Choreography of a Printing Press
And the music of machines
During the printing and binding of Tune & Fairweather’s fantasy art book Soul Arts, we hired two different video teams – one Irish, one Italian – to capture behind-the-scenes footage of the manufacturing process.
Even though it’s easy to imagine a tidy division between categories like ‘hand-made’ and ‘machine-made’, the operation of modern Heidelberg printing presses and bindery equipment requires human skill and intervention every step of the way.
The printer in Florence, Italy, that helped us bring Soul Arts to life was just months away from upgrading its bindery line of tank-like cast iron to the latest grey and shiny state of the art.
Though efficiency gains more than justify the upgrade, I’m thankful that we were able to get such beautiful video footage of the vintage bindery chugging away on one of its final jobs before being decommissioned.
When you watch the casing section toward the end of the video below, you are literally watching history in motion: