Print it…

CHRIS BENNETT was jolted to thinking about the written word.

I HAVE recently bought a printer. Now there may be nothing out of the ordinary about this, but I can’t help wondering why the Steve Jobs of this world have not yet got their heads around the idea of a laptop that prints.

I mean, we haven’t really come all that far from the typewriter, when you come to think of it.

Sadly, I seldom write letters these days, although I may develop a reasonable relationship with the printer and return to that gentle art. The trouble with printers is that they are too big and too impersonal.

I bought the smallest I could find and still struggled to get the box through the front door. We are still glaring at each other, the printer and I, but relations are warming.

Lawrence Durrell tells a lovely story about a printer’s devil, one of his assistants, which I gather were called bears in Greece, where the Greek-speaking writer lived on the Island of Rhodes from 1945, as part of the British administration. This odd term, bear, came about, apparently, because of their tendency to walk back and forth like bears in a cage “picking up and examining type, which are part and parcel of the handsetters work”.*

After WWII, when Durrell was editor of Chronos**, one of the bears was a young man called Christ, a common enough name for Greek boys. He came from a large family which he had to support on his meagre salary.

During a momentary crisis when the news was delayed, and Durrell found himself short of material, Christ pulled out a sheet of loose galley, the paper used to take a first impression, a galley proof, from the frame that holds the metal type, the galley. Printing a newspaper until quite recently was a hot, noisy and dirty operation. Mind you, it still is.

In no time he had written a column on his rather sad circumstances, which the paper’s Greek editor read to Durrell. “Print it!” said Durrell, “and tell him I want four a week.” The young bear was at first aghast and then overcome with joy. “Christ had entered the most impoverished aristocracy in the world”. *

This past few weeks has seen a flurry of articles in papers all over the English speaking world discussing the demise of newsprint, the coarse paper on which newspapers are customarily printed. Triggered, I suspect, by the arrival of the iPad, a device which is completely beyond my comprehension. I mean, what’s it for?

Anyway, as one writer wrote, a publication isn't the dead trees it's printed on, nor will it be the screen it's displayed on. The reading and writing of newspapers are cultural activities that inspire much of society’s interaction, whether it be on the scale of the South Coast Herald, which has been nobly fulfilling this worthy task for more that seventy years, or on the scale of the Citizen, a national daily, which has been reaching a wide cross section of the population through the medium of the country’s first language, English, for almost half that time.

These fine newspapers are institutions which can never be replaced by any amount of technology, no matter how spectacular.

It is interesting to note that the philosopher Plato (BC427-347) wrote, “Don’t put too many people in one place, don’t impose more on the physical environment than it can bear, make the maximum use of resources like water and replant trees if you cut them down.”

For the human race it has taken a long time for the Platonic penny to drop.

All being well, I’ll be back in next week’s newspaper.

* Reflections on a Marine Venus; Lawrence Durrell: Faber and Faber, London, 1953. ISBN 0-571-20170-9

**The newspaper is still in print.