Portland Newspaper Press

I have been working as a graphic designer in the newspaper industry for the last six years and had never seen a printing press until the other day. I was pretty stoked to see what goes on, on the other end. Here's a couple pics I took on my tour of the Press Herald printing facility.

This is the press used to print the paper. It's fucking huge. It reminds me of a giant fire truck.

These are the giant reams of paper they put in that thing.

This is the room where all the ink is stored and pumped into the press. It's a shitload of ink.

This is a linotype machine. Despite it's large size it created one line of type at a time. Thus the name. It had hot lead running through it and would pour the lead into a form. I think it looks like something H.R. Geiger would have drawn.

This is where they would assemble the slugs from the linotype machine. Making a newspaper back in the day was ridiculous. Hot lead, razor blades, fumes. But at least you could smoke butts in the workplace back then.