Our editors have collaborated with a writer, edited the text, checked for errors, produced the cover, and lined up reviewers for the book. How, though, does the book travel from the author's computer to the printer to the binder to your bookshelf? To discover this, we visited Mackays Printers in Chatham.
Books have been read by humans for centuries. Papyrus was used as a writing surface by ancient Egyptians, who crushed the plant's stems into thin sheets. Scrolls were also made by adhering papyrus sheets together. At some point, humans stopped using scrolls and instead made books with pages made from folded or ripped papyrus sheets.
Let's back up a little and give you a quick overview of web offset lithography's origins before we set off. It was invented in the late 18th century on the premise that oil and water naturally resist one another. The text is photographed and then transferred onto printing plates made of thin metal, paper, or plastic. The oil-based ink and water mixture is then rolled onto the plates. The non-image parts of the plate will not absorb the oil-based ink since oil and water do not mix. An inked image is transferred from a plate to a rubber blanket cylinder, which is subsequently used to transfer the image to the substrate.
The first books were manufactured one at a time, with the text being copied by hand onto each page. That would take an extremely long time. Copies could only be made of a select few pages daily. Making a book was laborious and time-consuming, thus it was only available to monks and intellectuals.
The book's metal printing plates must be made in advance of the printing process. Each plate has the text of the book burned onto rubber.
Instead of being digitally lasered onto a plate, the text was originally made up of separate pieces of metal type combined page by page. This required a great deal of expertise and patience. Modern printing technology has allowed for the mass manufacturing of books at low cost, which has greatly facilitated the spread of literature and the arts.
On a recent trip to the printer, we were shown an early 19th-century relic: a Washington Hand Press (shown below). The operator of this press would fill a frame with ink and then place type into the frame. The paper was next pushed against the framework. Take note of the photo's handle; it's there for a reason. Pressing the paper down on the machine needed a strong person to lift and lower the handle.
The printing press's reel stand receives a reel of paper. The publisher chooses and supplies the paper for each book, which varies in kind, weight, colour, and breadth. Paper rolls are unwound onto the printing lines with the help of the reel stand.
The "in-feed" station is where the paper is fed into the machine and passed along a series of rollers. The major job of the in-feed station is to drive the reel stand, which in turn pulls paper off the running reel at the same pace as the running press. It prevents the paper from bending and maintains it flat as it passes through.
Now, thousands of copies may be printed in a matter of days. Big, hulking structures house the printing presses. Crawfordsville's complex fills an area equivalent to 1,700 football fields. Workers put in both day and night shifts to keep the printing machines going nonstop.
You can get a decent sense of the scale of these state-of-the-art printing machines from the two images below.
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