TOS-era serendipity at the Printing Museum

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Some of you may already be aware that I spend my Saturdays docenting at the International Printing Museum, in Carson, California. (We're open Saturdays, 10-4, and the rest of the week by appointment.)

Whenever a letterpress shop within several hundred miles either gets out of letterpress, or goes out of business outright, we usually end up with most of their stuff, and we have neither the staff nor the time to catalogue it all. With the result that quite literally nobody knows where everything is, and if you are searching for one thing, the odds are that before you find what you're after, you'll find other items of interest that you never knew we had. So it was yesterday: I was searching drawer after drawer of "cuts" (i.e., letterpress engravings), searching for one thing, and ran across a number of other things. One of them, a line drawing of an Apollo CSM, I'd already seen before, but this one, I don't think I'd ever noticed before: A TOS-era Starfleet insignia, right around full-size for a TOS-era uniform. The cut is on the left, and a galley proof of it is on the right.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

BTW, I can't, off the top of my head, think of any time in any ST series in which letterpress printing equipment has made an appearance, but if it has, there's a very significant chance that it was rented from the Museum. (Among other things, we have John-Boy's press, from The Waltons, and we provided equipment rentals to Seven Pounds, among the more recent rentals.)

 

[Shawnster]

Awesome

 

[Sisko_is_my_captain]

I loved that plotline on the Waltons when John-Boy running his newspaper. It's wonderful that you guys have preserved it!

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

The Starfleet Insignia cut is also kind of an anomaly: most cuts are either solid metal, or mounted on wood or plywood bases; this one is on a particleboard base (not common, because it's likely to disintegrate under heavy use, just from the pressure of locking it up into a type forme). I'm not sure whether the cut itself is zinc, magnesium, or some kind of plastic. If it were hand-cut from linoleum (or from anything else), there would be tool-marks in the non-printing areas; this has the clean look of either a photoengraving or something cut with machine tools.

As to John-Boy's press, we didn't even realize it (if it was rented from us at the time, it was almost certainly rented directly from the late Ernie Lindner, long before the collection that is his legacy became the core of the Museum) until the set decorator or prop master from the show visited us, and recognized the casters he had welded onto the press, so that it could be easily moved around the set.

 

[John Cooley]

I...I think I know what that may be. If I’m right, it maybe a (really minor but fascinating) significant piece. Are there any other identifying marks on the back? Any idea what print house it could have originally come from?

I have some research to do on my end, but hope to have something soon.

John

 

[J.T.B.]

That's, in a word, fascinating. My impression is that it has a 1970s look, from the unofficial/quasi-official days of Trek publishing. It would be great if more could be found out about it.

Regarding the printing museum, I would love to visit. I don't know a lot about the subject, but I am old enough to have seen stuff like working newspaper linotype operators and it is just incredibly interesting how ingenious things were in the pre-electronic and pre-computer age.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I never expected to find so much interest in this item.

Some details: the bottom two corners are approximately 2 3/32 inches apart, and the top corner is approximately 3 13/16 inches above that line.

The corners are not sharply pointed, as in the division pages of FJS's Starfleet Technical Manual; rather, the top corner has approximately a 1/4 inch radius, the bottom left perhaps a 1/8 inch radius, and the bottom right approximately 1/16 inch radius. I was PM'd a link to a page showing a Lincoln Enterprises "Flight Deck Certificate, and this does indeed look like a good match for the seal at the bottom right corner.

Although if the seal was printed (and die-cut) on pressure-sensitive metallic gold roll label stock, it probably wasn't printed with this cut, at least not directly: roll label printing is generally done (or was, at least, the last time I saw a roll label press in action, in the late 1980s) by flexography (relief printing from a soft surface, the same technology as a rubber stamp). But if the dimensions match, it could very well be something used to print Lincoln merchandise.

It was found in a drawer marked, "Driver Ed. Science"