Symbolic:
From the basement, a cancelled stamp, 1939, commemorating 300 years of the printing press.
As we watch newspapers founder, cut back drastically, or all-in fold, we live in sharp awareness of our ongoing fortune in receiving the Sunday New York Times delivered to our door. In hard form, a real newspaper. Hold it your hands, smell the ink....
Staff layoffs, fallen advertising revenue, struggles to compete with this internet medium we use here are repeated from print newspaper to print newspaper, city to city, town to town, burg to burg. Individual local flavor and true what's- really-happening-here information vanish in the blanding wake of corporate buyouts.
Continuity for the printing press is a MUST, including the small locally owned publications, staffed by local people.
In seventh grade we took printing as a shop course at Lincoln Jr. high school. We set print in 'sticks' by hand, letter by letter, spacers by spacers, and we felt we were possibly learning a trade at that youthful commencement. The presses then were a few steps up from the one in the colonial America stamp above. But never did we dream there would be such a thing as a personal computer, blogs, or instant messaging.
That progress would lead from to linotype machines to this? Woe.
