Post by Grubb.
One of the exhibits of 19th century life at the Shelburne was a demonstration of how an old printing press worked. This was fascinating to me because the press that was being used was exactly like the cast iron monstrosity that I grew up with in Chicago…except the one I remember taking up space between the kitchen and dining room of our third floor apartment was missing a tympan and frisket. The tympan and frisket are the frames that hold the paper against the ink.
When the frames with the ink and paper are slid into the heavy duty press, the wooden handle lowers a platen with enough weight and force to print the ink on the paper.
So without the tympan and frisket we basically had a half-ton of useless equipment. I don’t know where my father found it. We lived on the corner of 56th and Kenwood at the University of Chicago where there certainly weren’t many yard sales. Was the university press getting rid of old equipment dating back to when Rockefeller first endowed the college? I was five at the time it was hauled up the rear porch stairs of our apartment, and I recall that my father thought he’d made a clever bargain. My mother was taking classes at the Art Institute and I think he intended for her to make woodblock prints. Still, without a tympan and freshet all the press did was stress test the flooring. And in 1955 it wasn’t like he was going to find the parts online. So what was the point?
As the woman in the Shelburne printing shop demonstrated how the press worked in all its entirety, I realized that maybe the hulking platen piece of equipment from my past was meant to be a talismanic sign of my 19th century future. The point wasn’t what possessed my father (alcoholics do the strangest things), it was the serendipity of a memory fragment being filled out before my eyes as if I was witnessing the discarded printing press from my youth finally reach its Platonic essence. So what if all this was happening in a different universe, it always feels good when things come together.
