The same Faye who has been proofing the pages of my book.
Faye’s brother, a big, strapping lad, and Hugh muscled the press up her basement stairs. This was no mean feat: the Chandler & Price weighs over a thousand pounds. Hugh took it apart and ferried the pieces to his house on a wagon, depositing them in the corner of his orthotics office where it sits today, fully restored, the braces and orthotics gone, replaced by reams of paper, drawers of type, and pots of ink.
“The press was in terrible shape,” Hugh recalls. “I brought it to the point where it was usable and printed on it for several years, then I rebuilt it a second time, making some modifications. Now it produces excellent letterpress images.”
The Chandler & Price was not, strictly speaking, Hugh’s first press. In the mid-1970s, when Hugh was pursuing a career as an orthotist, his daughters brought a note home from their principal at Lord Strathcona Public School, inviting parents to get involved in extracurricular activities.
“I went over the next morning and told him I would like to start a print shop with the children. The principal rolled his eyes and said, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea. But you’ll need a press.’”
At the time, Hugh was editor of the journal for the Canadian Association for Prosthetics and Orthotics (now Orthotics Prosthetics Canada, which publishes a journal, Alignment). In the early 1970s, when Hugh was editor, the journal was printed by one of the few surviving Kingston printers, Hanson & Edgar. He asked if they had an old press they’d be willing to part with for a good cause. They gave him a rusting Vandercook #2 proofing press, along with several drawers of old wooden type and a type cabinet he spied in a back shed.
“I came back to the school the same day and said, ‘I have a press and type. Now I need a room.’”
The principal showed him an empty classroom, and within a couple of weeks Hugh had a group of keen grade six students returning to school one night a week to learn how to operate a printing press.
“I think I was looking for an excuse to buy a press,” Hugh grins, “but I was also looking for an opportunity to teach open-ended problem solving, to create a situation that would allow the kids to open their minds to new ideas that don’t have a right or a wrong answer. I didn’t want to use intimidation as a motivator, the way it’s used in conventional classrooms. When we sat down at a table to meet the first time, I didn’t sit at the head. I always used a different chair. And I had them call me Hugh, rather than Mr. Barclay, because I called them by their first names. It meant something to them. Some of them still stay in touch, forty years later!”
Hugh and his band of neophyte printers named their venture Bubble Gum Press. Their first project was The Wrapper, a magazine written and printed by the kids under Hugh’s guidance. They started out with great expectations: a bimonthly printing of 100 copies distributed to parents and friends who could buy a subscription for 50 cents. Their motto: Don’t spend your money on the gum—just buy The Wrapper.
“We never knew when we might finish an edition, so in the colophon I always included a phrase like, ‘Published in the month of melting snow.’ I think it would be neat to include such a phrase in your book, since we don’t know exactly when I’ll get it finished.”
“How about ‘Published in the month the peonies fade’?”
“Consider it done!” Hugh crows. Why don’t I learn? Hugh picks up suggestions like live grenades and tosses them onto his agenda, no time for second thoughts.
Bubble Gum Press eventually printed stationery, Christmas cards, and thank you notes as well as the magazine. Every issue of The Wrapper was an exercise in innovation: poems and stories were solicited from all the kids at the school, and selected by a student editorial committee, which eventually included one of Hugh’s daughters. Faye Batchelor was an advisor. One issue was accordion folded, printed on both sides. One was a six-page “menu.” One had tipped-in block prints. A note in an early issue promised: “The Wrapper will make use of different materials and formats, in an effort to give our subscribers and ourselves the benefit of new experiences.” That sounds pretty serious, but every issue was infused with the quirky, irreverent wit Hugh exudes. How the kids must have loved him!
On the wall above Hugh’s Chandler & Price hangs a framed print of a girl running. One evening, one of the young Bubble Gummers, Elizabeth Southall, drew the figure on the blackboard, turning the chalk this way and that so the limbs were thick, then thin.
