Ink Runs in the Family

The red edition‘s letter from the editor contained a throwaway line to the effect that ink runs in this family. It was offered at the time as colour. It turns out to have been reporting.

The man in question was Johannes Wilhelmus Hillege — born in Dordrecht on the first of November, 1921; trained to the trade in Rotterdam; emigrated in 1953 to a suburb on Johannesburg’s West Rand, where he opened a print shop beside the water and named it for the lake: Floraprint. For thirty-two years he set the type and ran the presses himself, his wife Maria keeping the books, his sons in and out of the works. He reached Sydney in 1985 and died on the 31st of October, 1986 — the night before his sixty-fifth birthday. He was my grandfather.

The trade did not stop with him. His son ran a Heidelberg at a shop in Gordon whose telephone number I can still produce on demand, forty years on, which tells you something about the filing systems of childhood. And in that shop, after school and on weekends, I set type and ran the copiers and did the finishing — on a Mita DC-6500, a machine readers of the archive will recognise and may suspect of receiving favourable coverage. The suspicion is noted for the record.

So there is now a third magazine: TYPE — The Compositor’s Edition, 1890–1970. Thirty-eight pages, priced at one and six, “set & printed by hand” in the only sense available to a man with a laptop and a conscience about it. A Linotype Model 8 on the cover.

Filed as the job travelled

The photocopier editions filed by speed and by segment, because those were the arguments of their decades. Hot metal doesn’t file that way. A job in a letterpress shop travelled — composing room to caster to press to finishing — so the magazine is arranged the way the work moved: composing; the Linotype (and The Song, which is what the brass rain actually sounded like, and which deserves its own feature and got one); the other linecasters, because Mergenthaler did not go unanswered; the Monotype, the counter-argument in single sorts; the presses; the finishing; the trade itself.

Then the material closer to home: the Australian chapter, the family one, and a pilgrimage feature on the Penrith Museum of Printing, where the machines in these pages are not exhibits but going concerns, run by people who remember how.

A set, completed backwards

The shelf now reads as a trilogy in the wrong order, which is the right order. The red one catalogued the machines of my boyhood. The blue one catalogued the survivors of today. This one belongs to the man who came first — and to a trade that had five hundred good years and knew, roughly to the decade, when they ended.

The magazine is on the news-stand at photocopier.gethryn.com, beside its two siblings, where it will embarrass nobody except possibly the Monotype loyalists. Corrections and testimony to the usual address; the research department remains firm about sources, and the editor remains sentimental about exactly one print shop beside a lake.