Throwback Thursday Object: Large Type Printing Press
If you have trouble
seeing well enough to perform daily tasks, even with glasses or after surgery,
then you have low vision. February is Low Vision Awareness Month. We
dug a photograph out of a scrapbook of newspaper clippings that we’ve been
working on to recognize the event. This is a shot from January 1971
showing a line of Davidson
600 offset printing presses. Legendary APH production chief Virgil
Zickel stands at far right beside Howard Oliver and a salesman, Frank
Gatchel. The operator on the front machine—APH had six of these models at
the time—is Roy Carroll. APH started manufacturing textbooks in large
type for low vision students in 1947. By the 1970s we had rows and rows
of offset presses from Davidson, Miehle-Goss-Dexter, and A.B. Dick. If
you want to learn how the offset printing process worked, look here.
In the 1980s, we started experimenting with photocopiers from Minolta, and
today our entire production of about eleven million pages of large type comes
off only two very sophisticated machines, Xerox
iGens.
Micheal A. Hudson
Museum Director
American Printing House for the Blind
Micheal A. Hudson
Museum Director
American Printing House for the Blind
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