Book Arts in Film

by Alastair Johnston

At another time

I might have talked about the representation of books and printing in literature, bringing in Cervantes, Kafka, Arnold Bennett, Honoré de Balzac, and Mark Twain as evidence. The last three in particular have fine descriptions of nineteenth-century printing works in action in their novels. More recently, R. K. Narayan devoted a whole novella in his More Tales from Malgudi, to "Mr Sampath, the Printer of Malgudi," a crazed job printer who becomes a Bollywood movie mogul, and Anita Desai describes a cramped printing office in Delhi in her great work, In Custody. But here I'm going to explore the clichéd used of books and printing in film, thus in the popular imagination.

Let's think about books as dangerous things; books as the offer of an alternative universe. Ideas are amorphous and have to be held in shape, the book is often seen as a metaphor, a container for ideas. The avant-garde Icelandic pop star Björk uses the book metaphor in one of her music videos. More recently book artists' concepts became source material for parts of the successful French film, Amelie. The world-traveling garden gnome was borrowed from a book of photos that did just that, back in the 70s (The traveling gnome was later appropriated for a TV ad campaign by Orbitz.). The central theme of the scrapbook of rejected Photomat portraits also has a book arts predecessor in the work of Derek Jewel a British artist who published such a collection as Found Photos in 1977.

We know about the Book as Religion (the Word of the Lord transcribed), and the Book as Memory Device (replacing the Cathedral, a popular spot for memory exercises in the middle ages): these are both sources of power. Writing itself is an entry into ritual, it's a device to call up certain states of mind that can be allied to other memories. It's simultaneously a means of control and a means of escape from control.

So let's explore films as anthropological specimens and the popular presentation of the word, written or printed.


A common folk myth holds that poets and printers are thought to be drunkards. In the early days printers claimed that since Gutenberg adapted the printing press from the wine press, it was natural from them to have a little alcohol in their veins. Mr Peabody [left], the erudite drunk printer in The Man who shot Liberty Valance is a good example. But most printers, like poets, are drunk with words. Today, however, ecstasy through language is disappearing from folk culture. Computers have broken down the mystery of language: everyone wants to communicate clearly and directly. Writing as sudden illumination is not part of this culture.

Academics have traced the power of language in deconstructionist thinking for a century now. But deconstruction is a well-understood part of the technique of film: flashbacks, montage, speed changes, and zooming in are all devices for fragmenting the narrative or highlighting an important point, and have been since they were first used by Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein in the silent era. I've never given much credibility to those who regurgitate the chewed-up jargon of French semiotics. You want deconstructionist theory? Go to the movies. For printing in a film, it's often enough to allude to a print shop. This visual synecdoche is a common ploy in film. Film makers think if there's something resembling a printing press (even a bookbinding press) in the background, the viewer will get the idea that it's a print-shop. Even an empty California job case propped up on a table says "printers at work" -- this is the metonymic aspect. Well and good, but there's an inherent absurdity to counterfeiters using a tabletop platen or, equally commonly, a medieval print-shop with no press in sight.


In the 1976 BBC TV production of Robert Graves' novel I, Claudius (directed by Herbert Wise, adapted by Jack Pulman), Derek Jacobi plays the title character. He visits a scriptorium where copies of his History of Carthage are being prepared on scrolls. He takes offence at the inclusion of decorative borders of elephants, saying he also talks about concubines, so are they going to draw naked women too? The setting and activities shown all seem very plausible.

The Pillow Book by Peter Greenaway (1996) was loosely adapted from the original work of Sei Shonagon. The main character's own diary and even having her body written upon call up her longing for immortality like Sei Shonagon. She wallows in the older writer's works, like her remembrance of simple things. Here words equal ecstasy, as she rhapsodizes about the scent of paper and skin. For once it's also an example of female power.


The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco is set in trecento Italy. It was filmed in 1986, and directed by Jean Jacques Annaud. All books were firmly in the power of the clergy at that time. But books offer possibilities (such as humour and philosophy) other than Christianity, as William of Baskerville (played by Sean Connery) points out, as he investigates, with Aristotelian logic, a series of murders.

