One of the things I always promised myself was that I would
never work for a newspaper that didn’t print on the premises. I couldn’t keep
that pledge because times changed and printing was very quickly outsourced to
other places, some even as far away as the Netherlands because it was cheaper
than doing it at home.
However, when I first started working at Lincoln the print machines
were still on the premises at Waterside North. It seems odd that the printing
system, the network of huge rollers, was called the web. It was because it
looked like a spider’s web, and had nothing to do with today’s world wide web.
But I find it odd that the same word has ended up being used for two very
different forms of communication.
The machinery was actually called web offset, because the
printing rollers were inked and then rolled on to an intermediate felt covered
one which then rolled against the paper. This means that the original roller is
the right way round – you could read it normally. So the offset bit on the
intermediate roller was back to front, as if you were looking at it in a
mirror, then it transferred onto the paper the right way round.
What you also need to know is that when you create type on a
lino type machine you can’t just fit them onto a circular roller. Imagine you
have a pack of cards and you try to roll them into a cylinder. Unless they are
very well fixed at the central point you will have a shower of cards. And that’s what happens to the lines of type
if you try to set them up then curve them around. So what happened was that the
slugs of lead with the words on them were set up into a flat tray – called a
form – and then a slab of wet card was pressed onto it to take the shape of the
words.
Once that dried it could be lifted off and curled round to
create a new mould. That was used to create a curved metal shape that could be
fixed onto a roller to begin the offset process. It was a very complex series
of actions and it was needed for every page.
One of the things about ‘hot metal’ was the smell. There was
a distinctive aroma around the print works. It was the kind of smell that
triggers amazing memories. It wasn’t like any other hot metal smell I’ve ever
experienced. You might be familiar with
the smell you get from steam engines and the hot metal print smell was almost
but not quite the same. It was distinctive and if I ever smell it these days I
will be straight back in the building at Waterside, wandering through the print
works.
And something else about having the web on site was the
noise. You didn’t quite hear so much as feel the machines starting up. They
were huge and heavy and had to start up gradually but built up slowly to a fast,
rumbling spin. Knowing that the web had
wound up was a really exciting time. Everything was finalised. It was too late
even to add ‘stop press’ by then, In spite of what it was called it never
happened. You had to have everything ready for when the switch was thrown.
It was the final stage of getting newspapers ready for
delivery. A proper web offset machine would have cutting and folding systems at
the end of the run. So we put news in one end and papers came out the
other. I loved it. And I swore I would never work anywhere that didn’t have
the print works on site. Sadly, Lincoln
was the last place I worked that had printers in the same building. And we soon
moved out of Waterside and into offices over a local supermarket. It was never
the same and I missed it desperately.
Sometimes we helped ourselves to a freshly printed paper off
the end of the web to be among the first to read it, Genuinely they were still
warm from the presses.
No comments:
Post a Comment