“I looked at it and thought, Jesus, that is great!” Hugh made a tracing of the blackboard drawing and, at home that night, transferred the drawing to a piece of lino mounted on an eighteen-by-fourteen-inch board. The next week, the kids printed the image on the proof press, inking it in one colour and daubing the thick parts of the line with a second colour. They did fourteen printings, every one a different colour. Hugh has #11 hanging on his wall. At least one of them was Elizabeth Southall’s entry into the poster contest for the 1976 Olympics.
Hugh closed the door on Bubble Gum Press in 1978, when his spare time suddenly evaporated. After a decade of working as an orthotist at Frontenac Rehab Centre, then Kingston General Hospital, he had decided to strike out on his own.
“I remember driving home thinking I was crazy to try running an orthotics consulting business on my own, then I saw a dump truck ahead, listing to one side, with old tires and a beat-up box. I said to myself, If that bastard can run a business, so can I!”
The old proofing press lay abandoned in his basement, but Hugh couldn’t resist the call of ink in his veins for long. Every so often, he’d drive the 350 kilometres to Grimsby, Ontario, to spend a weekend typesetting and pulling prints at Poole Hall Press. Two years later, in 1980, he finally gave in to the urge and bought the Chandler & Price from Faye for $500. Twelve months later, almost to the day, the restored Chandler & Price printed the first Hellbox Press book.
“I promised that press it would never be required to print anything that was not an art form. To my knowledge, I have kept that promise.”
WHAT FOLLOWS NATURALLY
Hugh and Verla were married in 1968. Shortly before the wedding, they bought a building lot in a new subdivision in what was then the outskirts of Kingston. They’d looked at houses, but each one needed such extensive alterations to make it livable for Verla that they decided to build. They hired Verla’s cousin, an architectural technician at Expo ’67 in Montreal, to design a house especially for them, with wide halls, and windows low to the ground so that Verla could see outside from her wheelchair. By the time they were married, the house was far enough along to move in, although Hugh spent another five years on the finishing touches. He built kitchen cupboards out of teak, designing them to accommodate Verla’s chair. When it came time to choose hardware, he wasn’t satisfied with the prosaic chrome hinges and knobs available in the shops. He borrowed a forge and made all the iron knobs and hinges himself.
When he quit the hospital and went out on his own, he converted the garage to a two-room office: a small space in front to meet orthotic clients and conduct his business, and a shop behind where he built the orthotics that would turn the profession on its head. It was here that he developed the invisible scoliosis orthosis and the tilting wheelchair, and it was here that he tore apart the old Chandler & Price and put it back together again. Seven years later, in 1988, he sold the orthotic business and went full-time into tilt-wheelchair manufacture. It wasn’t until that enterprise failed and Verla died in 2003 that the garage became a full-time print shop.
Hugh’s press didn’t come with an instruction manual. There were no instruction manuals. Presses like his were run by printers who would have learned how to operate and maintain the machines in trade school or during their apprenticeship. In fact, Chandler & Price presses were such a mainstay of the printing industry that the textbook for training printers, The Practice of Printing by Ralph W. Polk, used a Chandler & Price as its teaching model.
By the time Hu
gh came along, the letterpress print trade was all but dead. There were no typesetters or pressmen, as all the commercial shops had switched to offset printing, essentially an image-based, lithographic process. Hugh had no idea how a press came apart or how it went back together, but he learned in his usual way: by doing. I can’t help wondering what would have become of him if he’d been born into the digital age, where dismantling doesn’t get you anywhere except face to face with an inscrutable motherboard.
“Taking the press apart and putting it back together was duck soup. Building and rebuilding things has always been second nature to me. And it was just a matter of time before I figured out how to adjust the ink film and the pressure to produce a good impression. You know, you don’t need a PhD to run one of these things. I’m sure I made mistakes, but all that is just part of the learning curve.”