His eyeglasses are seen as a source of magical power, not weakness (that's an example of the bipolarity of folk myth). They allow you to see more, but, because you see more, your brain is fried and you need help -- or stronger glasses! The head librarian, jealous protector of the books, is blind. In a nod to his Latin-American contemporary, Eco calls him Jorge de Burgos and refers to one book as the "edition annotated by Umberto da Bologna."

The scriptorium is well staged: the monks write at slanted-top desks (though, as someone commented in Fine Print, if they were all right-handed the desks would all have to face the same way to get the sunlight and not cast a shadow on the page). They use quills and the feathers are still barbed which is unlikely, but it looks good. (All surviving examples of medieval quills are stripped of their barbs which is more practical as you won't tickle your nose while writing.) There is one glitch here. A work-in-progress (of the murdered scribe) is shown and it's a stretched piece of vellum in a frame, but it's only a single page. To make a book you need pairs of pages, or bifolia, and this is a common error in films. In fact all the monks seem to be working on fancy Incipit pages, nobody is just churning out text. The director pointed out that the pages were custom-made for the film by monks, each one taking six months to a year to complete, and were frequently stolen. The library is well-recreated with wild labyrinthine staircases (inspired by both Piranesi and Escher) that link the rooms full of disordered books. The books are accurately portrayed, stacked flat with titles lettered on the fore-edge, no fancy gilding, and no real organization. "Aren't we looking for one particular work?" asks the young apprentice (Christian Slater). "In time, Adzio," smiles William. His joy at being loose in the greatest library in Christendom is palpable and he doesn't mind that they are lost. He would happily spend eternity in there, browsing.

Prospero's Books by Peter Greenaway (1991), very loosely adapted from Shakespeare's The Tempest, stars John Gielgud and acres of flesh. It's exquisitely staged if quite campy. The calligraphy by Brody Neuschwander, alone, makes it worth seeing. Various books, real and imaginary, are presented, many of them with moving parts: something you only see in old scientific or children's books with volvelles. Illustrations from Robert Fludd abound to remind us of the metaphysical setting of Shakespeare's great work. There are also early attempts at capturing movement, by Etienne-Jules Marey, a Frenchman inspired by Edweard Muybridge. The montage sequences of books are wonderful. (Apparently there's a bibliophagic or book-eating scene in another Greenaway movie, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and the Lover, which I didn't have the stomach to watch.)

The Ninth Gate by Roman Polanski is a biblio-mystery starring Johnny Depp that explores the occult power of the word. Because it's aimed at a popular audience, it's lightweight, popcorn-chewing fun. The mystery turns on three books, each of which has three unique pages of woodblock illustration, which need to be reunited for the satanic power to be unleashed. The artist of the woodblocks is LCF (or Lucifer) and when all nine pages are present he can be summoned. There's the usual silliness about satanic rites that we've seen in scores of Hammer horror films, but at the heart of the movie are the well-created books, purportedly made in Venice in the 17th century. It's not likely that all three copies would be identically bound, as edition binding in the modern sense didn't exist then, but this device is necessary for the storyline.

The Saragossa Manuscript by Jan Potocki, was directed by Wojciech J. Has (Poland, 1965). Again we have the power of the word as the central theme, for the events in the story are predetermined by the title book (it's printed and therefore not actually a manuscript). The implication is that all things are predestined and have even been recorded in this work. At least as far as the main character's grandfather was concerned. The illustrations seem to come from Hooke's Micrographia and other sources. There's a wonderful Cabinet of Curiosity, containing the books of the Cabalist (you can tell he's a Cabalist by his hair-style: spit-curls and a pony-tail), but unless you watch the film several times, you get lost by the complexity of the story-within-the-story device. Unfortunately, again, we don't get to see much typography, only the artwork.


