I still have the deck of cards I made when I was ten, each back coloured in a blue and red design, each front copied from my parents’ bridge deck. I have that Linotype slug with my name in italics from my first visit to the compositing room when I was a cub reporter in Stratford. I have every draft of every story I have ever written.
“The process is over!” Hugh exclaims, waving his arms as if to make all the garbage bags disappear so we can end this ridiculous conversation. “The trial is finished! Move on! We’ve got work to do!”
But I’m hauling paper out of the bags, salvaging what I can, tossing the rest down around my ankles until the floor is adrift with pages.
Hugh stands there, hands on hips, shaking his head. “And I thought you would come in shouting, ‘Oh boy! Look how clean the floor is!’”
I rummage under the counter and in the back corners until I find a decent-sized cardboard box.
“This,” I say with all the firmness I can muster, “is the archive box. Don’t throw anything in the garbage. Throw it in here. Understand? I want all the proof sheets. All your scribbles, all your notes, your tests, your smears of ink.” I want to ask him to date the pages he saves, but even I know that is asking too much.
“All of it, understand?”
Hugh nods meekly, but I catch his smirk. I’ll be lucky if anything ends up in the box I’ve neatly labelled in block letters, ARCHIVES.
And maybe that’s okay. When Erik and I make the digital book of The Paradise Project, there is no paper to save. We work through the design issues digitally, sending PDF after PDF back and forth. I label all the versions and save them in digital folders, along with the final PDFs, but I will never have the pleasure of pulling out fresh manila files that I label in black ink, PARADISE PROJECT EBOOK. I will never line up the banker’s boxes on our storage shelves. I will never pass the files and boxes into the hands of Heather, the Queen’s University archivist who backs her van up to our door every few years to haul away another load of boxes.
Will I ever print out those digital files? Probably not.
And the odd thing is, as much as I was desperate to salvage those crumpled proofs, I don’t really care about the digital files. They don’t seem real to me. Interesting, yes. Valuable, maybe. But not real.
ONE-OF-A-KIND
The Chinese have a proverb: “The faintest ink is better than the best memory.”
In The Paper Garden, Molly Peacock describes how, in 1773, Mrs. Mary Delany made her famous paper mosaics of garden flowers. She’d start by painting a background sheet of paper flat black, then paste on the petals, stems, and other plant parts that she cut from either white paper or sheets she’d painted herself, sometimes shading in another colour after the cut-out petals were glued down.
How well these paper-flower mosaics have survived depends to a large extent on the kind of pigment she used. Where she used a pure black pigment, the backgrounds are relatively smooth and unblemished. But sometimes her pigments contained impurities such as copper. And sometimes, in a rush to finish or feeling an economic pinch, she would stretch her paint by mixing in iron gall ink. We know now that iron gall acidifies paper, drying it out, crazing the paint. Whatever economies of the moment she enjoyed, they were gained at the expense of her legacy.
Expediency and economy over quality: it’s a compromise I’ve made a thousand times. Buying the slightly limp grocery-store lettuce instead of walking the extra five blocks for fresh, plump heads at the farmer’s market. Choosing the cheap and cheerful skirt that won’t last out the season, the dollar-store notebook with pages that suck up ink and drool it out, turning periods into puddles.
I came to Hugh’s studio thinking that ink was such a small and insignificant part of the printing process that it hardly warranted a conversation. Why not thin it out with iron gall? Buy the cheapest on the market? Who will notice? Who will care?
I should have known the answer: Hugh will.
I lounge against the work table as he mixes up enough chocolate ink to print 300 copies of every page of The Paradise Project. It’s not as much ink as I expect.
“Each two-page spread uses up about one-thousandth of a gram of ink,” he says. “When you think of the power, the beauty, the drama that can be conveyed using a thousandth of a gram of ink, it is quite amazing, at least to me. After forty-five years, I am still amazed every time I see a printed page emerge from the press.”
The amount of ink on the disc decreases slightly with each impression. During the printing process, Hugh will have to watch the ink coverage closely and replenish it when the impression begins to fade.
“Because of ink,” Hugh says, “every page is just a little bit different.”
The idea stops me in my tracks.
When I hold one of the books Hugh printed, I assume that it is exactly the same as every other book in that printing. I assume that my first-edition copy of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, published by McClelland & Stewart, is exactly the same as yours. After all, isn’t that the point of Gutenberg’s invention: the exact and speedy replication of a text? I open the pages of a book firm in the belief that the text I am about to read is identical to the text that every other buyer of this book is reading. I see what they see. Our experience is the same.
“When I put a book together,” Hugh goes on, “I select the pages that match in terms of the impression of the ink on the paper.”
He muses on as if this is an ordinary conversation. I am reeling. Once again, Hugh has blasted my assumptions to smithereens. Large press runs on commercial machines may produce identical copies, but each page that rolls off Hugh’s press is infinitesimally different from the one that came before it and the one that will come after. The type is the same. The paper is the same. The press is the same.
The poet and book designer Robert Bringhurst says that writing is the solid form of language. But Hugh has taught me otherwise: the solid form of language isn’t writing, it’s ink.
