The Lithographic Institute of Australia will celebrate its 50th anniversary with a dinner and wine appreciation night in Sydney next month.

All ex-office bearers, members and industry friends are invited to look back on the LIA’s journey since its founding by industry identities in the sixties.

The LIA was formed by the arrival of offset litho in the early 1960s, with printers and suppliers coming together to grapple with the new technology, which soon came to dominate the Australian print landscape.

The association provided support and information-sharing for printers and suppliers in those early days, in a formal setting, and the society now encompasses the whole spectrum of graphic technology and design.

The dinner will be held on August 14 at 6.30pm, at Dooleys Waterview in Silverwater, and include wine appreciation from Robert Oatley Vineyards.

For more information and to book contact Mike Williams at
mikewil@optusnet.com.au or fax to 9648 1258, RSVP before August 11.

Invented in 1796 by German author and actor Alois Senefelder as a cheap method of publishing music and theatrical works, lithography as a commercial proposition for printers came out in the early 1960s, and started out as a challenge for printers, as letterpress operators struggled with the principle of oil and water not mixing, and the transition from a raised letterpress plate to a metal plate with a smooth surface.

However within a decade litho had wiped out letterpress for all but newspaper printing as the main commercial print technology, with almost every commercial printer in the country putting in litho presses.

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