Farenheit 451 by Francois Truffaut was a futuristic story filmed in 1966. Typical of old futurist films it seems very dated now: the boring monorail ride and the flat screen teevees are all-too-familiar. Society has become as conformist as Truffaut (and more famously Orwell) predicted. But its chilling message has a strong resonance today when the Government is attempting to control everyone's thoughts through subpoenaing library lists, bugging phones and reading e-mail without probable cause. In Farenheit 451, firemen burn books in order to create an egalitarian society, so no one can be superior by having knowledge gleaned from books (The opening credits are read aloud because presumably there's no printing). The firemen find an old lady (Bee Duffell) in a house full of books. It seems radical to them, but it's a very mundane library, full of paperback Penguins, art books on Dali, and everyday works like The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy, Brendan Behan's Confessions of an Irish Rebel, The Blacks by Jean Genet, and assorted pulp works. Maybe the set dressers didn't want to burn costly books! Or perhaps this is to remind us how precious commonplace books are. The lady descends to her doom with a quote from the Protestant Bishop of Worcester, Hugh Latimer, who was burned for his heretical writings in Oxford in 1555: "Play the man, Master Ridley, we shall this day light a candle, by God's grace, as I trust shall ne'er be put out." The Captain (Cyril Cusack) goads Montag (Oskar Werner), "Once in his career a fireman wants to know what these books contain. Well, take my word for it, the books have nothing to say." This film particularly demonstrates books as a social tool. There's even an outcast society of people who have each memorized & therefore embody a book (Pickwick Papers, Lolita, Machiavelli's Prince, etc). In the Big Brother world, Montag (who has secretly started to read the confiscated books) is rehabilitated (but it's all on film); in reality he escapes to join the world of book people.

The metaphoric use of books in films continues to resonate with the themes of knowledge and power. It's gratifying in our channel-surfers' visual culture that the permanence and assurance of the book endures.


Part Two, Notes on Printing in Film

Here, with help from friends and Usenet chat groups, I have compiled brief notes on feature films in which print-shops are shown.

1922) Mabuse Der Spieler
Fritz Lang's black and white silent film sets the climax in the counterfeiting workshop where the fleeing Mabuse goes insane and the etching press turns into a huge malevolent head. Interestingly the stone quarry is called Melior, a name used by Hermann Zapf for one of his types, and this word flashes on the screen in dramatic style as they speed towards the quarry. See also, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (for the opening sequence with the informant hiding in a printing plant; lots of interesting calligraphy in the original version, lost in the dubbed version).

1923) The Printer's Devil
(dir: William Beaudine) Unseen. Silent adaptation of Julien Josephson's story "Ink Slinger."

1935) Life Begins at Forty
(dir: George Marshall) Unseen. Will Rogers as country newspaperman; stills show him sitting at a Linotype.

1935 ) Ah, Wilderness!
(dir: Clarence Brown) A newspaper shop with cabinets and a large-cylinder press appear briefly in the film adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's comedy which stars Wallace Beery and Lionel Barrymore.

1935) Charlie Chan in Paris
(dir: Lewis Seiler) An elderly Chinese man is shown with an engraver (burin) scratching around in the background of an 11 pt. zinc etching, easily identifiable from its green back. They put the zinc plate and a sheet of paper on top (registration? no!) in the press which is rather a vertical die-cutter for metal than anything else. It goes WHAM, and he pulls out a nice multi-colour job. (Usenet)

1936) Important News
(10 minute short from MGM, directed by Edwin Lawrence) Jimmy Stewart plays Cornelius the slow-witted typesetter, and Chic Sale plays the wily editor of the Cole County Clarion, a country paper. Very little sign of work in this office. An empty California job case leans on the wall. Cornelius distributes type by taking a letter out of the stick, examining it for a few seconds and then throwing it, from about 2 feet, towards the job case!

1937) Captains Courageous
(dir: Victor Fleming) With Spencer Tracy. Freddie Bartholomew goes to a prep school with a working but very messy print shop. There's a C&P with a flywheel guard, seen in action, but the printer goes back to class leaving it inked up.

1939) Hunchback of Notre Dame
(RKO, dir: William Dieterle) With Charles Laughton as the Hunchback. The King visits the first printers in France, 1473. (Chas XII & Francois I favored the press because they could use it to promote their own ideas; the first printers in France were three Germans under the control of the Sorbonne.) They use a standing book press to print. The printer pulls out a single printed leaf, saying it's a new book "On the Freedom of Thought" by Pierre Grandgois. The time period is also too early for the pseudo-renaissance grotesques seen in the margins of the King's prayer book. The printer tells him he can produce a book in a couple of months and quite cheaply. It's relative of course. They have some Hamilton furniture cabinets with odd lengths of furniture sticking out. Nice to see American enterprise reaching back in history!

