Wither Are We Bound?

Remember those old printer’s trays that young girls, mostly, now a little older, used to put on their bedroom walls filled with the most hideous useless junk. I think the trays then moved to more sumptuous parts of the home and became centre pieces for more ornate and tasteful knick-knacks as the girls grew up. If you have printers trays in the house you now know what to buy for Christmas this year and if you are the recipient of some irksome little trinkets this Christmas, you know where you can put them now.

Well, as a pre-Christmas chore  I found myself chipping and scouring away the layers of paint, especially from the corners, from my daughter’s printers trays that she inherited from my wife, that she had as a teenager back in the, never-mind. Clearly instead of their beautiful virgin wood, paint was applied with whimsy and little skill to the trays as often as a new fashionable colour got their attention. Alas the burden of restoration is a heavy one. If you find yourself being asked if you think the current colour of the printer’s trays is suitable, whatever you do gush madly at its beauty in order to avoid hard labour.

This got me thinking about when I was a library prefect at King Edward VII School. I had an unorthodox and engaging library master called Mr Sandom. He encouraged us to read all manner of works from the classics to the then, recently in vogue, fantasy literature.

Just before the Christmas holidays Mr Sandom took us library geeks, as we would be called today I suspect, to the then arty-farty suburb of Melville where we visited a house with a ye-olde genuine printing press, cabinets with draws similar to the printer’s trays that people used to put up on their walls in the 80’s. They were full of letters, numbers, punctuation, and many other characters, as well as space blocks.

We all got into the spirit of the occasion and learned from the Mr Sandom how to create a page that we would print and place into our hardcover books that we had manufactured out of old maps as Christmas gifts the previous week. I distinctly remember that I had Iceland on the back and Nyasaland on the front. We didn’t just learn the rudimentaries of what it took to create a page of text the manual way we came away with a sense of achievement that a print out from our state-of-the art dot-matrix couldn’t do for us.

Which causes one to reflect, wither are we bound? Elsewhere in this magazine you will have read that inkjet technology exists that can produce droplets smaller than bacteria. Talk about sending the ‘flu a message. Then some Japanese guy had the bright idea while putting on his deodorant one morning: “if inkjet printing is just firing liquid at a surface why not spay stuff with perfume and other smells.” So maybe you’ll receive Christmas card smelling of roast turkey. And to think we got all excited in the 80’s about scratch-n-smell.

Whether it was yesterday, today or tomorrow, in the printing world higher and higher resolution seems to be that holy grail or fleeting horizon, reaching ever further, to working harder to produce clearer and better images and text, faster and faster, with less and less, in narrower and smaller spaces, cheaper and cheaper, with fewer and fewer people, using the fewer calories and lower wages, during reduced hours and…okay I’ll stops now.