A printing chain, from old to new. Four printers. Four colours. One hundred years of desktop printing history. Working together. Xavier Antin’s Just in Time, or a Short History of Production.
From The Atlantic. Thanks to Sarah for sending me the link.
What could he do with interacting bound and digital books, I wonder?
What I want to know is how he managed to get them all working at the same time? Surely at elate one of them needed a judiciously placed kick to get it started?
You can see the shims on the tables where he had to level things out!
Really interesting. My husband and I have a small print shop where we produce poetry broadsheets and occasional chapbooks. For years we used our big Chandler and Price platen press exclusively but recently bought a small table-top Adana platen press, a restored mid-20th century gem; it’s about the size of my laser printer. Our print shop also serves as our basement (we don’t have an actual basement) so over the years, we’ve taken our typewriters out there to store them, not wanting to give them up entirely. Sometimes I look around and think that the shop is something of a museum. Yet every one of the machines there is still in working condition. This can’t be said of the laptop I’ve stored in the corner of my study, not wanting to admit it’s dead. Or the earlier laser printer which also gave up. The notion of every generation working simultaneously is a neat one.
If you click on the link to Xavier Antin’s page, you can see the final result. Not perfect. But interesting nevertheless. Interesting, too, that the most recent machine in that line is from the 1970s.