Mackenzie Printery & Newspaper Museum

Chandler & Price Platen Press

This is a Model N, Chandler & Price 10 x 15 platen press.
This press was donated by Carruthers' Printing in Smithville, Ontario.
Chandler & Price was founded in 1881 in Cleveland, Ohio, by Harrison T. Chandler and William H. Price. They manufactured machinery for printers including a series of hand-fed platen jobbing presses, as well as an automatic feeder for these presses (the Rice Feeder), paper cutters, book presses, and assorted equipment. Despite dominating the industry in the 1930s, by the 1950s the offset printing industry had eclipsed the world of movable type printing, and only Chandler & Price and Brandtjen and Kluge continued to make open platen (Gordon) presses. Chandler & Price ceased production of presses in 1964.

Chandler & Price Pilot Press

C & P Pilot Press donated by Don & Craig Black in memory of William "Bill" Poole, one of the original founders of the Mackenzie Print & Newspaper Museum.

The Pilot was designed and sold as a press for small job, short-run printing in commercial shops as well as for teaching letterpress printing in high school or industrial trade school print shop classes. On it, the student could learn all they would need to know about set up and make ready of a hand-fed platen press, and could do it with a machine that was less expensive, safer and could fit into a classroom.

Vandercook SP15 Press

In September 1909, Robert Vandercook founded Vandercook & Sons in Chicago, Illinois. Over the course of its 75 year production history, Vandercook manufactured more than 38,000 presses under its brand name. The name of Vandercook & Sons was used until 1968 when E.O. Vandercook sold the company to one of their suppliers, Illinois Tool Works.

The SP15, notable for its lightweight design, is a member of the "Simple Precision" series. It was specifically designed to print repro proofs from metal type forms on specially formulated paper, which were then used to make photo-litho plates for offset printing. It was also used for laboratory testing of ink and paper. The SP15 features the "quick change" rollers introduced with the Universal series. Maximum form: 14¾ × 20″; maximum sheet: 14 × 18″.

Heidelberg Windmill press donated by Howard Iron works in 2012.

Print group volunteers use this Heidelberg windmill press to print items for the Niagara Parks including recipe cards for the Fort Erie historic fort gift centre.

The Original Heidelberg Platen Press was introduced in 1914 and manufactured between 1923 and 1985.

The Heidelberg press is most famous for its windmill-like automatic paper feed mechanism. There are two blades that rotate from the paper feed, where it picks up a sheet of paper; to the platen, where the printing impression is made; to the paper receiver, where the paper is released; followed by the blade pointing straight up ready to start the next cycle. There are two blades mounted on opposite sides of the rotor (when one blade is picking up the next sheet, the other blade is releasing the previously printed sheet).

Linotype

Linotype became one of the mainstay methods to set type, especially small-size body text, for newspapers, magazines, and posters from the late 19th century to the 1970s and 1980s, when it was largely replaced by phototypesetting and computer typesetting.

The machine revolutionized typesetting and with it especially newspaper publishing, making it possible for a relatively small number of operators to set type for many pages daily. Ottmar Mergenthaler invented the linotype in 1884.

This is a working linotype machine similar to many used in newspaper printing companies. Model 5, Number 72816. Donated by Rochester Institute of Technology. On our board at the time of the donation, was a gentleman by the name of Archie Provan who was the Director of the Goudy International Centre at RIT.

Linotype Keyboard

The linotype machine operator enters text on a 90-character keyboard. The machine assembles matrices, which are molds for the letter forms, in a line. The assembled line is then cast as a single piece, called a slug, from molten type metal in a process known as hot metal typesetting. The matrices are then returned to the type magazine from which they came, to be reused later. This allows much faster typesetting and composition than original hand composition in which operators place down one pre-cast glyph (metal letter, punctuation mark or space) at a time.

Ludlow Typograph

A Ludlow Typograph is a hot metal typesetting system used in letterpress printing. The device casts bars, or slugs of type, out of hot metal. These slugs are used for the actual printing, and then are melted down and recycled on the spot.
The Ludlow system uses molds, known as matrices or mats, which are hand-set into a special composing stick. Thus the composing process resembles that used in cold lead type printing. Once a line has been completed, the composing stick is inserted into the Ludlow machine, which clamps it firmly in place above the mold. Hot linecasting metal (the same alloy used in Linotype and Intertype machines) is then injected through the mold into the matrices, allowed to cool, and then the bottom of the slug is trimmed just before it is ejected.

Bill Poole Room