As far as I can tell, Hugh has always been like this. In 1957, he was working as a car mechanic in Belleville. His friend Johnny Meyers had been in a car accident in high school that injured his lower spine. He’d been fitted with long leg braces at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, one of Canada’s best rehab hospitals, but he wasn’t happy.
“The braces weighed eight pounds,” says Hugh. “Imagine dragging that around with every step! Johnny asked me if I could make him something lighter. Fibreglass was just coming in and it looked like it had possibilities, so I took some time off work and developed the first moulded orthosis.”
He tosses this off as if every twenty-three-year-old leaves their job to help a friend, inventing a new orthotic device in the process.
Hugh had no experience with either mould-making or fibreglass, but lack of knowledge has never stopped him.
“I found a book that showed how to make plaster moulds for small decorative articles. Based on that information, I constructed a three-sided box on a wooden door, which I laid across two sawhorses in my basement. I filled the box half full with plaster of Paris, and then had Johnny sit in it so his legs were half immersed in the slurry. I used liquid soap as a parting agent and poured the top half of the plaster mould. I was cleaning up the pails when I heard the door break. Johnny was trapped in the mould. I found a big screwdriver and pried the two parts of the mould apart. His legs were beet-red from the heat given off by all that plaster, something I hadn’t anticipated. We decided not to tell Johnny’s mother about this episode. (<;)-”
Young Hugh salvaged the mould and created a single fibreglass-reinforced orthosis with knee joints and locks. The whole thing weighed eight ounces. Three years later, Johnny was working for the March of Dimes as a fundraiser when he heard that the Frontenac Rehab Centre in Kingston was looking for a bracemaker. He urged Hugh to apply. The minute he was accepted, Hugh dumped his job as a car mechanic (once again), figured out how to get some training at Sunnybrook and SickKids hospitals in Toronto, and started on a twenty-year career as an orthotist.
Hugh attacked the press with that same confidence in his ability to solve whatever problem might arise. Luckily, the press had no breaks in the frame that would relegate it to the scrap heap. But the rollers were worn down to nubbins and the press bed could no longer hold a chase in place. He found a machine shop to mill new rails for the press bed and fashion ends for new rollers to ride the rails. The press had a motor, but it also had a foot treadle that he hooked up until he could recondition the motor. After putting the press back together, he repainted the body a shiny black, converting the horizontal arm to a sunny yellow and the flywheel to a bright red. Then he learned to operate it the same way he learned to rebuild it.
If I ever wondered how an orthotist becomes a printer, I found my answer in Hugh’s youth. At ten, he built himself a workshop in his parents’ basement. At twelve, he designed and built his own sailboat. By seventeen, he was working as a mechanic. At twenty-two, he built one of the fastest go-karts on the continent. At twenty-three, he invented a new kind of leg brace.
He winks at me. “Doesn’t it follow naturally that in midlife I would become a private press printer?”
DANCES WITH DEVILS AND BEARS
Letterpress printing comes with its own quaint lexicon. Compositors were called “monkeys”; the boys who did menial jobs like distributing type from the hellbox were “devils”; the men who pulled the presses were “horses” or, in France, “bears.”
“Makeready” is among the most mundane of printers’ terms. It means pretty much what it says: the process of making the press ready for printing.
Watching Hugh work through the makeready for printing The Paradise Project is like stepping into a novel by H. G. Wells. Gutenberg himself wouldn’t have done it much differently.
By the time Hugh is ready to print, he has four locked-up chases leaning against the wall of his shop. In each chase is a block of type, the forme carefully proofed for spelling errors, for good layout, and for problems with the type. The forme was moved into the chase and furniture and reglets fit around it to position the text exactly on the page, with proper margins all around. When everything was tight and true, the quoins were tightened with the quoin key, locking up the chase.