1939) Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
(Columbia, dir: Frank Capra) Lewis R. Foster's story won the Oscar. Jimmy Stewart's character, a Boy Scout leader, prints a newspaper in his house. When party bosses try to railroad him, the boys go into action and print a paper in his defense. Realistic scenes of them at work are intercut with scenes of a big city newspaper office.

1939) Outside these Walls
(Columbia, dir: Raymond B. McCarey) Prisoners run a print shop; after release, one of them starts his own small press with help from the warden.

1939) Smashing the Money Ring
(Warner Bros, dir: Terry O. Morse) Ronald Reagan and Eddie Foy Jr play T-men who go after counterfeiters printing money in San Quentin prison. The forgers (who are printing a full-size newspaper on a 10 x 15 C&P) switch from the newspaper forme to the money plate without changing color, or the registration pins. They handle the "wet" paper without regard for smearing; the impression lever is in the "off'' position the whole time. But most remarkably, the T-men can distinguish between "new" ink and 6-month old ink!

1939) Stagecoach
(MGM, dir: John Ford) Classic Western has a classic printing scene. Old printer working at a news-stand with a Reliance press in the foreground. He wears apron, sleeve-guards and an eyeshade. Excited editor runs in: "Billy! Billy! Kill that story about the Republican convention in Chicago and put this on the front page: The Ringo Kid shot on Main Street in Lordsburg tonight!" "I didn't hear any shooting, Ed..." "You will, Billy, you will."

1940) Young People
(20th Century-Fox, directed by Alan Dwan) Shirley Temple movie. Town newspaper office shown, with an incredibly slow typesetter scanning the job case for sorts.

1940) East Side Kids
(Monogram, dir: Robert F. Hill) The gang foil counterfeiters who use a table-top platen to print fake $5 bills. The printer is recognizable by his eye-shade, armbands and apron.


1941) Penny Serenade
(Columbia, dir: George Stevens) Cary Grant buys a country paper in California and summons an old pal from New York to help him. The Linotype is stuck: the old hand thumps the middle of the magazine, getting the Linotype to work again. Plausible. Messy printshop shown functioning with cranky pressmen in paper hats.

1941) Wide Open Town
(dir: Lesley Selander) "Hopalong" Cassidy film starring William Boyd. One of Hoppy's sidekicks tries throughout the film to get the newspaper's printing press to work properly. The press refuses to cooperate thus creating the running gag. (Usenet)

1942) Our Gang "Going to Press"
(episode directed by Edward L. Cahn) A fat kid prints the newspaper by sitting on pages with a locked-up chase attached to the bottom of his legless chair.

1943) Ghosts on the Loose
(dir: William Beaudine) Bowery Boys' flick with Bela Lugosi has Nazi counterfeiters using a tabletop platen. This is so they can pick it up and vamoose when the Feds show up!


1944) The Adventures of Mark Twain
(Warner Bros, dir: Irving Rapper from Harold M. Sherman's play) The film is overstuffed and attempts to cover all aspects of Twain's remarkable life, thus achieving no depth. Ten minutes in, young Sam is shown as an apprentice pieing a forme (seven hours of work!) and saying if anyone could invent a typesetting machine he'd make a million dollars. Half an hour in, Twain (Frederic March) is shown in the gold rush printing office of the Nevada Enterprise. There's a jobbing news-stand with a couple of empty-looking California job cases on it, instead of a cap-case and a lower-case. But overall it looks realistic until the editor, sitting at his desk writing, hands a full typestick to the workman, and says, "Put this on the front page." Similarly, Clemens sits marking up a proof then goes to a proof press to take another proof, without making any changes. An hour and a half in, he meets Paige the madcap inventor of the Paige typesetting machine -- the prototype is hilarious, a giant wooden birdlike structure that pecks at the letters [left].

1945) Our Vines Have Tender Grapes
(dir: Roy Rowland) Margaret O'Brien & Butch Jenkins visits the local paper to talk to the editor. A man sets type very slowly in the background.

