Hi, this is Frank Romano at the Museum of Printing in North Andover. Well, they’re making a movie here today and they’ve got me in costume with makeup—oh, by the way, I’m not supposed to have my eyeglasses on because that would not have been of the period. It’s a movie called Rebel, you’ll see it on PBS probably sometime next year, and it has to do with a woman named Loretta Velazquez, who during the Civil War, dressed up as a man and fought on the side of the Confederacy. She organized a brigade that fought at Bull Run and other battles, she became a spy, and then a double agent. And they want to have a scene in the movie where they printed her book, which was published in 1876, so we have all of the equipment that was typical of that period. And so our gang taught me how to print.

Now, by the way, the clue in the book that helped us in printing this book, was the fact that it was done at the Boston Electro Typing Company, because in those days, what they did was they would set the type in hot metal, they would make a stereotype mold, and then they would make a plate from that in metal, and they would mount it on wood. And here we have it, by the way. We took some scans of the book in Acrobat, and then we sent it to one of the few companies left in the world that can produce electrotypes that were typical of that period.

So noticed that we’ve locked it up on the bed of the press and right now I’m going to ink it. Now, this is a more contemporary brayer, but I want to do a better job on inking than the old brayers that we have can do. This is the key to everything, is inking the type.

Then we would take a piece of paper and position that, close the press door poll, it’s all about pressure, let’s open it up, peel up our sheet, and there we have our printed material. They would have printed several pages at a time, probably not four, probably more like eight pages at a time. They would let this dry, they would hang up it actually to dry, and then they would print the second side. After they folded their signatures, they would gather them and then bind the book.

The book is rather interesting, there aren’t that many copies of the original book from 1876. But again, the company that is making this movie came to the museum so they would have an authentic press, type, and look to the movie. Plus they dressed me up, in those days there would have been no zippers, so I would’ve worn suspenders, no belt. Buttons of course, the buttons, by the way, were metal on this particular outfit. The apron I actually borrowed from Gary Gregory, who plays Ben Franklin in Boston, this is a leather apron very typical of the period as well. And we’ve done about 200 takes of me printing from this press, so now there’s evidence that I actually can print on an old press.

And I tell you, the biggest part of the problem is inking each time. I mean, as printing advanced, they tried to figure out ways to do automatic inking, then automatic paper feeding, and you can actually see that here at the museum as you go to the various iterations of presses that occurred.

Right now they’re setting up the camera for handset type, which is also part of the movie. So again, I’ll probably let you all know at some point when the movie comes out. Now that I’m a star, I will not forget all the little people who helped me on the way out.

In any case, that’s my opinion. Take care.