Gone are the days when printers would curl into bed with their ink-rollers to protect the sweet smelling sponge from rats. Rollers made of mealie-meal, molasses and honey made a tasty midnight nibble for rodents.
Gone are the days when printers would curl into bed with their ink-rollers to protect the sweet smelling sponge from rats. Rollers made of mealie-meal, molasses and honey made a tasty midnight nibble for rodents.
This was the cherry on the top for the Rhodes University, fourth year design students getting a taste of the 19th century printing process at the National English Literary Museum's (NELM) Eastern Star Museum.
Last week a rather weary looking group of design students arrived at the museum, coffees in hand, ready for their next assignment. Fresh off their 120-page magazine deadline, they could hardly believe the laborious history of their craft.
“There’s no control-zed!” exclaimed Lucy Holford-Walker in shock, leaving the rest of the group in hysterics, referring to the computer keyboard shortcut, Ctrl Z (undo).
Their tired spirits were quickly lifted by Richard Burmeister, the self-taught Gallery curator, who led the group on an entertaining historical tour of the museum. He aptly began with, “has anyone ever told you they feel out of sorts?” The confused designers chuckled; relating to the feeling. Burmeister continued, “an individual letter is known as a ‘sort,’ so that is what typesetters would say when they ran out of a's or e's.”
The penny dropped. Burmeister cracked joke after joke as he guided the students through the technical and finicky business of type-setting, working upside-down, back-to-front with tiny metal sorts and a composing stick. It so happens that the composing stick that Burmeister was using belonged to Grocott’s Mail compositor, H. E. Griffiths in the 1800s.
The design students, comfortable with the proficiency of modern day computers, giggled in awe of the tedious process of justification – fiddling with minute ‘en’ and ‘em’ spaces.
“It’s amazing how much language we still use today from this time; leading, ‘em-space,’ ‘en-space,’ added Brian Garman, fourth year design lecturer. Burmeister explained that even ‘uppercase’ and ‘lowercase’ refers to where the letters where stored in their respective printers cases.
“With printing, you’ve got to mind your p’s and q’s,” he said, once again sending the giggles around the room.
The tour ended off with a demonstration of The Wharfedale Press patented in 1859. ‘The Wharf’ is a sister model of the press used by the Eastern Star newspaper first published in 1871. The Wharf is an entirely mechanical flatbed cylinder press. It prints between 600 and 800 one-sided copies in one hour. Burmeister compared the Wharf to Gutenberg’s 90 copies in one hour and modern day printers that shoot-out around 50 000 copies per hour.
Equipped with Burmeister’s institutional knowledge, the design students were ready to embark on their assignment. After a week spent at the Eastern Star Museum the students produced a series of National Women’s Day posters, composed entirely by hand and manually rolled on the The Wharfedale Press.
Take a look at their work here