1945) The Cummington Story
(dir: Helen Grayson and Harry Madison) A short documentary with music by Aaron Copland. "I just about jumped out of my seat when I saw Harry Duncan in the background operating the Cummington's Washington. The production company hired an actor to play Jim Orchard the local printer, but if you watch closely enough it's Harry doing all the important work. Jim is just standing around holding things. Gustav Wolf, who illustrated Cummington's publication of The Book of Job (1944) is seen. A Golding Jobber is also spotted." (Terry Chouinard)

1948) The Big City
(dir: Norman Taurog) Danny Thomas & Margaret O'Brien movie. A kids' youth club has a C&P and a news stand with an empty California job case on display. Boys work the press.

1950) Mister 880
(dir: Edmund Goulding from a New Yorker piece by St. Clair McKelway) Burt Lancaster plays the FBI investigator; Edmund Gwenn as the counterfeiter.

1952) Hans Christian Andersen
(dir: Charles Vidor) Danny Kaye, as the hero, goes to the office of the Copenhagen Gazette who want to print his stories. There is an iron hand press and several busy employees, but no real work being done. There's an incredibly slow typesetter wearing a visor who has to peer at the copy every three letters and a pressman who fusses about, putting a wad of paper on the outside of the closed frisket. Andersen is so excited about seeing his name in print he goes out and sings a song to the passersby with the surreal notion that he looks at his story in the paper while it looks back at him!



1953) Ben & Me
(A Walt Disney cartoon, directed by Hamilton Luske) Amos Mouse is the key to Franklin's success, reporting the news and telling him to start a daily paper, even helping him print. Franklin, who holds the stick improperly [left], also sets type upside down and in reverse order, calling out characters he needs, while the typesetting mouse collects them from the case. The mouse is also the actual inventor of bifocals and the Franklin stove.

1953) Scandal at Scourie
(dir: Jean Negulesco) A turn-of-the-century Canadian newspaper editor is shown. Behind him through an open door a man sits at a newsstand setting type very slowly.

1955) Bombay
(India, dir: Mani Rathnam) A big newspaper press is shown, running off the daily paper, during Hindu-Muslim tension in the city.

1956) Maverick Queen
(dir: Joseph Kane, from Zane Gray's novel) Grade B western starring Barbara Stanwyck. "At the time the picture was shot, the building that housed the Silverton Standard was crammed full of good old letterpress equipment." (George Chapman)

1957) Johnny Tremain
(dir: Robert Stevenson) Walt Disney movie has a scene set in a colonial print shop. The hero's hand is burned while casting type. (Don Rash)

1957) Peyton Place
(dir: Mark Robson) The mother of all soap operas. A slow C&P is seen running, printing the Peyton Place Times.

1957) Pyaasa
(India, dir: Guru Dutt) A small-town printing office is shown, in the background is a news-stand. When the hero's poems are printed, sheets are shown running on a large cylinder press in montage. They look like newspaper pages.

1957) Aparajito
(Bengal, dir: Satyajit Ray) In the second part of the celebrated trilogy, Apu moves to the big city (Calcutta) and gets a job in a printshop in exchange for a room. We see him operating a treadle platen press in conjunction with another man who feeds the paper. They both appear to have dirty hands & get in each other's way.

1961) Cimarron
(dir: Anthony Mann, Charles Waters) Remake of a 1931 western starring Glen Ford and Maria Schell in which Ford starts a newspaper "The Oklahoma Wigwam." They print wanted posters on an iron hand press: the interesting thing is although they print several sheets they never ink the type. The second printing scene occurs a number of years later and the hand press has been replaced by a cylinder press. As they feed sheets of paper the press eats a sheet and the actor calmly picks at the shredded paper while delivering his lines. (John Laird)


1962) The Man who Shot Liberty Valance
(Paramount; directed by John Ford, from a story by Dorothy M. Johnson) With John Wayne & James Stewart. Set in 1885. The printer, Mr Peabody, played by Edmond O'Brien [left], is a major figure who relies heavily on the bottle for his courage. When it is empty he addresses it in a soliloquy like Hamlet and Yorick's skull. Drunk, he kisses his press. He frequently refers to his old boss Horace Greeley (1811-72), editor of the New York Tribune, with remarks such as "As my old boss Horace Greeley used to say, 'We'll tear their hearts out!'" Great scenes in the print shop of the Shinbone Star, with an iron Reliance hand press: actual presswork looks convincing, but when Valance (Lee Marvin) and his thugs trash the shop and one of them tips up and flips over a jobbing news-stand, you can see the cases are empty. Mr Peabody, the erudite drunk, dies for the liberty of the press. "Taking liberties with the liberty of the press, Liberty?" he asks Valance. The typography of the headlines is a little late for the time.

