View “The Chapel: Inside Ireland’s National Print Museum”

Photography by Ruth Carden
Written by Larry Gallagher

Although the modern design world continues its well-documented love affair with the look and feel of letterpress, the once highly regarded trade of printing press operation has largely faded out as a career path, giving way to the relentless growth of digital printing methods.

Ireland’s National Print Museum in Dublin was founded in 1996 by retired printers who couldn’t bear to watch their trades disappear without trace or fanfare. “The Chapel”, a core group of volunteers (mostly retirees), are dedicated to keeping the museum’s collection of historical printing machines — and the skills required to operate them — from fading away as well.

The museum recently commissioned Ruth Carden and two other local photographers to document the work of The Chapel, including a skills-transfer program designed to involve the younger generation. These images form part of an ongoing photo exhibit that debuted in July 2020, when the museum reopened after the initial pandemic lockdown of March 2020.

For all their efforts in curating the museum, the veteran tradesmen were determined not to create a “Hall of Idle Machinery.” Every device on the crowded floor is capable of executing the task for which it was created. In non-pandemic times, the retired printers would gather at the museum four or five days a month, fire up the various machines, and set ink to paper once again.

In Great Britain, a collective of union printers is known as a “chapel”. While the exact origins are unknown, the term can be traced back to William Caxton, credited with bringing the first printing press to England in 1476. It may be connected to the fact that Bibles and other religious books were the main business of early printworks; it might even be a reference to the monks who, for centuries, copied liturgical documents by hand. Some say the name honors the first British trade unions, which held their meetings in churches as way to cover their activities — illegal at the time.

When they founded the museum, the retired printers kept the name “The Chapel” to refer to their club of volunteers. In an ironic circle, the museum itself is now housed in the former chapel in the Beggar’s Bush Barracks, on the south side of the River Liffey. Shown here is the late Alf McCormack, working one of the museum’s many antique presses shortly before his death in 2018.

Put simply, letterpress is the transfer of ink to paper via the pressure of raised type. For the first 400 centuries of its existence — from Johannes Gutenberg in 1439 until the development of hot metal typography in the late 19th century — that meant hand-setting individual pieces of wood or metal type. If that sounds glacial by today’s standards, compare it with *The Book of Kells*, which lives a half hour’s walk away at Trinity College. According to lore, the illuminated manuscript that is Ireland’s most renowned cultural artifact took a team of monks 30 years to complete.

In its heyday, typesetting was considered a skilled trade. Typesetters were paid based on speed and accuracy, so not only were they literate, but able to read upside down and backwards. Presumably, a downstream proofreader would have caught the inverted “g,” shown here, before it went to press.

Thomas Edison called the Linotype machine “the eighth wonder of the world.” Invented in the 1880s in Baltimore, Maryland, by German transplant Ottmar Mergenthaler, the machine arranges brass letter molds (“matrices” in industry parlance) into sequences, which are injected with molten lead alloy to form lines of finished type. This technology ruled the newspaper world for nearly a century before being superseded by digitally generated text. *The New York Times* retired its army of linotypes in 1978, but in Ireland, the technology held on for another decade.

At 72, Harry Havelin is a relative spring chicken compared to his fellow Chapel members. Harry worked the Intertype machine, a close cousin of the Linotype, for 15 years before moving on to a civil service job. But 35 years away from the keyboard did nothing to erase his knowledge of the system. “Something you learn when you’re young, you’ll never forget.” Around the museum Harry’s ears are legendary; he has been said to be able to use them to detect malfunctions among the many thousands of moving parts that constitute the machine.

Picturesque though it may seem, this landscape of type is the stuff of a printer’s nightmare. What look like rows of skyscrapers are tiny slivers of lead produced by the Monotype, another hot metal system that lent itself to book production (see Craftsmanship’s story, Printing with Love, for more on the Monotype system). Printers referred to this mess of type as “pie,” and in a normal print shop, it would all be fed back into the “hell box,” the reservoir of molten metal from which future rounds of type would be formed.

When the age of hot-metal printing ended, it ended quickly. Machines that weren’t sold off to the developing world were carted away in dumpsters. Some were stored for years in garages and woodsheds around Dublin (by stubborn and sentimental printers), before they found new life in the Print Museum. Still, the machines packed into the current space represent only about 20 percent of the museum’s total inventory, the rest of which is in a warehouse in neighboring County Kildare, waiting for a moment that may or may not ever come.

More than a few phrases from the world of typesetting survive in the modern idiom. “Upper case” and “lower case” referred to the physical placement of type in separate wooden trays. Individual pieces of type were known as “sorts,” so to be “out of sorts” was to be stuck mid-job. And to “mind one’s p’s and q’s” was a non-trivial challenge when reading backwards — and sometimes upside down.

This is a version of the same Wharfedale printing press used to publish the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic, the document through which the leaders of the Easter Rebellion declared Ireland’s independence from Great Britain. The duress under which the posters were printed is manifest in the multiple quirks that made it into the finished copy. The occupying British attempted to keep tabs on all the free type in Dublin, hence a few recognizably modified letters and a bunch of undersized “e”s. In 2016, for the hundredth anniversary of the proclamation, the museum created replica prints on their own Wharfdale. “This is the greatest honor that I’ve ever had,” said printer Alf McCormack, of his participation in the project. A copy of the original Proclamation, one of only about 30 known to exist, sits behind glass in an adjacent case.

As you would expect, the passing of time has not been kind to the brain trust of retired printers. In 2019, to offset the forces of entropy, the museum, in conjunction with Ireland’s Cultural and Heritage Studies Programme, created a skills-transfer mentorship for 10 aspiring printers. More than 50 applicants applied for the program, with the winners drawn from a range of backgrounds from the fine arts to mechanical engineering. The traditional, 7-year apprenticeships in each discipline were squeezed into a 10-week intensive. For Christine Lennerton, 34, this represented a generational return, as her father once worked the hot metal for the *Winnipeg Free Press* in her native Canada. “The retired printers are amazing,” she said. “You just love being around them, feeling their passion, listening to their stories.”

Quaint though it seems today, the customized ledgers and cash books created on this Shaw Line Ruler machine were crucial in abating chaos for business and government agencies alike. This technology also hails back to the time of the monks, who used it to make manuscript paper for their music.

The Shaw Line Ruler has an ink reservoir made from ordinary flannel, and uses gravity to feed ink through a line of brass pens that drag along the paper. Christine hopes to be able to pass on whatever she can of the retirees’ passion for the trade. “So many people walk into the museum and say `I just see metal.’ But the operators can give these silent objects a narrative; they give them life.”

Ruth Carden is a self-taught professional photographer with more than three decades of experience, specializing in environmental portraiture as well as private and commercial works in Ireland.
Larry Gallagher has described his adventures in such publications as Details, Outside, and The New York Times Magazine.