Great letterpress stories and anecdotes

I would like to know how many of the oldtime printers have seen type lice? I doubt that any/many of the newcomers have.
inky

I remember the a story told about a weekly newspaper/ job shop near here. The building had once been a hatchery, and they would wash the floors with water from a hose. The editor came to work one morning and found that his entire operation — flat-bed Babcock press, Linotype machine, counters, desk, handset type, job presses, etc., etc. — was in the basement. All those years of floor washing had rotted the ends of the floor joists. The weight of all that printing equipment finally did the trick. After the floor was rebuilt, publication resumed.

That one reminds me of another. A colleague of ours in a neighboring town, purchased a windmill and was having it moved to the second floor of a factory. There was no other way but to go up a flight of 20+ stairs. The stairs were plenty strong enough, but at the very top, they lost control and the Heidelberg tumbled all the way down to the bottom.

My shop is in my living room, or rather is my living room. To keep down fuel oil costs I never set my thermostat at more than 60. The ink plate seemed a bit cold so I thought I might use the old printer’s trick of setting a candle under it.

After thinking about it for a while I decided that I would prefer not to have wax dripping on the carpet and, even though it was not great, to avoid any potential fire hazard. I figured I could use a clamp-on socket with a floodlight and achieve the same end.

After much fiddling and experimenting with where to clamp it so the bulb would be the right distance from the plate and still clear the press mechanism I was ready. A perfect marraige of old ideas and new technology. Traditions maintained and modern innovation embraced: I was a credit to the craft.

I dressed the platen, inked the pate, and flipped the switch. Here we go! One, two, three; feed the press; now we’re cooking with gas.

Until the bulb burned out after the 6th impression. I walked slowly to the shelf, opened the box, and struck a match…

Rich

As a kid (40+ yrs. ago) it was one of my duties to clean up the old C&P at the end of each day. It seemed the mice that lived in the shop had an affinity for black ink and each morning we’d find little black footprints all over the presses. Everyone thought this was funny except the person who had to clean up the footprints & mouse poop (me).
I asked the foreman to purchase some traps but he refused. One morning we came to work and there were our brand new rollers with holes chewed out right of the middle.
I couldn’t help but tell the foreman “Now will you buy me some mousetraps?” A pretty expensive lesson on trying to save a few pennies!

Fatsean, I have witnessed with my own eyes, a mouse pigging out on a chunk of dried black ink. We actually felt bad for it and gave it some bread.

On the subject of the nasty affliction of typelice. There was an employee a while back that had fallen victim to typelice and other “troubles” in the shop. He had been victimized so often, that when we asked him to go to another shop to pick up a reverse numbering machine, he adamantly refused.

We have to great men that still work at our shop part time. One was the composer years ago and the other the pressman. The composer delights in telling the story of the day the owner asked the pressman to set a line of type. He was obedient, set the line, proofed it and showed it to the owner. The owner looked it over for all of a tenth of a second before asking “What is this chinese?”. Seems the pressman had set the entire line in Old English Caps.

We had a Heidelberg cylinder walk across the floor once. It was loaded to capacity with a heavy bed of type, and after everything was set up right, we cranked up the speed. Before we knew it, the press was sliding back and forth in its pan. It’s impressive (and scary) to see tons of iron move like that, but it has never been pushed to that point again.

Hi Bill,
When our Heidelberg cylinders were installed the Pan was stuck to the floor with some special adhesive, and the machine was also then stuck to the pan. They never moved even when up to max. When we sold them, the engineers had a devil of a job to get them off, having to use hydraulic and screw jacks to lift and separate them from the mounting.

We had two Kelley C model presses and there was only one guy who had learned to run them and when he passed away, the company decided to get rid of them. They were on the second floor and the only way to move them was to bust them up with sledge hammers and heavy saws. We had chains hooked into the third floor to lift some of the parts. It took many weeks. Those presses were built! And even the parts were a hassle getting on the elevator.

Many years ago I raided the print shop of a large insurance company in downtown Des Moines. They had printed a lot of their own materials for decades via letterpress in a large shop in the basement of the building. I bought a little bit of type and got some free galley racks, etc out of the place.

The person that was in charge of disposing of the shop was absolutely certain he could find a buyer for the large flatbed press down there. I told him that he would NEVER find a buyer, and besides that, it would be impossible to even get the press out of the building intact.

He was incredulous and said it could probably be taken apart. I told him even if it was taken apart, the larger pieces still could not be taken out with breaking or torching them down into smaller pieces. He told me I was nuts. I told him to try to find out how it got into the building in the first place.

I went back a week or so later and asked if he had figured out how to get the press out of the building. He said I was correct and that it would never get out intact. As I suspected, he said that the entire street had to be dug up in the 1920s and the press was brought down a dirt ramp and into the building through a hole that had to be punched in the wall at that time. There was no way that was going to happen again to get rid of this piece of basically obsolete equipment. It was hardly worth the trouble to pay to have it cut down into pieces and sold for the value of the iron.

I suspect that the beast is probably still down there.

