Too many people think that printing is a necessary evil that they tolerate as a means to an end. They miss the beauty, the possibilities, and yes, the fun that goes along with this incredibly diverse field, a field that, with the advent of 3D printing, the new possibilities we’re discovering in digital printing and the old. The fashionable beauty of offset printing becomes more diverse every day!
It probably won’t surprise you to learn that printing has its own history. That’s a fact. What you may not know is that you live in it every day. You just don’t know yet! For example, did you know that:
- Were Benjamin Franklin, John Dunlap, and the Wright brothers printers by trade?
- Did Paul Revere (a silversmith by trade) engrave the plates for the first colonial currency?
- The printing industry may have given rise to the phrase “Watch out for the p’s and q’s,” a printer’s admonition to his apprentice to be careful when placing letters on an old-style press. (This has been debated, as there are many possible origins for the phrase and no one is really sure which one is correct.)
- Is the dot above the letter “i” called a tilde?
- We have about $500 billion worth of US currency currently in circulation, most of it outside of the US?
- In 1999, a 1943 copper penny sold at auction for $112,500.
- When a main printer was printing a page and discovered that a particular font was empty, was he…upset? Very annoying. Hence the phrase, “out of class.”
- The first book to be printed on a movable type press was Gutenberg’s Bible?
- 3D printing was used to test the lighting for each scene in the movie “Avatar?”
- Have people been printing since 1447? (Which means that, in fact, there is a very distinct possibility that some of the pieces you see in the museum ARE older than dirt.)
- Did Pringles ever combine inkjet printing with food coloring to print trivia questions and answers on their index cards?
Move along. Tell me you never had a Pringles. Or read about Paul Revere. Or tell your co-workers to stop being so cranky. And we’re not even going to talk about taking care of your p and q!
Think of everything we’re doing with print these days. Think of the potential of 3D printing for manufacturing. So tell me printing can’t do AMAZING things.