Photograph from The Wonder Book of Knowledge by Henry Chase Hill, 1925
This is an early version of the kind of flatbed cylinder press on which the Saratoga Star was printed in the 1920s.
If it ever comes to that, I am prepared to take an oath that I am not now, nor have I ever been, a card-carrying Luddite. Not that anyone actually has put me in the same class with the early 19th-century Englishmen who destroyed labor-saving machinery because it was depriving them of work, but in these nervous times of the Unabomber Manifesto, one can't be too careful.
I'm referring to an earlier article in which I expressed the hope of not being around when the Information Age comes into full flower and newspapers, among other things, are no more. It's a generational thing, I suppose, or, in my case, even a matter of prenatal influence. At the time I was born in 1923, my dad, Llewellyn R. Peck, was publishing the Saratoga Star in a printing plant at the rear of the old post office on what was then called Lumber Street.
I have no recollection of that particular operation because he moved the whole shebang to Los Gatos in 1925, when I was 2. But I have the clearest memories of the sights, sounds and smells of that newspaper plant at 37 E. Main St., where the Saratoga Star and its companion Los Gatos Star --actually the same newspaper with a changed nameplate, or flag--were published until 1929, when the papers were sold to Hiland L. Baggerly and his Los Gatos Mail News. My dad kept his commercial printing shop, the Caerleon Press--named for a site in Wales that was a supposed site of King Arthur's court--until 1931, so I had plenty of opportunity to satisfy prepubescent curiosity about the mysteries of printing.
The old-time newspaper or commercial printing plant was a pageant of moving parts, a mechanical wonderland. There was the job press with its big, whirling flywheel, rollers hissing as they passed over the circular ink table, absorbing the sticky substance to spread over the type a split-second before the rhythmically moving platen pressed paper against the raised letters. Little wonder these presses were sometimes called "snappers"--a careless pressman could easily wind up with mangled fingers. I can remember standing for long minutes watching this press do its work.
Most fascinating of all, though, was the Linotype, actually a self-contained factory that melted down ingots of type metal and produced lines of type-- hence the name--to be assembled in a frame called a page form. The Linotype, described as the most complicated mechanical device ever invented, did its work with an array of cams, levers, belts, wheels--you name it--presided over by an operator seated at a typewriter-like keyboard. As spectator sport, it beat anything in the printing industry.
Speaking of Luddites, they would have found a fair target in the Linotype, which came into use in the late 1880s, displacing hundreds of compositors who had set type by hand. Hand-set type, with refinements, continued to be a factor in newspaper publication and commercial printing until the advent of the computer era for such things as headlines and jobs requiring special fonts.
Printing used to be taught in some public schools, and a useful thing it was. One literally gets a feel for words when setting them letter by letter in a composing stick. It was also an activity used by occupational therapists for helping to smooth out the kinks in troubled personalities. This kind of printing also survives among hobbyists, who take pride in producing books of museum quality.
Having been more or less weaned on reading in a newspaper back shop, and having been a hobby printer for more than 45 years--my press is an 1887 treadle-powered "snapper"--I am ready to expound on the benefits, therapeutic and otherwise, of printing as it has been done since the time of Johannes Gutenberg.
I can't help but feel that if the troubled genius accused of being the Unabomber had been able to sublimate his hostility to the ways of modern science by means of printing with hand-set type, the country might have been spared a most distressing episode.
This article appeared in the Saratoga News, June 26, 1996.
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