The weather remains cold and wet, to cap it I’ve now picked up a cold and yesterday was the annual Horse Ploughing and Country Skills Day at the Folk Museum in Holywood. I try to go every year and I’ve made it for the last five or six but yesterday I couldn’t face standing in the cold in a mucky field sniffing and coughing and trying to take photographs.
Anyway with the Folk Museum in mind I continued organising my images and came across these photographs taken in the printers shop in the museum. They show printing frames with type. I have an interest in such things because many years ago I trained to be a Compositor or Typesetter and used similar tools, albeit not as old as these. I moved on to other employment and the memories faded until about ten years ago walking past the Belfast Telegraph I glanced in the window and saw a Linotype machine on display. A Linotype machine was a machine for casting type from molten metal. I know that sounds really dangerous but things were different then – not less dangerous just different. It was displayed in the window like some kind of ancient artefact with a mannequin sitting at it as if operating it. I had used one of these machines and seeing it on display like a museum piece made me feel a bit, well, uncomfortable. I suppose its part of getting not old, but older.