NO SMALL POTATOES
When my boys were young, every year in late November, we’d choose half a dozen of the biggest potatoes from the bin in the cellar and cut them in half. The boys would draw a candy cane or a fir tree or an alien with a star on the flat side of the potato, and I’d cut away everything but the picture, leaving it in raised relief. They’d take turns pressing their half-potatoes on a green or red or purple ink pad, then rock the inked flesh against a piece of folded card. Again and again we’d shift the cut potatoes from ink to paper until the table was covered with red aliens and green candy canes in a forest of purple trees.
That’s how I thought the printing of The Paradise Project would proceed. We’d get all the pages typeset, stack up all the paper and the tins of ink, then get down to it, printing all 300 copies of its sixty-plus pages at one go. It would be a long day, sure, but it would be over all at once.
If I was learning anything from my time with Hugh it was that, more likely than not, my assumptions were wrong.
GUTENBERG’S PRESS
For its first 300 years, the printing press was not considered the brainchild of Gutenberg. Johann Fust and Peter Schöffer were credited as the inventors, with Gutenberg mentioned in passing as their “associate.” In fact, Fust and Schöffer were Gutenberg’s financial backers, and while they didn’t invent the press, it’s fair to say that the press would not have come about as soon as it did without their support.
Gradually I’ve come to understand that the printing press wasn’t one invention, it was a series of problems that had to be solved: getting paper that would take an impression, type that could be easily interchanged and reused, ink that would stick to metal yet dry quickly. By comparison, developing the press itself seems relatively straightforward.
Presses of one sort or another have been in use for millennia. Over the years, I have owned a flower press, a laundry press, a butter press, a cookie press, a French press for coffee, and a
cider press for apples. Basically, a press is any apparatus that applies pressure, especially downward pressure, in order to compact something into a smaller, denser, flatter form. In the process, liquid or juice is often expressed.
Once the printing press took hold, it hijacked the word so that now printing presses are simply presses, as in “Stop the presses!” The word has even come to stand for the entire profession of journalism, as in Meet the Press. It is interesting to note that the word “expression” dates back to 1460, about the time the Gutenberg Bible was being printed. The original meaning of expression was “to represent in words or symbols.” Later, the word came to mean something closer to “produce.” A French press expresses coffee. A printing press expresses words.
Once he developed type and ink, Gutenberg could have simply laid a piece of paper over the type and rubbed. The Chinese and Koreans had been doing that for centuries.
But the rag paper made in Europe was stiff and thick. Rubbing wouldn’t have worked. The letters had to bite into the paper to create the indentations to hold the ink, and that required pressure.
Historians speculate that Gutenberg got the idea for his press from the wine presses he must have seen in Mainz and Strasbourg, both cities located in the great wine-producing valley of the Rhine. Mechanical wine presses had been in use since Archimedes invented the screw, a marvellously simple machine that provides the force to draw two surfaces together. Early Greeks and Romans used a screw press turned by slaves or oxen to lower a stone into a vat to crush grapes, the juice running out a bottom spout. Olives were pressed for oil the same way. In the middle ages, the screw press was refined by adding a basket made of spaced wood slats bound together by metal rings. Grapes would be loaded into the basket and a heavy horizontal stone disc screwed down into them until juice poured out through the gaps.
The cider press that Wayne and I used every September to turn bushels of apples into a hundred litres of juice operated on exactly the same principle. Our stone house was situated in the remains of a century-old apple orchard. We’d dump fall apples into the hopper of the press, where they’d be chopped into mash that fell into a stave bucket below. When the bucket was full of apple mash, we’d position it under a metal screw that lowered a heavy wooden disc into the fruit to press out the juice.
By the time Gutenberg was working through the problems of reproducing words on paper, screw presses were being used for things other than fruit juice and olive oil. They stamped patterns onto cloth. And they pressed paper to remove moisture from the rag mush, flattening the page. I peer at the paper press in the background of Jost Amman’s illustration of an early paper mill in his Book of Trades, published in 1568. It looks remarkably like the printing press in his illustration of a printer’s shop.
Gutenberg needed the horizontal pressure of a paper press, but with a lot more force. And the pressure needed to be absolutely consistent if he was to get an impression of every letter of type across the page. He also needed a sudden “elasticity”—a sharp, hard, quick meeting of paper and type to avoid the smudging that slow, uneven pressure would inevitably produce. He also needed a way of changing the paper fast. After all, the point of the exercise was to better the speed of the scribe’s pen.
The printing press Gutenberg developed could do all of these things. The type was set into a frame on a perfectly flat granite or marble surface. The stone was mounted on rails so that it could slide quickly into place under the press and back out again. The type was inked with an ink ball, then a sheet of paper was laid over it. A hinged frame, called a tympan, held the paper in place. This was topped with a frisket, a frame of parchment that protected the margins of the paper from being sullied by the press.
The stone with its topping of paper was slid into the press under a heavy horizontal metal plate—the original platen, the part of the press that provides the weight to press the inked type against the paper. A lever released the screw to press down quickly and heavily, causing the type to impress the paper and the ink to transfer. The second the platen touched the paper, the lever drew it back up. After the page was printed, the stone was slid out, the frisket and tympan lifted, the printed page removed and hung up to dry.
