Just some ink and paper...

Ah the things that make a Journalism student excited! This time it was a deviation from our usual lecture in favour of a trip to the Eastern Star museum in Grahamstown, home to some of the original machinery used for printing newspapers back in the day. It was "so hipster" as one person remarked. 

I'm embarrassed to say that until yesterday. I had no idea the museum existed. What a delightful discovery though. The inside of the building smelt like ink and paper, and everything seemed to be in wonderful shades of black and brown and grey. Add to that the sound of a roaring printing machine and the scene was set for us to learn to manually print our own words.

This rather scary looking contraption was used for printing onto the larger newspaper pages. Originally it ran on steam and 130 years later, it stills works but this time with electricity. 

To make sentences, individual letter blocks were used to create words and those were placed together manually on frames to create sentences. This had to then be redone for every single combination of letters and words (clearly requiring loads of patience!)

This was not just time-consuming, but also difficult because all the letters are facing the opposite way. The saying, "mind your p's and q's" comes from the fact that people had to be careful not to use the letters p and q interchangeably as they look quite similar when they face a different way. 

As a journalism student, a lot of my life is spent in front of my computer screen, typing away until the words become fuzzy. After experiencing the arduous process of good old fashioned newspaper printing, I don’t think I’ll complain again about simply typing and clicking 'print'!