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Show The Tooele Transcript Friday, July 27, 1962 o N criD This is the first Goss web offset printing press in the state of Utah. For the past three weeks an installation engineer from the Goes plant in Chicago has been busy putting the new press in working order. He has been assisted by Dale Harwood, Edward Bottom and Joel Dunn, all of the Transcript and Bulletin staff. The equipment is comprised of three Suburban units, arranged in line; a combiroll stand, clear at nation folder, at far right, and a the back of the picture, where the rolls of newsprint are held. Each roll is fed through the individual units. Each continuous sheet is imprinted and they join at the folder where they are cut and folded. The press will kick out 18,000 newspapers per hour. It is housed in a new cinder block building in the rear of the present Transcript " and Bulletin plant. four-posit- ion Dale Harwood and Louis Matiasek, Goss installation engineer, make final adjustments on the combination folder which cuts and folds the papers at the rate of 18,000 per hour. Brief Story Of Offset Todays issue of the Transcript signifies a new milestone in the Bullehistory of the Transcript The tin Publishing Company. new Goss Suburban web offset press, recently purchased by the Company is the first of its kind in Utah. This issue is its first. Throughout the years, Alex F. Dunn, publisher of the Transcript and Bulletin has invested most of the profit from the newsdepapers in newer and more pendable press equipment. the reason IN EXPLAINING for the new installation, he stat ed that since 1954 the newspapers have been produced on a Goss Cox --O --Type flatbed letter-pres- s. But the offset printing process will enable us to give our readers and our advertisers a appronewspaper dynamic a dynamic commu-munit- y, he said. The Suburban was built by the Goss Company, a division of Miehle -- Goss --Dexter, Inc., of priate to Modern EXCEPT Senefelders IN artists Letterpress: Printing trom Line Slugs and Plates circles, stones have long since disappeared. But in print shops, those gloomy caverns of the publishing world where paper is imprinted with ink, the process he invented 166 years ago is enjoying a new boom. Under another name - offset printing - the growth of lithography in the U.S. has been There are more phenominal. companies building web offset presses today than there were web offset presses just 25 years ago. Web is the printing trade term for the continuous paper roll used on high speed presses. Many national magazines with international editions reach their overseas readers via off set presses. IN THE EARLY 1950s only one U.S. daily newspaper, the Opelousa, La., World (circulation 10,468;, ran on web offset Chicago, Illinois, one of the foremost press manufacturers in the world. IT CONSISTS of three press units, arranged inline; a combination folder with quarter-fo- ld attachment; and a four position roll stand. Each unit of the press will be complete with manual and autoand tension matic throwoffs, plate lockup system. Our community has grown tremendously in the past couple of years and our publishing company has grown with it. We expect the future to hold more of the same, said Mr. Dunn. presses. IN HIS OPINION, the Suburban Today, 42 dailies and (431 press is the best available equip weeklies) are printed by offset, ment to meet the growing deamong them Phoenixs Arizona mands in newspaper and comJournal (circulation 54,000), bom mercial printing his firm is bein February. ing called upon to produce. Some papermakers now proIn 1796, an imaginative Munich duce a special grade of newsplaywright named Alois Senefelder discovered that he could print, appropriately called "0 for offset print from stone. Searching for PRINTERS WERE slow to turn an inexpensive way to print his to lithography, largely because plays, he inscribed the smooth and porous surface with grease they already had an excellent or crayon, dampened the stone process. This was letterpress, a process used by the Chinese at with water, and then took his imleast twelve centuries ago in on off pression paper. which ink is transferred to paTHE PROCESS, called lithofrom raised type. Technologigraphy (literally, writing on per cal advances in letterpress kept of was such beau stone), capable pace with the phenominal growth tiful reproductions that it was of the U.S. press during the 19th by painters, eagerly adopted ec Toulouse-Lautrcentury. among them Degas, Steampowered presses were and Goya, to make cheap already around; forerunners of but faithful replicas of their appeared by the 1960s; and before the century closed, Ottmar Mergenthaler had introduced the the first successful Linotype, mechanical typesetter. LETTERPRESSS ability to stay abreast of the publishing demand for greater speed relegated lithography to a few humble applications, such as printing picture postcards in which the sunsets were violently pink and skies violently blue. Lithography, costly and slow, might never have advanced much beyond the stone age but for the curiosity of early experimenters, among them a Nutley, N. J., lithographer named Ira Rubel. Feeding paper into his press, noticed that the inked image inadvertently printed on the cylinder when a paper sheet failed to feed through, then reprinted itself with impressive clarity on the back of the next paper sheet. THIS OFFSET principle which Rubel built into a press in 1905, became the bridge by which Rubel lithography moved into the big time. All of todays web offset presses rely on this technique. In letterpress, the impression is taken directly from the printing plate. But in offset, an extra cylinder, composed of soft rubb ;r picks up the printed image from the plate and transfers it off to the paper. sets it WITH THIS development, the possibilities of web offset became readily visible to commercial printers. The rubber offset cylinder was able to reproduce, on rough grades of paper such as newsprint, impressions of far greater fidelity than letterpress. And since anything can be offset photographed, printing plates can be prepared without the use of metallic type. "You can make up a page, said one Midwest printer, simply by cutting anything out of a magazine and taking a picture of it. WEB OFFSET also adapts more readily than letterpress to many of the new experimental techniques in the printing trade such as the photographic composition of type, a process in which light flashing through letter images produces photographs of words, columns, and paragraphs at many times the speed of automatic typecasting machines. But offset has its disadvantages as well. For one, offset ink is heavier and more expensive than letterpress ink, and because it does not as readily absorb into the paper, the ink must either be t rollers and the plate cylinders on one of the units of the new Suburban web offset press. peri-lodica- ls ed rd Editor and publisher of the Transcript and Bulletin since 1919 is Alex F. Dunn. His foresight and desire to eqjip his plant to keep pace with the dynamic growth of todays giant rotary presses had i Louis Matiasek and Dale Harwood, man of all trades at tne Publishing Company, check out the critical adjustments of ink, blanket and water tractive to newspapers and of small circulation, .where speed is not as essential as it is to metropolitan dailies. The time may come when offset speed will compete on near equal terms with letterpress. ' The process of offset printing allows more versatility in newspaper composition, advertising layouts, gives clearer and more solid colors and images. In addition, there is a savings in time. Staff members of the Transcript artificially dried or the presses and Bulletin are hopeful that this must be slowed to give the ink new Transcript will be easier to read, be more pleasing to look time to dry. FOR YEARS, the fastest web at and a lot easier to put togethe offset presses ran at about one-thithe speed of the fastest letterpresses. The tackier offset ink, together with the rubber cylinder, collects paper dust, which can botch a printing job. The web offset pro high-spe- ori-gio- al work. cess is more wasteful of paper than letterpress. And on long runs, the ink tends to emulsify with the water played on the impression plate and thus spread until the page turns into an unrecognizable blob. BUT THE SAVINGS that web offset offers in labor costs and makeup time have made it at- 1 Tooele, is reflected in the printing of todays issue cf the Transcript on a new Goss Suburban press, the First of its kind in Utah. |