My blog...my call...!

I had written this article for our Print Project called "Mozaic". We were divided in groups of four-five and were asked to create any page of a newspaper. Each of us did stories of our choice for the project. One of my stories was on the treadle press...the printing machine used in the past. My co-correspondent, Lakshmi, and I had gone looking for printing presses that still had these old machines on Triplicane High Road, the 'Printers' Paradise' of Chennai.
Doing the story was a great experience. My generation is so used to computers that it was difficult for us to digest that sentences were composed letter by letter on a tray.
The most exciting part was when the press owners switched on those dust-covered treasures. Ah! That rhythmic sound of the treadle press...! Very exhilerating!
This article never appeared in our project coz when we were designing the page, we realised we didn't have enough space for everything. So, I volunteered for my article to be left out. No probs coz my other article was the lead story.
But, this is MY blog...finally, my article finds a place for itself.

Chennai, Sept 8: “Printing is essential at every stage. There are no alternatives to it,” says Syed A. Kareem, owner of Tahir Printers located on Triplicane High Road. In a corner of his small and cluttered shop lies his old treadle press under a generous layer of dust.

Letterpress is a printing technique in which a raised surface is inked and then pressed against a smooth substance to obtain an image in reverse.

When the shop was opened in 1987, Kareem used the treadle press, which uses the letterpress technique, to print handbills. Though business was lucrative in those days, clients for the treadle press today are few and far between. Change in technology has forced him to invest in a mini offset printer which he uses for almost all the printing jobs.

Printing using letterpress technique is a time-consuming process as only 1000 copies can be printed in an hour as against 4000-5000 copies in a mini offset printer. As letters are composed manually on a chest, there were times when the letters would fall out and the entire process would have to be repeated again.

The changeover to the mini offset printer has affected dye manufacturers, type foundries and block makers who were dependent on the older technique for their business. Kareem says that there was a time when the mini offset printers was even banned considering the loss incurred by these people.

In this Printers’ Paradise is another printing shop called Vasantha Achagam that had three treadle presses when it was set up 28 years ago. Today, it has only one treadle press that is used for the occasional printing of files.

When asked whether he would sell the machine considering that the machine was no longer used for major printing jobs, A.S. Sankaran, the owner, replied. “We can’t sell it as they will break it and weigh and accordingly pay the money. Instead we can utilize it for odd jobs and keep the machine intact.”

Citing the example of a film, Server Sundaram, a waiter who keeps his server coat even after becoming a rich man, Sankaran says, “I have kept the treadle machine for memory.”