beating heart

I had my first press OK today. For those of you who don't know what a press OK is, it is essentially a visit to the printer while your book is printing to ensure that it is printing correctly, which is useful if a book is high profile, or has tricky elements in it that a publisher wants to keep a close eye on. Working in office jobs my whole life, I forget that some jobs are more hands on. I forget that there is more than administration, litigation, emails, and phone calls. When I walked into the printer's facilities, the first thing I saw was 10-15 cubicles. Ordinary enough-- and then I am led into the pressroom, which seemed about 20 times more spacious than the area the cubicles were in.

A pressroom is an extraordinary place to be. You are surrounded by machines; by different kinds of printers, binders, trimmers, and other amazing pieces of machinery. When they are running, your ears fill with the sound of the machines humming and thrumming with life and motion. It's a wonderful noise. It is the sound of books coming into existence, of thousands of books being printed and bound. It's the sound of a strong beating heart. It really is something beautiful.

Printing is still very much a hands-on trade. Of course technology has changed it immensely, but it wasn't that long ago that everything was moved from film to digital files, and even if everything is done digitally today and less needs to be manually adjusted, a bad pressman can still ruin a book. This is what I love about books. Every title that is printed has this human element, it has someone behind it who took the time to color correct it, to edit it. It has a pressman who loaded the paper and ran the job, it has a shipper who wrapped it tight with cellophane to ensure safe transport. There are so many hands that a book needs to pass through to become a product that a person loves to read, to become something with neatly trimmed pages that are aligned properly and doesn't fall apart at the spine or rip with every flip of the page.

We're living in great times. This is what the president of a leading paper company said to a group of us on a plant tour. He's right. Look at all the things we can do. Look how far printing has come. Look how far technology has improved not just the print industry, but every industry. Yet, there is so much more to look forward to. See how far we have come, and how limitless it is. We are definitely living in great times.