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Antique Albion printing press gets new home in Fine Arts

by Laura Landon on 2018-01-10T19:12:05-04:00 | 0 Comments

Thaddeus Holownia and Dan Steeves with Albion printing pressMount A. Fine Arts professor Erik Edson was walking across campus one night when he spied something priceless through the lit windows of the Library’s ground floor storage cage.

"I thought, 'what's that there?! Do they have furniture in there?" said Edson, whose keen fine-arts eye zeroed in on an antique cabinet designed to hold wood or metal type for printing presses. But when he took his colleague Dan Steeves around to see the treasure a couple of days later, they discovered something even more precious.

"He said, 'come over to the window and look in. See that?'” says Steeves, following Edson's gaze toward the typeface cabinet. "I said, 'See THAT?! Look! There's an Albion press in there!"

What followed is a story of art, history, and a bit of ingenuity as the Fine Arts department worked with Mount A’s carpentry and grounds crews, Chemistry department, and the Library to get this 1870 tabletop Albion hand press—with its accompanying set of wooden type—up and running.

First, they had to get it out of the library and over to the Fine Arts building. The cast iron press is roughly the size of a bar fridge and weighs up to half a ton. 

"Grounds were really great," says Steeves. "Four of them brought it over in a cart."

Carpentry then pitched in by constructing three cross-braces to strengthen the press's wooden trestle or stand, which brings its levers and bed -- the large flat area on which the type sits -- to waist height.

Next, they had to get the press working. The Albion squats on delicate cast iron legs. It had been jarred out of shape in its journey to Fine Arts, and so the first challenge was to twist it straight again. Steeves, Edson and Fine Arts Chair Thaddeus Holownia looked to the Chemistry department for help.

"Working with Bill Cameron in chemistry -- he’s a tool and die maker -- he helped me figure out a way of fastening one set of legs down and moving the others, and twisting it and making it square again," says Steeves. Cameron also worked some additional magic. The press was missing some ancient bolts with an English thread. Since modern hardware-store bolts would not fit, Cameron created replicas. "He actually made them on a lathe to match the threads that were on the press,” Steeves explained. Age had deteriorated the press in other ways: Steeves had to apply epoxy to a big crack in its wooden hub, and attach new leather straps to the hub -- the wheel-like mechanism underneath the press that enables the bed to move in and out.

After some additional tinkering, and shining its tarnished brass top hat (the Albion's signature crown finial) to a gleam, Fine Arts had a functioning Albion hand press -- an increasingly rare item. It looks tiny surrounded by the print shop's 10 larger presses and the giant, steel worktable that dominates the room. But it plays an important role as a press to teach printmaking basics and the history of printmaking.

"It's very exciting to have," says Erik Edson. "In a way it's kind of like a living museum in the way that we're using it."

“It’s kind of a funky press because it’s old and there were a lot of things that were much smarter ways of printing type than that, but for wood block it’s a fantastic press,” says Thaddeus Holownia, who worked with Dan Steeves to get the Albion ready for its first print job in its new home. As thanks to the library, Fine Arts invited University Librarian Marc Truitt to the printmaking shop to roll out the first print: an approximately 13" X 18" image reading "PRINTMAKING SAYS THANK YOU," made with wooden type. In the middle of the print is an emblem of a mythical fish made from a cut owned by the late Douglas Lochhead, poet, first chair of Canadian Studies at Mount Allison, and former owner of this particular Albion press. They also made a print for Lochhead's daughter, Sara Lochhead, a former University Librarian at Mount Allison.

ALBION PRESS HAS RICH HISTORY: FROM RENOWNED TYPE MAKER, TO POET, TO MOUNT A LIBRARY

Holownia says his old friend and former colleague Douglas Lochhead brought the Albion press to Mount Allison when he moved to Sackville to become chair of Canadian Studies in 1975. Roughly 10 years before that, Lochhead was recruited by Robertson Davies, author and first master of the University of Toronto's Massey College, to become the College's first librarian. It was there that Lochhead assembled an impressive printing room, where he taught  bibliography and the history of Wooden cabinets to hold type for printing pressesprinting. Holownia recalls that Lochhead got his Albion press in Toronto from Carl Dair, the type maker who created Canada's first Latin typeface, Cartier, in 1967. Lochhead stayed at Massey College for 12 years, then moved to Sackville, bringing some of his printing equipment with him, including the Albion and the cabinets (see left) designed to hold sets of type.  Lochhead and Holownia set up shop in the ground-floor "cage" in the R.P. Bell Library.

"We squatted there in that cage area with a Vandercook press and we even had a Linotype machine in there. And we had the Albion," says Holownia. “We were printing a lot of stuff for the university, like invitations and things. We were just having a lot of fun, and students would come and be involved.”

He and Lochhead envisioned a Mount Allison letterpress shop much like the one at Massey College, where students and staff "do all kinds of stuff" with the presses and the type. The campus's nineteenth-century Anchorage Carriage House on York Street would have been the perfect home for it, he says. But with no support from administration at the time, they shelved their plans and took their printing interests off campus. Thaddeus Holownia's Anchorage Press in Jolicure, which also serves as a teaching studio for Fine Arts students, is a testament to what could have been on the Mount A campus. When Lochhead retired from Mount Allison in 1990, he left his Albion press in the library's "cage," where it sat for nearly two decades before Erik Edson and Dan Steeves sought to rescue it. Albion hand press

“I’ve always wanted to have an Albion press here both for students to be able to see what an Albion press is and how it worked,” says Steeves, who saw his first Albion at Gaspereau Press in Kentville, and immediately thought of what one could do at Mount A.

The Albion is "very sophisticated and very simple at the same time," says Edson, who notes learning the "analogue anything" cultivates a deeper understanding of the process and a new appreciation for the easier, electronic methods. (To see a video of how an Albion press works, click here.) Fine Arts just ordered a new set of wooden type for the Albion and other presses. Edson says the Albion helps connect three intersecting histories of visual arts, literary arts, and the community, where Douglas Lochhead crafted his nature- and town-inspired poems; Lochhead's High Marsh Road poems adorn the town's telephone poles in a march toward the Marshes.

How might Douglas Lochhead feel about his trusty old hand press moving out of retirement in the Library to active duty in the Fine Arts department?

"He'd be delighted," says his old friend Thaddeus Holownia. "It's nice that Douglas's memory is here."

 

 

 

 


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