire.  Right now we're going through Franconia Notch, the White Mountains.  We're heading for Britain Woods, the site of the 1944 conference that resulted in the foundation for the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and various trade agreements.  Why are we going there?  Well you'll find out in a little while.

And here we are approaching the iconic Mount Washington Hotel, the site of that historic 1944 meeting.

Well here we are.  We're at the print shop for the Mount Washington Hotel.  It closed in 1999 but everything was left just the way it was at that time.  First of all, the first thing you see when you come in there's a golding press.  Right in front of it is a stone.  On the stone you have some locked up type that's been tied with a string.  You can see that there's a chase that's left, there's a composing stick, some spare solvent.  The chase probably has one of the last things that they printed.

Now this press is run from electricity.  So you can see it is has a power unit on it.  This is a golding press and it has an automatic inker and you can see up there we think that might be the turbine that actually creates the electricity but we're not certain.  But the most interesting here in this shop is this set of belts and the way it works is you turn on the water and the water then drives that wheel, that wheel then drives those wheels, then this belt transmits that energy down over here and what you find is another golding press that is run from water.  That's a very unique printing press.  It's not run from a water wheel now, it's run from flowing water.

The golding presses were a Gordon Design, vertical printing as such.  You have the ink disk.  In this particular one you don't have the automatic inking system.  So these two presses printed the material for the Mount Washington Hotel.  Now everything here is exactly the way they left it, so all the leading here, some cuts.  Their aprons are still hanging here.  I especially like the fact that they built a stool that because the floor is so uneven the stool is uneven.

You've got type cabinets galore, and by the way some of the oldest type cabinets they have both the upper case and lower case rather than the California job case orientation.  Although, many of the cases have type that is California oriented.

Here you have some menu items that are left over from the last time they ran the shop.  So they're standing types so they could reuse some of the material from the galley.  Here's a locked up chase of one of the last jobs that they printed, it actually went on the press over there.  The lighting, by the way, there are fluorescents and there are these old lights that are run by this very old electrical system.

Cases on furniture of course.  leading material, regular type spacers.  By the way, didn't clean up the spacers here at all.  Another type cabinet.

This is the office for the print shop.  By the way, very small desk, very small lamp, but you would have had then many of the jobs that were being printed or in process or things that they could hold on to and then reuse.  Various forms for the resort.  Menus of course change and that was a difficult one to really save and then reuse.  Very small office.

The calendar, the last time anybody was here was 1999 by the way.  So May 1999 was when they last changed the date.

We're going to go back inside and go into their utility room and such.  And what we're passing now is just a utility table.  The printer lived here; he lived upstairs and his bathtub was down here.  So he had his own accommodations.  In this room, was mostly finishing.  Here you have a very interesting golding cutting machine.  You don't see too many of these around.  You've got paper.  On this side, you have various finishing machines.  So here you have a saddle wire machine.  Isn't this gorgeous, by the way?  This is a very old saddle wire device.  Here's another one that's a little bit more modern.

Here's a golding press in pieces; they probably used this for parts more than anything else.  In fact, there are some of the other parts down there.  There's more paper.  There's lots of type that's been typed up or in galley racks, again, that they would probably reuse at some point in time.

The most interesting thing I think is the sign.  There you see the sign for the Mount Washington Print Shop.  That probably was just outside the door in this very small, almost non-descript building.  But the most interesting thing about the building is its right next door to the satellite dish that receives all the signals for television, cable, and communications for the entire resort.

So here you have one of the most forms of communication and here in this print shop you have one of the oldest forms of communication.  This is a time capsule of a hot metal shop from around 1900 or so to about 1930; although, there are hobbyists out there who are still printing this way.

So welcome to the Mount Washington Resort.  Their internal print shop where they have a printing press that runs from water.  So talk about environmentally friendly, this press is certainly one of them.

This is Frank Romano and thank you for watching.  Take care.

Next time...

I introduce to you the iPrint.  iPrint.