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SheetfedPress suppliers describe the retrenching of North America’sdominant printing process

New Directions

As head of Howard Graphic Equipment Ltd., one ofthe world’s longest operating suppliers of used andreconditioned printing equipment, Nick Howard

obviously knows his way around machines. His day-to-day work requires him to juggle all of the many intri-cacies of machine mechanics, freight, logistics,appraisals, international currency exchange, and im-port/export controls in 72 different countries. His teamof specialized technicians at his Mississauga, Ontario,rebuilding facility can overhaul virtually any piece ofoffset, web, packaging, or bindery equipment, regard-less how newfangled or complex.

But perhaps less well known is the fact that, in hisspare time, Howard devotes his considerable expertiseto the even more esoteric tasks of acquiring and refur-bishing antique printing presses and bindery machines.Following on last month’s cover story exploring the recent revival of interest in old-fashioned letterpressprinting among printers (Letterpress Revival, PrintAction,June 2013), their clients, and the general public, I spokewith Howard recently about his passion for procuringand restoring printing antiques.

Back to the beginningLetterpress was the princi-pal printing technologyfrom the time JohannesGutenberg commercial-ized it in Germany in 1440until the last half of theprevious century. Howardexplains that he has a per-sonal, professional, andhistorical affinity for let-terpress because, “It’s a re-version to where I started.My dad sold letterpressmachines.”

Howard’s father, H. W.Howard, known as Billthroughout the industry,was born in 1918 in Lon-don, England, and leftschool at age 14 to be-come a letterpress ap-prentice in a local printing

shop. After serving in the British Army, Bill immigratedto Montreal, Quebec, in 1947, where he secured work atthe large printing and lithography firm of Ronalds-Fed-erated Limited. After H. W. launched the family businessin 1967, Howard, started working alongside his father, ini-tially on his summer holidays from school.

“Back then, almost all printing equipment consistedof things like platen presses, hand-lever presses, cases,gallies, compositor’s stones, furniture, chases, quoins,keys, and reglets – so much specialized paraphernaliafor setting type and letterpress printing,” Howard rem-inisces. “I love it all now, I guess because my fathertaught me so much about it, and he was such a goodpressman. You have to be really skilled to be a letterpresspressman, because the makeready is so complicated,and the presses don’t have a single button on them.Modern offset pressmen have no idea how much skillit requires.”

As a young man, Howard often helped his father bymaking pick-ups and deliveries of equipment by truckbetween cities in Ontario and as far afield as New York.What he remembers most was how heavy, bulky andhard it was to stabilize old letterpresses and paper cut-ters. “Boy, I hated moving that stuff,” he laughs.

Some of the equipment literally weighs thousands ofpounds, requiring Howard to use chain ratchet systemsand pipe rollers to move it – a task made even worse bythe narrow doors, hallways, and elevator shafts in oldbuildings, not to mention the fact that his clients rou-tinely lied or grossly underestimated the difficulties ofthe move when they reported by telephone beforehandwhere the machine was located or how many stairs wereinvolved.

VICTORIA GAITSKELL

JULY 2013 • PRINTACTION • 13

Continued on page 22

Restoring Printing’s Past

Restored printing equipmentcome in all sizes, pictured is

a Cropper Peerless platenpress, circa 1920.

Nick and Liana Howard have been collecting and

restoring antique equipment for 30 years. Here they stand beside a

Klein-Forst +Bohn cylinder press, circa 1870.

This ornate eagle is thecounterweight on a Figgins“Coloumbian Iron Press”circa 1887.

Photos by Clive Chan

22 • PRINTACTION • JULY 2013

Hobby versus a businessToday, Howard frequents the Michael’schain of craft stores, where he combs theshelves in search of materials he can useto solve the myriad of detailing problemsthat come with restoring antique equip-ment. He observes that, although his fel-low shoppers used to be mostly women,he now sees more men in the store. Healso notices that both genders are oftenbrowsing for craft materials to createthings of substance to give to others;small handcrafted mementos or cards,for example, instead of mass-producedprinted cards or e-cards.