Hugh sets one of the chases on his imposing stone—the glass plate on his work table—and turns the quoin key to back off the quoins a bit. Then he picks up a planer that looks less like a carpenter’s plane and more like a big blackboard brush with a padded sheet of canvas stretched across the bottom. He sets the planer across the type and taps it gently but firmly with the quoin key, the handle of which is conveniently shaped like a little hammer. Tap-tap-tap, until he is certain the type is perfectly level in all directions. Then he retightens the quoins and lifts the short end of the chase slightly off the glass. Gently but firmly he presses his fingers against every line of text and every piece of firming furniture.
“You can feel movement if something is loose. If nothing moves, we’re good to go.”
The principle on which the old press operates is simple enough—rollers rise up over the press bed to ink the chase, a sheet of paper is laid on the platen, and a clamp pulls the two together to transfer the ink to the page—but to get a good print, every moving part has to be level, true, and perfectly aligned. That’s what makeready is all about.
Hugh lifts a spring lever at the top of the press bed and inserts the chase, then knifes a daub of ink onto the disc. He turns on the motor and lets the press run, inking the rollers for the proofs.
“Makeready happens in two stages,” he explains. When we are talking about the press, he is the soul of patience. I feel less like Stupid Merilyn, more like a straight-A student. “The first makeready proofs are about the ink. The second makeready proofs are about the type.”
When the press has run long enough to spread the ink evenly on the disc and the rollers, he slips a piece of bond paper onto the platen and takes a print.
“Now this next part is very scientific, so pay attention. You take the paper off the press and run your finger across the printed image. If the ink smears, there’s too much.”
He is laughing at me, but I play along, rubbing my finger across the print. It comes away clean. The first makeready is done.
Guide pins along the lower edge of the platen keep the paper from slipping down into the press, and grippers, like long pointy fingers, press against the paper, holding it in place as the platen rises for the print.
Between the paper and the platen is the tympan, which on Hugh’s press is a metal frame that clamps down a piece of Mylar. (In Gutenberg’s day, it would have been a stretched sheet of strong linen.) If the type isn’t biting deeply enough, or if there are pale spots on the proof, the situation can be corrected by packing paper under the tympan.
Hugh prints another proof, lifts the page from the press, and turns it over. The letters are punched so deeply into the paper I can almost read the text in reverse. “Too much deboss,” he says. “I like a really light bite. You want to be able to feel the impression on the backside
of the paper, but not see it.”
At one end of the spectrum is the traditional “kiss impression,” in which there is just enough pressure to transfer ink to paper but not enough to create an indentation on either the front or the backside of the page. At the other end of the spectrum, a page can be “bitten” or “punched,” creating a visible depression where the type hits the paper and a noticeably raised surface on the underside—an emboss.
Hugh tucks a sheet of bond paper under the tympan. Again and again he checks the impression. He doesn’t care where the text ends up on the scrap of paper he’s using as a test: he’s only looking for the bite of type into paper, ensuring that it is just deep enough, and consistent across the page.
Erik’s images have their own makeready demands. The total thickness of the lino blocks is 0.918 inches, the same as the type characters on their matrices. Erik gave Hugh the thin lino carvings and Hugh built them up to the correct thickness, gluing the lino first to a block of three-quarter-inch plywood, then building the thickness to the correct micrometre by gluing thin layers of card stock on the back.
“Erik’s linocuts have far more surface area to them than a block of type, so there has to be more ink on the disc and more pressure on the platen.”
It would be a minor miracle if the first makeready proofs were perfect, although given Hugh’s years of experience they are usually close. The page we are preparing to print still has some dark and light patches, known in the trade as “monks and friars.” Hugh positions torn strips of paper under the tympan to build up the light areas. Tearing rather than cutting the paper gives it a feathered edge that contributes to a more consistent impression.
Hugh shoves the wheel away from him, printing proof after proof until he gets the impression just right. It reminds me of sitting in the dentist’s chair as she grinds down a newly filled tooth, slipping in that blue paper, having me bite down, taking it away to grind a bit more, then making me bite down again. Trial and error seems such an old-fashioned, imprecise way to find the sweet spot, and yet she gets there, and so does Hugh.
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