1964) Cheyenne Autumn
(dir: John Ford) Scene of an iron handpress being used to print a newspaper. (Joseph Rannebarger)

1966) The Ghost and Mr. Chicken
(dir: Alan Rafkin) Don Knotts plays Luther Heggs, a typesetter for the Rachel Courier Express who dreams of being a reporter. While Knotts knows how to hold a typestick, he doesn't put a lead in the stick before picking up type, and he tightens quoins in a forme for no apparent reason. Also there are no presses in sight, and the furniture cabinets are laying on their backs. Pat Reagh calls it a "Fine example of typesetter as wimp!"

1974) The Odessa File
(directed by Ronald Neame from Frederick Forsythe's novel) Spy thriller starring Jon Voight. During a fight in printshop, Nazi counterfeiter trying to push hero's head into a running platen press.


1976) Kings of the Road
(dir: Wim Wenders) The hero (Rudiger Vogler) goes home to his father's printshop. He sets type on a Rogers Typograph which is used to typeset the paper (These machines continued to be used in Germany during the hot type era). He works all night setting up a newspaper forme then pulls a proof, folds it (wet) & hands it to his father (who has slept through it all) to read. There is a typographical portrait of Gutenberg on the wall.


1982) La Nuit de Varennes
(dir: Ettore Scola) Set in 1791 France. Restif de la Bretonne (Jean-Louis Barrault) 1734-1806 is seen talking to the camera while setting type backwards from the side of a typecase, i.e., he is picking sorts from the cap G, O, & W boxes (Maybe he's setting the headline "GO WEST YOUNG MAN!"). Well-known printer, author, pornographer, who composed whole books in the stick, Restif frequently used medieval abbreviations. His print shop has a binding press (looks like a Bertrand Frères standing press), but no printing press.

1982) Gandhi
(dir: Richard Attenborough) Printers use an Albion hand-press in a tent.

1982) Brimstone and Treacle
(dir: Richard Loncraine from Dennis Potter's novel) Starring Sting and Denholm Elliott. A Heidelberg platen seen printing church material. (David Clifford)


1982) Printer's Devils
Laguna Pacific, Ltd./Catalina Video present a film by William Higgins.
The videocassette box of this Gay film has a 1982 copyright; the videocassette is copyrighted 1989. The former, at least, is apparently intended for international bibliophiles, for it has a summary printed in English, French, German and Italian. The English text asserts: "They may work in a print shop that publishes dirty magazines, but these printer's devils have seen and done more than anything between the printed pages. And when the print shop goes out of business [in the opening scene, a young man conveys shocking news to four devils that "no one seems to be buying porn any more!"], the four of them spend their last hours on the job remembering hot times [not, disappointingly enough, in the print shop]...." (Tom Trusky)

1982) The Mysterious Stranger
(dir: Peter H. Hunt from Mark Twain's novel) Decent made-for-tv adaptation of Twain's final novel #44, the Mysterious Stranger, a fantasy in which an idle printer's devil is transported back in time to the early days of the Black Art in Germany (Austria actually). Fred Gwynne ("The Munsters") stars as the crazy alchemist. The medieval print shop looks great though the compositors seem to set type without typesticks and fiddle about with their cases. The "modern" (late nineteenth century) print shop has a few glitches: a forme is locked up without furniture (it appears to be taped together). The apprentice inks it with an ink ball and though he doesn't cover the whole surface, the proof looks like a repro.

1983) Jam Amos Comenius
(Gateway films, 1983) Czech Protestant father of modern education, Comenius (1592-1670), taught children, including girls, according to their age, and introduced pictures into books for children. Good representation of a printshop, including inking a forme with leather balls, though when the printer lifts the frisket, the sheets are stuck to the type. He peels one up, showing that there were two separate sheets of paper laid side by side onto the inked type. This would not have happened. They then hand Comenius the sheet which has two engravings on it.

