First Impressions

The new press arrived yesterday in the care of Jeremy and Giles. Jeremy owns a company called Antique Machinery Removal and together with old school friend Giles, he travels the country ferrying all sorts of printing presses to and fro with no fuss and a lot of love and care. We were agitated, to say the least, about the logistics of getting more than a tonne of press out of an upper story art room in Barnet and across a long garden in Buckinghamshire. We shouldn’t have worried. I’ve seen more bother caused unloading a week’s worth of shopping than AMR made delivering my Albion.

Getting the bulk of the press into the studio was really only the start. The men then sat in the garden and carefully cleaned and oiled (not greased, we know now that grease is a big mistake) every component part before reassembling everything. Then we started on an extensive round of test prints to check the press was correctly adjusted. The testing was, well, testing to say the least: both Jeremy and Giles being expert printers. I began to feel like a mum caught by social services raising a child on turkey twizzlers and the odd nip of gin, my inks and rollers being bad enough to distress both men considerably. They were far too kind to be cross about it, but Jeremy urged me to ‘treat yourself to a couple of good rollers and replace that ink’ in a way that suggested ‘for the love of God woman, get a grip!’ would have been more in line with his feelings.

Having sorted out my new press, they cheerfully set about my old one ‘as we’re here’ and rebalanced and repacked it beautifully, managing to teach me more about printing in a couple of hours than I learnt in four years at art school. They cost a third less than our original quote and I would urge anyone who wants to buy or move a press to use them (there’s a link on my web site). Apart from anything else, I can’t imagine there are many people like Giles; a man prepared to buff a whole press to gleaming with baby oil, just to do it justice.