The day the Heidelberg arrived

The press came in through the second-floor window. The staircase to the loft was a Dutch staircase, sixty-eight degrees, narrow, three turns, and the Heidelberg Original platen, at 480 kilograms, was simply not going to make it. The man who sold it to me had warned about this when I bought it. He had also recommended the crane operator, a friend of his from Eindhoven who specialised in lifting old machinery into upstairs studios. That is how we did it: a crane on the Heuvelstraat for one afternoon in March 2014, the press wrapped in moving blankets and slung in canvas straps, and three men inside the loft to receive it and walk it across the floorboards to the rear corner where it has now sat for ten years.

I had wanted a Heidelberg specifically because of one thing: the feed mechanism. Heidelberg Original platens use a vacuum-and-gripper system that picks up the next sheet from a stack and presents it to the chase, holding it perfectly square. On a hand-fed press you lose maybe ten per cent of your sheets to misregistration; on a Heidelberg, you lose perhaps one per cent. The difference compounds. Over a 200-sheet run, the Heidelberg saves you the better part of an afternoon. Over a ten-year career, it saves you years.

What the press was already

The Heidelberg I bought had been in continuous use since 1912. The seller's grandfather had bought it new from the Heidelberger Druckmaschinen factory in Germany, shipped it by rail to Tilburg, and installed it in a print shop on the Goirkestraat that ran until 1986. From 1986 to 2014 the press sat in storage, oiled but not run, in a warehouse in Goirle. I am the fourth owner. I think of myself, in the day-to-day, as the temporary caretaker of a machine that will outlive me by several centuries.

I think of myself, in the day-to-day, as the temporary caretaker of a machine that will outlive me by several centuries.

What I had to fix

Three things were wrong with the press when it arrived in the loft. The rubber on the gripper bars had perished and needed replacement, fortunately an old-stock supplier in Frankfurt still carried original-spec replacements. The vacuum belt had a slow leak somewhere between the pump and the gripper manifold; I traced this to a cracked rubber hose, two weeks of crawling on the floor with a pencil-light, and replaced four hoses to be safe. And the impression cylinder had a flat spot, a previous operator had locked the press with the cylinder under load and left it for what must have been months. The flat spot was machined out by a printer's machinist in Eindhoven who, when I asked his fee, named a sum so low that I assumed I had misheard him.

By June 2014 the press was running. The first thing I printed on it was a single line of 24-point Bembo, in black, on a sheet of Zerkall mould-made paper. I framed it. It is on the wall over the desk and it has not moved since.

What it has printed

Every broadside in the archive ran through this press. Some, the larger almanacks, the 1937 Oogstfeest reprint, required two passes (one for the black text, one for a second colour). The Heidelberg's registration is good enough that a two-pass print, sheet by sheet, is unproblematic; on a hand-fed press it would have been the kind of work that breaks a printer.

The press was sold in March 2024 to a printer in Antwerp who, by all accounts I receive from him, is treating it as one is meant to treat a machine of this age. He has had it serviced. He has replaced the vacuum hoses again. He is printing. That is what one wants for a press: not preservation in a museum, but continued working life in someone else's hands.