Hi there, this is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  I found this little book the other day.  It’s called The Advantages of Modern Letter Press, Modern Letter Press, so that got me to reading it.  It was published in 1957.  Now, the world had started to change before that and as a result this booklet reflected those changed because you don’t do a booklet promoting letter press unless there’s an absolutely requirement.  And the absolute requirement was because offset lithography was coming in very strongly.  For instance, in 1947, offset lithography accounted for 25% of all printing.  By 1955, it was 50% of all printing.  And by the way, they mention that in here.  And the book was produced by a consortium of companies.  So, there’s one list right there and it continues on to the next page, there’s another list right there.  And it was almost everybody you could imagine that was involved in letter press printing at the time.  For instance, Gil Bassett, Sales Manager, Millie Goss Dexter, MGD.  He would go on, by the way to run the MGD Division when they introduced photographic typesetting.  I remember I was at that press conference and he was not happy when I asked him a question that essentially said, you know, we have more phototypesetting machines than we need, why are you introducing another one? 

I had to be Frank with him…

In any case, many of the people on this list, some of whom I know, eventually moved into the offset lithographic area.

So, as I go through here, I find various areas where they try to give you the advantages of letterpress over offset lithography.  So for instance, on this page here, they use Time Magazine as an example.  And they talk about the speed on the press and how you can go faster with letterpress than you can with offset lithography, but Time Magazine was a bad example because Time Magazine wanted to get their issue out… they didn’t want to have a delay from the time they closed the issue to the time you actually received the issue.  They wanted to get the last piece of news in so you get that issue weekly as quickly as possible. 

So, eventually they went to offset lithography, and by the way, pioneered almost every new technology.   They were one of the first to use computer to plate.  They were one of the first to use digital proofing in various forms.  Time Magazine closes on a Friday and you get your issue on a Monday.  That’s absolutely amazing.  Of course, with digital printing you can even speed that up and of course they pioneered distributed printing where they printed it in multiple locations to be closer to the postal distributions points. 

So using Time Magazine as an example probably wasn’t a good one, but at the time maybe it sort of worked out for them. 

They talked about quality in here.  And they said the quality of the half tone dot was much better with letterpress and that was a reason to remain with letterpress.  They talked about how making plates was more efficient and getting it on the press and make-ready was less, well I disagree with that part of it, but depending on modern press and how you did it, you might be able to get away with that. 

I’ll read here:  “The yardstick for measuring the quality of various processes has always been half-tone printed letterpress on number one enamel paper.  Letterpress half-tones by the very nature of the process have better detail, are sharper and offer a wider range of tonal values.”  Cleaner dots. 

I dry clean my dots...

So, why do I bring this up?   Well, the same thing is happening today.  You’re seeing offset lithographic people being very defensive about their process as digital printing erodes the low end, that is, the short run end of the marketplace.  That’s going to happen.  You will never have a period of time where the same technology continues uninterrupted and without competition.  There will always be something that comes along that disrupts you, disrupts the technology, disrupts the marketplace. 

Now, in the old days, when one process came out, it completely replaced another process….

You can’t ever replace Frank…

Well, I don’t think that’s going to happen with offset lithography.  It will have at least 40% of the marketplace.  I don’t believe digital printing will replace 100% of offset lithography the way offset lithography replaced essentially 100% of letterpress. The only think that was left of letterpress was imprinting, crash imprinting, and other areas where you wanted to only have a certain amount of information on a small number of pieces. 

There’s a renaissance, of course, in letterpress for those people who are hobbyists, but that’s a whole different market.  If you want to produce 20,000 of something, you’re not going to do it with letterpress.  I mean, just doing the feeding in of one sheet at a time just doesn’t work for that.  Although a windmill, and by that I mean a lot of companies still use a Heidelberg windmills for letterpress printing, but then again, their printing specific kinds of materials in shorter runs, they are not doing very long runs.

So, I believe there will be changes in offset lithography.  I think you will see advances in their technology that will allow them to hold on to a good portion of the marketplace and digital will complete erode the low end of the marketplace for all intents and purposes.  Of course, digital itself has seen competition from toner versus ink jet, and that will continue.  And in fact, there are probably some surprises that will occur in that part of the world as well.  So there’s always, in the printing industry, nothing every stand still.  There’s sometimes there is sort of periods of time when you say, “Ah, everything is wonderful.  We’ve got a great process.  We know our workflow; we know how to get things done.”  And then all of a sudden, it all changes.  And we’re going through that change right now in addition to the change of electronic dissemination where information being red on iPads and computers and things like that. 

So, this is an interesting time capsule of what happened in the industry as we went from letterpress to offset lithography. 

And that’s my opinion…

Next time…

You’re a printer who’s publishing a newsletter for your clients and potential clients; it’s a great source of information…