Still thinking about that Newsies printing press scene.

[conuly]

The printer is being kept in a basement. In NYC. Sure, it's got a dustcover over it, but dust is not the issue. I'd be worried about rust. Has anybody been maintaining that thing? Keeping it oiled or, um, whatever you do with printers?

No, better not to think about that scene too hard, otherwise it doesn't make any sense at all. And on a related note, I need to go down to our NYC basement and empty the dehumidifiers again.

Comments

[rebeccmeister]

After the rains this summer, our basement in Albany is a horrible, moldy mess!

[conuly]

No amount of money fixes this humidity.

[frandroid]

I haven't watched that show, but I assume that if that printer is working on the regular, the paper going through it and the generated paper dust would absorb a lot of ambient humidity.

[conuly]

It's a movie - and also now a Broadway play with different lyrics - not a show.

And the entire plot point hinges on the fact that this printer is old, outdated, and no longer in use. That's how they had access to it, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to use it.

[movingfinger]

It really depends on the type of press. I haven't seen the show or the movie. A Gutenberg press was super simple and a skilled print shop could get 4000 sheets a day out of it. Single-operator Franklin presses are durable (named after Franklin, not invented by him). Steam presses capable of running thousands of pages per hour go back to the 1830s. Later 19c models that printed continuously off big rolls of paper printed double-sided, cut, and folded even faster, and then the really massive machines came in.

Anything more complicated than a simple Franklin press is going to take time and expertise to set up, check, test, and get running. The real problem in my mind would be that anything bigger than a Franklin was probably damaged in moving, if this thing is in some guy's basement and not just shoved off to the side in a corner of the print shop where it was first installed. They're also going to have to get the right materials, no idea whether special sizes of paper rolls were needed (probably), spare parts for whatever perished, and inks, and know how to use them.

But it's a movie, and movies are where magic happens.

[movingfinger]

The 4000 sheets a day on the Gutenberg would be with trained and experienced operators, a crew handling the multi-step process very fast. The number really surprised me when I learned it, I had guessed hundreds of pages a day off one of those.

The Franklin press spawned a huge number of imitators and offspring. If you look up Chandler and Price tabletop presses, that's what they're modeled on.

[captainsblog]

Somebody started an actual charm school in a shopping plaza near us.

It's called Ladies of Grace.

There's one of those rent-by-the-day lettered signs out on the corner. First it said MODELING AND ETIQUETTE. This was right around the time a huge asphalt milling machine showed up to rip up the street in front of it.

Now, though, the girls are putting on a show, apparently.

NEWSIES.

Somehow I don't remember the sashes or tiaras on the original cast members.