This project grew from my wish to resurrect some of Grays School of Art's long abandoned letterpress facility last summer, during which I tried, often in vain, to collate alphabets of font from jumbled mail bags of wooden type. This activity, purely recreational initially, created an unexpected frisson of interest amongst the Art School community and sparked a number of revelatory conversations with a fellow colleague at Grays; David Blyth.
A scheme was hatched involving letterpress, artists book publishing, the strange appearance of woodcock in the North East, fishing for trout and the importance of printed ephemera in regard to memory. During an early fishing trip to Stonehaven, I happened to mention to David that the town still had a local printer who continued to use a Heidelberg press dating back to the fifties to produce flyers, tickets and such. Peering over the half shuttered window we confirmed that was indeed the case. The printer, peering over from the interior, probably thought we were nuts.
Several weeks later, David informed me that a long defunct printer's shop in Huntly still contained a Heildelberg in fairly good condition, albeit unused for over a decade. The paper feed on a Heidelberg is air fed i.e. the paper is held on suckers and deposited onto the feed and introduced to the inked type, then lifted off and stacked after printing. Think of a 'whuup' and then a 'pwww' over and over. This is the sound the owners of the building above could remember fifteen years previously and they were keen to hear that sound again. I like to think that the repetitive breath-like repetition would have been soothing to their young children at the time. During site visits to Huntly, it quickly became obvious through conversations with local people that there was a deep 'folk memory' regarding the old printers premises. Most, it seemed, had visited the shop to pick up calendars, office documents, raffle tickets and the like. The gentle rumble of the Heidelberg was one of many tunes in the soundtrack of a small market town, long since silent but still resonating fifteen years after it fell out of use.
Heidelberg platen presses are regarded by many as the automated letterpress machines. Certainly the engineering is fantastic and they perform the job with a simple efficiency. This one, dating to the early 1950's, needed a good clean and lubrication, connection to electrical power and there it was, for the first time this Century...that missing auditory element which had been part of the dissemination of information for decades.
Now the press is running David and I can set our minds to the basis for the original funding bid...to self-publish Artists Books, publications and other short run letterpress projects. During the Autumn, we'll be opening up the printer's shop to the public over a couple of weekends with the enthusiastic permission of the current owners, not to turn the clock back and re-enact history, but to bring the press's capacity to produce beautiful, challenging, defiant, amusing printed information back into the public sphere once again. So really, the Heidelberg is still a means to an end, and perhaps small children in Huntly can once again be lulled to sleep by the gentle machinations of the Huntly Heidelberg.