“We’re bombarded. No one has thechance to read all the information thatcomes to them,” he theorizes, “but bycontrast specially handcrafted messagesstand out as being personal and impor-tant. I think this is one reason why letter-press is growing again in popularity.”

He also thinks that, although all thedisciplines involved in printing are com-mon to other industries, such as machinetool making, printing is unique becausepeople feel a special appreciation for itsproducts: “No one wants to look at aflange after it comes off the productionline, but printing is something everyonewants to spend time looking at. Peopleespecially love tosee how a sheet ofpaper comes off aletterpress with theink still wet and thepaper embossed bythe pressure of thetype. Whatever comesoff these machinesseems very specialand is somethingyou keep.

“ L e t t e r p r e s sprinting seems to bean especially goodcreative outlet forpeople in later mid-dle-age who havemore disposableincome and wantto invest in a pas-sion,” he adds.

Howard tracksthe current revivalof popular interestin letterpress throughhis own profes-sional network ofspecialized con-tacts, as well as onthe Internet: “Once in a while I enjoychecking the U.S. Website BriarPress.org[a 75,500+ member letterpress commu-nity], which provides classifieds, discus-sion groups, and a listing of many of thelittle letterpress operations and somemore substantial ones that are startingup. At the Iron Handpress Group onFlickr, you can see photos by over a hun-dred people from all over the world whoare enjoying the freedom of choosing andsetting type and printing whatever theywant to print on handpresses.”

But he says a lone guy in a garage witha Chandler & Price platen who will fiddlearound with any printing job you askhim to for a price doesn’t really have aproper business going. He continues: “If

people want to create a successful busi-ness around letterpress, they shouldn’tventure outside the realm of what it’sgood at doing. They will certainly have tostay small and specialist. Just like bookbinderies, whose work requires so muchskill that it’s hard to find craftsmen whocan do it well, you can’t have 30 guysworking in a letterpress shop.

“But to earn some decent income withletterpress, you have to create a new nichefor things like greeting cards, weddingstationery, personal announcements, andhigh-end advertorials where the clientwants to get away from anything to dowith modern, high-volume printing,”says Howard. “Ad agency campaigns forluxury products like Aston Martins canuse letterpress to blow the pants off somereally special printing jobs that will behand delivered to the customers. That’sthe kind of project where letterpress isgoing to excel commercially.”

Antique printing sourcesHoward inherited some of his antiquesfrom his father, who just happened onsundry old bits and pieces in the course ofdoing his job. H.W.’s legacy to Howard in-cludes a curious little tabletop pencilprinter, possibly dating from the 1920s.Howard explains that, after the pencils wereprinted, they would have been dipped invarnish; so originally the pencil printer

would probably havecome in a kit whichalso included a rackused to dry the varnished pencils.Howard explains thatolden-day printerswould have boughtdevices like the pen-cil-printing kit inorder to serve a par-ticular customer’sneeds or to extendtheir company’sproducts and serv-ices with new value-added offerings.

Howard’s morerecent acquisitionsderive from an oddvariety of sources.For instance, hebought a collectionof several antiquemachines that hadonce belonged to adealer in Antwerp,Belgium, from thedealer’s sons, whodid not share their

father’s interest in the collection. (Howardsays in general other dealers, especiallythe younger ones, have little interest inantique equipment.) His other recentpurchases have included a press that aseller in one Ontario city had cleared outof a defunct printing shop in another city200 kilometres away. Another press wassold to him by a contact in Salt Lake City,Utah, whose father had been a printer forthe Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-daySaints in Palmyra, New York.

“In the States, it’s much easier to findantique equipment than in Canada, be-cause of all the abandoned buildings,warehouses, and factories in Rust-Belt[former Factory-Belt] cities that have

GaitskellContinued from page 13

Continued on page 24

In order to restore the ornate decorations of some of the older presses, graphic designer Anita Kumar was hired to handpaint designs.