1983) Jaane Bhi Do Taaro
(dir: Kundan Shah) Hindi comedy with Naseeruddin Shah as a professional photographer trying to start a photo studio with a partner. The first assignment they get, from the activist magazine Khabardar (literal meaning "Beware"), puts their lives in danger. There are references to Western films, including Blow-up. When they visit the newspaper we see several large sheet-fed presses running and they try to get the attention of a press mechanic who is under one of the presses and slap his bottom only to find out that the mechanic is a woman.

1985) To Live and Die in L.A.
(dir: William Friedkin) Willem Dafoe in a movie about a money counterfeiter.

1985) Huckleberry Finn
(dir: Peter H. Hunt, made for TV) The "king" is off at a revival meeting with Huck, pretending to be a reformed pirate. Meanwhile, in the deserted town, the "duke" enters a print shop and proceeds to print several items on a table top hand printing press of some sort. He prints a runaway slave notice and a flyer for their horrible Shakespeare performance. (John Deason)

1991) JFK
(dir: Oliver Stone) A quick scene with Lee Harvey Oswald (Gary Oldman) running some (presumably) Communist tracts on what appears to be an 8x12 C&P. (Michael Babcock)

1992) Newsies
(dir: Kenny Ortega) Newsboys in 1890s New York print a broadsheet on a C&P. Typesetting and printing look very credible; the only flaw is they manage to print 100,000 by hand overnight.


 1994) Princess Caraboo
(dir: Michael Austen from John Wells' story) Starring Phoebe Cates. A wonderful reworking, set in Regency England, of the story of George Psalmanazar who claimed to have visited exotic lands and invents whole histories and languages to explain his tales. In a country printing office, there is a small Albion. The pressman works up the ink balls AFTER he has inked the forme. Sheets are hung up to dry and a typesetter is seen. You will also enjoy readings from Edmund Fry's Pantographia, 1799.

1995) Catherine Cookson's Gambling Man
(dir: Norman Stone from Catherine Cookson's novel) Unlike the preceding, a very credible print shop is seen, with type stands, an Albion that looks like it is in use, and part of another machine, perhaps a paper cutter. I believe it was filmed in Preston Hall Museum, Stockton-on-Tees. Like the other Cookson film adaptations the setting and period details are exceptional.

1997) Addicted to Love
(dir: Griffin Dunne) Comedy starring Meg Ryan and Mathew Broderick. "Although it does not have letterpress printers in action, the action takes place in a derelict printing shop." (Geoff M.)

1999) Snow Falling on Cedars
(dir: Scott Hicks) "A scene shows a working Linotype and what I think may be a Wharfdale or similar hand feed press printing a newspaper in the Northwest during WWII." (Tom Conlon)

1999) Les Enfants du Ciècle
(dir: Diane Kurys) Disappointing script mars story of romance between Georges Sand and Alfred de Musset. Apparently the opening credits have a sequence shot at the Imprimerie Nationale under them.

2000) Quills
(dir: Philip Kaufman) About the Marquis de Sade (Geoffrey Rush)'s life in the Charenton insane asylum. After his death the director (Michael Caine) puts the lunatics to work printing his works. Wonderfully detailed printshop with sewing frames, typesetting, and printing with a Stanhope press. "The compulsives set type and the manic depressives ink," the director explains. A typesetter works at a news-stand with the lower case on top, upside down, but then he is probably schizophrenic.

2001) The Mystic Masseur
(dir: Ismael Merchant from V.S. Naipaul's novel) About the Indian community in early 1950s Trinidad. The main character is determined to publish a book, and there are three scenes in a real Port of Spain print shop, with a tabletop (perhaps a Kelsey) and a Heidelberg in operation. Among other continuity glitches the typography is mostly digital (though the author's book does seem to be printed in Times Roman) & you see the shadow of a traffic camera in Oxford!

2002) Catch Me If You Can
(dir: Steven Spielberg) Tom Hanks plays an FBI agent pursuing a forger (Leonardo DiCaprio). He takes a forged check to a printshop where the wise printer tells him it was printed on a Heidelberg and such work is only done in Germany, England and France. Hanks then goes to France and finds the forger. Most improbable.

