Old School Printing

Last Friday I went to the Melbourne printing Museum where we were shown around a great collection of printing machines. Michael (the owner of the museum) explained the history of printing, from it's beginnings in Moveable Type (1450) through to digital printing (2000) I loved his passion for his collection, it's important to be shown these things as in the near future not many people will be around to share their historic wisdom.

Some of the Key Periods in the history of Printing:
1450-1950 Moveable Type
1450-1900 Hand Printing Press
1850-Now Machine Printing Press
1890-1980 Mechanical Typesetting
1900-Now Offset Photo Litho Printing
1970-2000 Computer Typsetting
1990-Now Full Page Computer Layout
2000-Now Digital Printing 

He also explained the two types of printing press; Platen and roller press. 

The older of the two is the Platen Press; there are no rollers in this type of press 

The second and more modern press, the roller press. The ink is rolled between two rollers, the paper is placed at the top and then manually rolled over the typeset. 
The type is held in place by 'furniture' (the black bars)


The process Michael taught us, involved picking out individual letter 'moulds', then casting the words with hot metal. The words were then placed onto the roller press and held in place by 'furniture'. The ink was placed onto the rollers and mechanically rolled to spread even. We then manually placed one sheet of paper at a time and manually rolled the paper through the press.

Some more photos of the museum: