At the BookStud I've got an old electrical folding machine that only folds a single A4 page in half. It's a thing of beauty, with a real leather strap to make the bits revolve and a genuine bakelite 'light' switch to turn it on, but pretty useless these days and takes up more space than we can afford. So I rang the Queanbeyan Printing Museum today to see if they'd be interested in taking it. I talked to an ancient printer called Jim.
Jim is interested, and said that he's 'got a lad who works up Canberra way who will pop in and have a look for me'.
Queanbeyan is all of 10 km outside of Canberra, and is only saved from being a Canberra suburb by the fact that the NSW border lies between it and Fyshwick.
And I'm willing to bet that that 'lad' is at least 50.
(It made me think of Rosemary Dobson's poem 'Country Press'. It's too long to type up, sorry. Look it up sometime (in a real book, you won't find it on the web) and see what I mean.)
4 comments:
Gorgeous.
Lad will come in on a bicycle wearing a cloth cap and plus-fours.
Do you promise to post a description of 'lad' when he arrives to look at the machine? Obviously not while he's there, you know what I mean.
But of course!
Being from up Queanbeyan way myself I've often passed the printing museum and wondered about its contents. I've never been past when it's open unfortunately. I can tell you though after living in "the 'yan" for nigh on five years, myself and other new locals do find ourselves talking about 'going into town' for the evening when planning a twenty minute trip across the border for dinner. eg "shall we 'go into town' or should we go 'down the road'..."
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