Colm O'Regan: Why printing is a type of skill that shouldn’t die

Pictured at the National Print Museum, Dublin, for the announcement of the programme for The BIG Type Festival are author and designer Annie Atkins and 11-year-old Darrach Wrenn. Picture: Mark Stedman.

Like a lot of nice places, I don’t go there enough. The National Print Museum, tucked away behind the Beggars Bush Barracks on Haddington Road. The perfect combination of enormous machines and exhibitions of old prints.

At the moment it’s old tourism posters, but another time it was old lemonade bottle wrappers. It’s the kind of place that makes you ask questions like: Where did all the lemonades go?

Downstairs it’s full of machines waiting for their time to shine, or their time to smudge. Last weekend they had The Big Print festival.

Demonstrations, workshops, and a chance to see clacking grunting machines in action. There were printers, artists, and enthusiasts, all wanting to keep the old skills alive.

I was chatting to a man named Liam as he cleaned a small machine at the end of the day. He’s an enthusiast. He potters with old printers in his shed. He was the youngest printer there by about 40 years. It felt like he was the last speaker of a language.

Also, I’d love a shed. Imagine just pottering away in a shed with a printing press. Do I know anything about it? No. But in my daydream I was definitely tinkering with something competently, with the correct quoin key and emery cloth.

Next to Liam was a retired printer explaining linotype machines. The things that set the type for newspapers for 100 years. How it works is, you type in the key here, and then there’s a Heath Robinson machine-like chain of command that spits out the answer somewhere else. It’s an absolutely mad yoke.

At the National Print Museum, Dublin, for the announcement of the programme for The BIG Type Festival are author and designer Annie Atkins (left), letterpress printer Mary Plunkett and Órlaith Kelly, 7. Picture: Mark Stedman

You line up the letters you want and on the spot, a small lead foundry spits out a metal mould you could use to print the words you wanted and then when you’re done, the lead is melted down and reused. The printer was saying that they used to keep their chips warm on the box the molten lead was in.

“Shur, we didn’t know about health risks then.”

Elsewhere, another retired printer is printing big posters of the Proclamation of Independence. Watching the proclamation being printed, it felt clandestine, like we were at the start of the revolution ourselves, waiting for a Peeler to burst in the door and start with the truncheons.

Obviously it was hard work with lots of moving parts that no doubt broke plenty of times, but I bet it was still less frustrating than an angry “Printer Jam in Zone C” message appearing or a passive-aggressive “It appears you are using illegal cheap ink”.

I saw a cabinet with the word Impact written on one of the compartments and realised it was for storing different typefaces. It was like being inside a computer. Like being Mike TV from Willie Wonka, shrunken down and walking around the circuits.

I’ve never seen people so enthusiastic about passing on their knowledge. There’s almost a desperation in it. Who is taking it up? Who will remember the skills that are in their brains? 

It’s not on the CAO. It should be. It is another AI-proof job. 

Although, as we speak, I bet the AI overlords are buying up all the remaining printing presses to learn how printing presses work and before destroying all the printing presses.

Watching the machines work pleases the same part of the brain that likes those viral videos where someone bounces a ping pong ball in their bedroom, leading to a chain reaction that causes a car to drive into a giant balloon filled with glitter four minutes later.

But this had a point. And maybe it will again.

Hopefully we’ll find out exactly how many old-school printers there are in the country by the number of angry complaints received by the Examiner about my terrible representation of the intricacies of printing. And I hope that for all those complaints, they print every single one of them.