BUENA PARK : A Look at Printing Machines That Work

While touring the printing exhibit at the Science Museum in London, Mark Barbour noticed something curious: The bulky old machines weren’t exactly grabbing the museum-goers’ attention. Most, in fact, were just gathering dust.

With that in mind, Barbour set out to do something different. Using more than 100 printing artifacts, he created the International Printing Museum in Buena Park, which boasts the largest working collection of printing machinery in the world.

There you can see a Linotype operator churn out a line of words the same way the machine’s inventor did in 1886.

“The general public doesn’t (find) much excitement when they see a piece of wrought iron,” said Barbour, a calligrapher who is now curator of the Buena Park museum, which opened in 1988.

“But when they see you turn it on and that it still works, that changes things,” he said.

Located in an out-of-the-way industrial complex on the city’s eastern border, the museum is home to the Ernest Lindner Collection of Antique Printing Machinery. Lindner, called the ultimate pack rat, owned a Southland company that made printing machinery.

He began collecting various pieces of equipment more than 40 years ago, storing the immense wrought iron machines in a warehouse before deciding to give them a more permanent home. His collection became the centerpiece of what was to become the International Printing Museum. Buena Park was chosen as the museum site because thousands of tourists flock there each year to see Knott’s Berry Farm and other established attractions, officials said.

At the museum, a tour guide leads visitors around, telling the stories behind the artifacts and showing how they work. Visitors soon learn that they are looking at not just typesetters and presses but at small snapshots of history. “Most major events in history coincide with a breakthrough in the communications industry,” Barbour said.

Take the case of Enoch Prouty.

The Baptist minister from Wisconsin wanted a fast way to spread his anti-alcohol message, so he built one of the first newspaper presses of its kind in the 1870s, known as the Prouty Power Press. On this hand-cranked machine, weighing about 4,000 pounds and costing about $550 to build, he spit out copies of his “Temperance Watchman” and distributed them to neighbors in Boscobel, Wis., about 120 miles west of Madison.

Eventually nicknamed “the grasshopper” because of the movement of its legs during operation, the press took two men to operate and could make 1,500 impressions an hour, considered record speed in its time. Prouty’s 120-year-old press, found in an abandoned print shop in Calico Rock, Ark., still works and is on display in Buena Park.

To help make history more exciting and understandable for schoolchildren, corporate executives and other groups, museum officials recently added an 80-seat theater where actors playing characters such as Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain--both known for their fondness for the printing process--relate tales from their days.

“If they don’t call me Mark Twain, they call me Einstein,” laughed La Habra resident Sheldon Craig, who resembles both men in his white wig, cream-colored overcoat and trousers. During his 15-minute skit, Craig, an actor and former newspaper reporter, recites from Twain’s work while sitting in a leather chair on the small wooden stage.

Besides the current exhibits, the museum also offers classes on a variety of topics, from bookbinding to calligraphy. A cafeteria is now being completed for patrons as well.

In the meantime, Barbour is busy filling up the museum’s 25,000 square feet of space with more pieces to help chronicle 500 years of communications. Not an easy task, he admits, adding that they will be previewing a new press in January. Although the collection is strong, there are still “a few gaps,” Barbour says. “We are still in the process of collecting.”