Textual imaging was one of the first casualties of the digital age. The days of cranking out volumes upon volumes of catalogs, encyclopedias, annual directories, and in most cases phone books, are all but gone. Sure, there are certain kinds of color catalogs that still have an impact in printed form, especially when they’re meant to elicit an emotional response and help motivate a desire to purchase. But text content has found a permanent home online, in the cloud, or on your desktop/laptop computers, flash drives, external servers, etc.
But it wasn’t so long ago that “down-n-dirty” printing was a much more manual process, involving typeset blocks and journeyman printers, dressed in ink-stained smocks/aprons. It was a manual craft, and the most skilled of printers could produce flyers, programs, wedding/event invitations, menus and all other matter of text (and sometimes images) for public consumption.
While the internet has eroded much of the need for such jobs, there is still a niche, romantic allure to the old-world craft. A recent episode (season 22, episode 1) of the History Channel’s “American Pickers” (“Pumps, Prints & Pics”) took a walk back in time to a small print shop, the Hour Press, located in Norwalk, Connecticut. Pickers Mike Wolfe and “Jersey” Jon Szalay strolled through the long-shuttered shop to see what treasures from the 20th century would make for prime pickings.
For those unfamiliar with the show, Wolfe and his primary partner, Frank Fritz, travel the country as “pickers” in search of antiques, collectibles, automobiles, motorcycles and all things Americana to sell at their antiques store in Iowa. They love to find items of national and local appeal—dusty, dirty and sometimes rusted pieces that “tell a story,” knowing there will always be a buyer for items that romanticize the past.
Bygone Era
As Wolfe and Szalay maneuvered their way through the clutter at the Hour Press, most of which hasn’t been disturbed in 40 or 50 years, they were given a historical overview by shop owners Nathan and Gloria Dillard. The former cigar factory had been owned by the Bredice family for 90 years, and the founding brothers—one-time employees of the Norwalk Herald—had opened the establishment in 1930 to address the high degree of demand for commercial work (one of the shop’s prized accounts was Pepperidge Farm).
Wolfe noted some of the older Heidelberg heavy iron before picking several items, including a number of printer cabinets and a beautiful printer’s sample book that helped promote Hour Press’ capabilities. One of the more ornate items they found was a hand embosser with a lion’s head handle. Szalay latched onto a Queen Anne Victorian door, a solid steel table and various woodworking/machine tools—all having laid dormant for decades.
The pinnacle haul of the day was when Wolfe located drawer after drawer of letterpress-era wood typeset blocks. Wolfe, who is renowned for his willingness to climb up into the rafters of less-than-stable outdoor structures, worked up a sweat but managed to pull out 10 drawers of type, for which he paid $500.
The allure of the show is not so much the memorabilia, but the people Wolfe and Fritz meet in the process, the stories they have to tell, bring animation to what most people would view as worthless junk. Connecting the past to the present is one of the show’s strong suits and makes it one of the more meaningful programs on cable television.
