Print’s Past: Sleeping on the job

I’m not sure if he was an apprentice or had just come out of his time.

They used to just about fall asleep because they had big long print runs and these machines were only running at about a thousand sheets an hour. You could go to sleep once things were going.

Anyway, on a cylinder press, it shoots the sheets out on an arm, and the paper just sort of sits on it. Sometimes if you’ve got a bit of breeze or if you’ve got light paper, the paper can curl up and actually blow back. And then it flops and the machine just keeps going. The next minute, if one stuffs up, because you’ve got no cut-outs, it just piles up. Anyway once Bruce went to sleep and woke up an hour later and the whole room was full of paper and he couldn’t even see the machine!

We’re talking about big bits of paper like that and when it gets scrunched up. He was shitting himself, Christ he didn’t know what to do.

Steven Jeffries

Print’s Past excerpts are drawn from interviews held by Benjamin Thorn, curator of the Armidale Museum of  Printing, and are due to be published in a forthcoming book.

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