2002) The Hours
(dir: Stephen Daldry) About Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Leonard is seen very slowly hand-setting type while a boy prints dampened pages one-up on a table-top platen. This seems a bit silly since they have a 10 x 15 C&P standing unused. The C&P rollers have been left on the platen, which will flatten them -- but then this was an amateur printing operation!

2006) Miss Potter
(dir: Chris Noonan) Romanticised story of children's author Beatrix Potter & her romance with her publisher. As is well-known she was quite persnickety about the appearance of the colour in her books. A pressroom is shown in action (It looks like the printing museum at Innerleithen in Scotland). There's a Wharfdale and a Columbian in action, however, on scrutiny we see there's no frisket on the Columbian therefore the close registration of the colour blocks would be impossible. Also the lockup is very bad.

Television programmes

1960s) Twilight Zone episode "The Printer's Devil"
The Devil (Burgess Meredith) saves a desperate newspaperman's life and offers to become his partner to save his paper. He modifies a Linotype so that anything he typesets becomes true. ("SCHOOL PRINCIPAL EXPOSED AS BIGAMIST!") He really knows how to run a Linotype. On close inspection however the following details emerge: The type he is setting turns out to be the same line over and over again, there is no ink on the rollers, and no tympan on the proof press he is printing with.

1970s) The Waltons
John Boy runs a C&P to print his stories. Ben his brother shown locking up a forme (actually taking out a piece of furniture and putting it back in then tightening the quoins).

1970s) The Rockford Files
"Rockford keeps a small press in his glove compartment and prints business cards with it, they dry immediately!" (Mark Barbour)

1970s) Mission Impossible had an episode about an attempt to destroy the economy of some eastern European state by flooding it with counterfeit currency -- printed by one man on a Pilot (or similar) press. A washing line in the background has about 30 bills attached to it with clothes pegs. (Bob Richardson)

1970s) Dad's Army in the UK included an episode called "The Face on the Poster" and the story revolved around the printer mixing up two halftone blocks: one being a photo of an escaped German prisoner of war for a "wanted" poster, and the other a member of the Home Guard who had volunteered to be featured on a recruiting poster. The episode featured a number of scenes in a wartime print shop and had a press running in the background. (Bob Richardson)

1976) Clayhanger
I tried watching this BBC miniseries on PBS but it was so boring and so drawn out I couldn't get through it. In Arnold Bennett's novel there is a wonderful description of a country printing office. The film crew asked James Mosley, Librarian of St Bride's, to find a location and he did, in the West Country of England, complete with Columbian hand press, but apparently no one coached the actor who pushed on the bar instead of pulling it.

2001)Touched by an Angel
Episode #720 The Sign of the Dove. A failing printer plans to blow up his print shop. (Asa Peavey)

EPILOGUE

From the above list, and doubtless many more occasions, one can spot frequent appearances of printing on film. One film I heard about is called San Francisco Lesbians. Apparently it has a sex scene in a print shop with "nice type banks and a C&P": location unknown. It was seen by a local bookman who declined to be recognized for my survey. I located it here but have not seen it.

Other areas of exploration include dummy books and posters used to dress historic sets. I love watching historic dramas and checking out the background ephemera. Often you will see enlarged photo-stats from John Lewis's book Printed Ephemera. One recent American film had music posters from the 50s recreated by Hatch Show Print. I often notice newspapers used in films that are blank below the headline (there are several in Preston Sturges' 1940 classic The Great McGinty). There is a website run by eagle-eyed Mark Simonson that has details on anachronistic typography in films.

Finally some acknowledgements: Frances Butler for editorial suggestions; Pat Reagh, Eric Holub, Asa Peavey, Cory Reisbord, Kathleen Burch, Carlyle Johnston, Jay Rosas, Will Morrison, & Terry Horrigan all recommended films. Thanks to the staff of San Francisco Public Library who invited me to show film clips and talk about them for the Christmas lecture in December 2002. (The first part is a transcription of my talk.)

Copyright 2006, 2008 by Alastair Johnston. Additions/corrections to editor[at]poltroonpress[dot]com
Last update June 2008