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stopped paying their taxes,” explainsHoward. “Reality-TV shows with peoplebidding on the contents of abandonedstorage units have started appearing onAmerican television for similar reasons.At one time, a lot of manufacturerswould have had their own print shop, soit’s not unusual to find printing equip-ment in some of the older abandonedfactories.”

Although auctions were once anotherreliable source of antique equipment,Howard says he now finds they havedried up, mainly because other dealershave already snatched up most of the de-sirable antiques, and any that remain sellat auction for ex-orbitantly highprices.

Additionally,over years of col-lecting, he hascome to acceptthe fact that cer-tain types of an-tique printingequipment aresimply too rareto be acquired:“At first, mymaster plan wasto get one ofeverything evermade. But Ifound it was likeplanning toclimb MountEverest. When Igot to the firstplateau, the airgot thin. Thenafter I dugdeeper and real-ized how little Iknew previouslyabout the historyand manufactur-ers of printingequipment, I re-alized it was an inconceivable challengeto collect each and every machine. Therewere too many different manufacturers,many of whom have practically disap-peared off the face of the earth, alongwith their equipment. As a result, it isonly possible to collect the makes andmodels that were manufactured in suffi-cient quantities because some of them arestill around.”

He adds that a further challenge inbuying old machines occurs becausehard-to-find parts often go missing. Forinstance, because Golding letterpresseswere so often used to print short runs ofthings like tickets, the printers who oper-ated them typically discarded the press’sink fountain and simply dabbed ink di-rectly onto the disc to ink up their jobs.Consequently, it’s a challenge nowadaysto find a Golding letterpress with the inkfountain still attached.

A labour of loveAlthough Howard has been collectingantique equipment for the past 30 years,he says he and his wife/business partner,Liana (whom he met in 1978 when theywere both working for the family busi-

ness) have been spending more time onit lately. They will text each other excit-edly whenever one of them happensupon a tempting prospective acquisitionfor their antiques collection.

So far, despite all the challenges thatacquisition and restoration entail, Lianaand Nick have already filled a large roomat Howard Graphic Equipment with adozen or so machines dating from thepast two centuries, all lovingly restored topristine working condition. Metal partsand paint jobs gleam like new, and someof the equipment displays such quaintartistic finishes as gilded edges, decora-tive finials, or other metal or painted or-naments.

Recently Howard, who was recruited in2012 to serve on the seven-person steering

committee for theMackenzie Print-ery and Newspa-per Museum inQueenston, On-tario, has donateda beautifully re-stored HeidelbergT platen press tothe museum’s col-lection.

Still more an-tique machines areawaiting restora-tion at the rear ofthe company’s re-building facility. Asa general practice,Howard says he isfirst concentratingon refurbishingthe simpler, morestraightforwardold machines andis leaving restora-tion of the rarer,more complicatedones for later. Insome cases, he andhis techniciansmust rely mainlyon their own pastexperience and ex-

pertise in overhauling modern machinery;but in other cases, they are lucky enough tohave for reference one of the many antiqueoperating manuals in Howard’s huge, im-pressive printing library. Alternatively theymay find guidance by studying similar earlymachinery in museum exhibits like HenryFord’s printing equipment collection in theDetroit metropolitan area.

Does Howard foresee strong commer-cial prospects for his own special niche ofrestoring antique printing and binderyequipment? “Only four of my technicianshave the exceptional skills required forthis kind of work. Restoring a smaller,fairly simple piece of equipment mighttypically take them about 200 man-hours. But restoring a large, complexpiece might require $15,000 or $20,000worth of labour,” he estimates.

“Would most of these labour-intensiverestorations find a market that would bewilling to match these prices? Nope,probably not.”

GaitskellContinued from page 22

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In addition to working on modern presses,Howard Graphic Technician Leo Carandang wasinstrumental in restoring many of the Howard’svintage pieces.

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