We (Printers’ Hall in Mt. Pleasant, IA) obtained a Babcock cylinder press in northeast Iowa a few years ago. It was in the basement, but the building was in the edge of a hill so there was level access to the basement from the back. We did have to pay some carpenters to remove the back wall so we could extract the Babcock, and then they had to rebuild the wall once it was out of there. All this took place in one day.

The story of type lice reminds me of when an old pressman once sent me around the corner to get a fresh bucket of halftone dots.

Craig

I ran 2 miehle v-50’s at trade shop in New Orleans back in the early eighties. I was the youngest man in the shop. The forman lets call him Weber smoked like a chimminy he was a sargent in WW2, he was a very by the book boss.He didn’t like me and was unhappy person I think he had corns or ate prunes for breakfast hardly ever smiling he was in pain I felt sorry for him
One day while both my verticals were running I looked over
my shoulder where the stone man “Potts”was jumping up and down screaming at Weber while both men were trying to extinguish a job ticket that was on fire! Weber use to fill
his zippo with type wash evidently a fair amount had landed on the ticket unknown to him and of course as soon
as Weber did his refill he had to light up and poof! Potts was a tall red head and quite not all there and something about the fire really made him come unglued so the fire went out and the two grown men 59 and 63 years old started a verbal yelling match which escalated over the regular noise of the pressroom so Potts grabs a 9x12 galley and the mallet off the stone and starts banging on it like a gong. And so like the fire the argument subsides as the owner walks into the pressroom and states what all the racket about? Weber says Potts dropped a galley on the stone and it landed on my foot. While sheepishly trying
to obscure from view the burnt job ticket. I just kept my mouth shut and laughed really hard inside.

A former pressman added too much ink conditioner as he ran a job on a windmill. As he stood watching the job run, he slowly started to turn blue (reflex blue). The ink was too thin and was being thrown off the press. It happened so gradually that he didn’t know it until it was too late. He had turned into a smurf. The area around him also turned blue except for the wall behind where he stood. We all thought it was funny but he really thought he was going to die, so we had to try to act sympathetically while we helped him clean up.

Hi Bill, Another one from the late forties!!
One very hot summers day, around mid-afternoon, my mate was eager to get a job finished, so that he could wash-up the Bronze blue ink he was using, and go home knowing that he hadn’t to start again the next morning.
The press was a Thompson Auto Platen, one of only four known to be in existence in the UK. ( It was a clone of the Heidelberg Windmill, and Thompsons were sued by Heidelberg for patent infringement, and all existing machines were supposed to be destroyed.)
The machine was under a roof light and the sun was shining on it, which helped in drying the ink; the forme was a complicated tabular affair made up of numerous brass -rule boxes with small 8pt headings.
Anyway he decided to up the speed and was going along quite merrily when suddenly things started to slow down, he turned around to see what the cause was and was amazed to see that the three composition forme rollers had melted. Needless to say we had to have the job reset as there was no way we were ever going to get the gung from the rollers out of that small type.
Thank goodness for the solidity of rubber rollers, Bern

We had rollers for the windmills (for many years), and I suppose they were composition but they had actually started drooping and dripping onto the floor. We’ve never been able to get all that sticky mess off the floor and had to put large sheets of paper to keep from stepping in it. It’s between the 13x18 and the wall and out of the way. I did one time and tried to take a step and it actually pulled the shoe off my foot. Of course we’re using rubber rollers now.

Bern Bennett’s experience on his Thompson British platen reminds me of my experience on the same machine.
But first I have to say that it is one of the most magnificent automatics that I worked. Its feeding mechanism, method of lay and registration as well as delivery are inspiring, pandering to grain and very unusual shapes. Beating the Heidelberg hands down. The only drawback was it could not print 2 envelopes simultaneously like the Heidelberg.
My Thompson was a bit worn in the delivery shaft and bearings, so to encourage the delivery gripper bar to slide all the way along to grip the paper, I had it jacked and supported seriously to one side. It never failed to extract and deliver a sheet. Suppliers, making deliveries, took many photos. I was proud of my Australian initiative!!!!

William Amer.
The Thompson I was referring too, was not the model with the straight feed and delivery. This was the model which I believe was made in the 1920s, and had the same type of “windmill” feed and delivery as the Heidelberg and this I think was why the firm were sued by Heidelberg and all the existing machines were supposed to have been destroyed.
I have also operated the machines you referred to, many of which were made after world war2 at the Alvis car plant in my home town of Coventry. At one time the printers I worked for had three of these machines, and they were a delight to use; the straight feed was ideal for printing letterheads etc maybe not as solidly built as a windmill but nevertheless a good workhorse.

Thanks Bern, always some thing to learn.
Always interesting.

I heard this one from a company I worked with, happened years before I started there.

A manager at a good size company was hosting a job fair to try to bring in new people to the printing business.

While he was taking people around he went by the windmills, as it was running he was showing parts of the press and his head got to close to the arm. He was knocked back on the floor with a good gash on his head.

None of the job fair applicants applied for a job there.

Brent Weaver
Mankato, MN