The process took two or three skilled craftsmen: one to ink the type, one to fit the paper in place, and one to lower the platen. A good team could print a page every twenty seconds.
I imagine Gutenberg as a man made in the same mould as Hugh, pulling proof after proof, holding pages up to the light, trying to figure out what went wrong when the type failed to impress the page or when the impression was too light or the ink drooled and eddied on the paper.
To get an even distribution of ink, both the platen and the stone had to be absolutely flat and parallel to each other. But even with a perfectly true, heavy screw press, the paper was still too hard to take a good impression, which led to Gutenberg’s trick of dampening every other sheet and pressing them together for a few hours until the moisture distributed itself evenly.
No one knows how long he worked to perfect all the elements of the mechanical process, but according to three separate medieval writers, the bugs were worked out by 1440. At the age of roughly forty-five, Gutenberg finally had a working printing press.
HUGH’S PRESS
A print shop collapses time. Hugh is standing at his press, a machine that has a platen with a tympan, a press bed with a chase, and an ink plate with rollers and a giant hinge that brings all three—paper, type, and ink—together in a swift intersection that Gutenberg would recognize as a process not much different from his own.
Hugh was also forty-five when he got his first press: an eight-by-twelve-inch Chandler & Price. He tells me it was built in the late nineteenth century as a “jobber” for printing invitations, stationery, and such. Harrison T. Chandler, an Illinois banker, and William H. Price, the son of a builder of printing presses, had become partners in the early 1880s for the purpose of building a high-quality workhorse platen press to service the rapidly expanding printing industry.
For 350 years, printing presses had not advanced much from the simple wooden hand press that Gutenberg invented. But in 1800, the metal Stanhope press was introduced: faster and more durable, it had a large plate that allowed a printer to ink an entire folio—four pages of text printed on one sheet of paper—at a go. In 1811, the London Times acquired a steam-driven press that could print 1,100 sheets an hour, ten times as much as a hand-press operator working at top speed. Mechanical presses proliferated: by 1880, there were a hundred different platen presses on the market, most of them lightweight, awkward, even dangerous to operate.
In 1884, Chandler and Price introduced their famous jobber press, manufactured in Cleveland, Ohio. It wasn’t an original design: they used the expired patents of George Phineas Gordon, an actor-turned-printer who invented a jobbing press. He called it the Franklin press, claiming that Benjamin Franklin had revealed the design to him in a dream, but it has since been known as the Gordon Jobber.
Instead of the common “clamshell” design, where the platen was hinged at the bottom to receive a piece of paper thrust between the type and the inked surface, the Gordon design had a vertical press bed on a long hinge that brought the platen and paper up to the inked type so the two were parallel. The Chandler & Price variation was powered by a small quarter-horsepower motor, although some models came with a foot-operated treadle. The company advertized its press as “strong, reliable, simple,” and it became instantly popular. By the turn of the twentieth century, the company boasted there was at least one Chandler & Price press in every print shop in every town in America. It maintained its status through the ’30s and ’40s and survived even when other platen printing press manufacturers went under, victims of the boom in offset printing that took hold in the 1950s. When Chandler & Price closed its doors in 1964, it was the only American company still producing a hand-fed, flywheel-driven platen press.
Chandler & Price p
roduced some 100,000 printing presses over the ninety years they were in business, and they were as much a fixture in small Canadian print shops as they were south of the border.
Hugh’s Chandler & Price came from Jackson Press, a large Kingston print shop. When we first met over The Convict Lover bookmark, Hugh told me his press was built in 1890. We are well into publishing The Paradise Project when I grow curious about the provenance of his press. I email him for the serial number so I can check the date of manufacture.
“I didn’t even know it had a serial number!”
“Look on the front edge of the press bed.”
Within minutes he gets back to me. “I found it! The serial number is 50108.”
© ACROGAME/DREAMSTIME.COM
Chandler & Price introduced their New Series of platen press in 1912. The Old Series was more ornate, with a high base, a curved-spoke flywheel, and curlicue castings befitting a Victorian machine. The New Series was plainer and heavier, with a lower, more utilitarian silhouette. Its flywheel was smaller, and the flywheel spokes were straight: more Edwardian than Victorian. The whole machine was painted black with natty gold pinstriping.
The New Series begins at number B-50000. Hugh’s press is number B-50108, which makes it the 108th Chandler & Price built according to the new, improved design.
Although Jackson Press was the largest printer in eastern Ontario, nothing survives of the original owner of Hugh’s press except a lovely old red-brick building, in the heart of downtown Kingston, that still bears its name. The press closed its doors in the early 1970s, but Hugh didn’t buy his press directly from Jackson.
“At the time, Faye was going around buying up letterpresses from the print shops that were closing down and selling them to schools. She bought one of the Jackson Press jobbers. She lived down the street from me, and after the press had sat in her basement for a year or two, I bought it from her.”
Gutenberg's Fingerprint Page 15