Robert Smail's Print shop - Seeing the print machines

We learned about a couple ways that printing was actually done. the first is using this hand-operated press.

Part of the tour was to typeset a name for word of your choice and this young man would print it for you. This comes in two videos since the first one is short and I was a bit frisky stopping the recording.

In the second one you get more detail about how it works.

Down in the basement are the larger, power operated presses. This one with the round platten does what the manual one upstairs does but it runs automatically and faster. As the apprentice learned to operate the manual one, he (it was always a he) would move up the automatic one and slowly learn to feed it faster and faster.

The fanciest press in the shop is this large one that takes larger sheets of paper.

Here you can see it in operation.