Library hosts Press On Print Bike

Visitors to Wendover Library on one morning at the end of July were treated to an unusual sight.

Parked near the reception desk was a special bicycle with a small hand-operated printing press on the back, owned and operated by Nick Hand. This summer Nick has been cycling between libraries all around the country, printing special bookmarks that celebrate something different about each one and the famous figures who used them. For Wendover he was printing a poem, “The Mid Country,” written by local author Will Burns, who has been a friend of Nick for years. Will and his wife Nina were there too, as visitors to the library were engaged in a chat and a demonstration of the little press, together with a free bookmark. Children were invited to have a go at pulling the lever that operated the press to print their own bookmark to take away.

Nick’s day job is running a printing workshop in Bristol called The Department of Small Works (www.departmentofsmallworks.co.uk), specialising in traditional pre-digital methods such as hand-set type, letterpress and linocut printing to produce short-run books, cards, posters and art prints, as well as teaching the craft. He says he is touring with the Print Bike to publicise the vital part that libraries play in local communities, as well as to demonstrate the intimate links between books and printing.

The press itself is a small hand-operated model called an Adana, which is popular with craft printing operations. First introduced in the 1930s, it uses raised type and images that are inked and pressed against sheets of paper. Surprisingly you can still buy new Adana presses from their maker Caslon, a 300 year old company now based in St Albans.

The custom made Print Bike has an elongated frame with a platform on the back that holds the press, another on the front for baggage, and panniers beside the rear wheels. “It was hand-made by a friend,” says Nick. “I work in a craft printing workshop, and the next workshop is a bike maker. We used to have coffee together, and the idea developed. It was quite a difficult project.” Although the bike looks incongruous, he says the low centre of gravity makes it quite stable.

It’s served him well over the years – in 2014 he took it all the way to Mainz in Germany. This was the home of Johannes Gutenberg, who invented the first cast-metal typesetting system and practical printing press back in the mid-1400s. There’s a museum dedicated to Gutenberg in Mainz, and so Nick rode his print bike all the way there and set it up in the foyer as a tribute.

After a break of a few years while he concentrated on his printing business, Nick put the bike back on the road again this summer, and started a new “Press On” tour of selected libraries around the country, splitting it up into legs of three or four towns. He pedalled to Wendover from Oxford, where he had been demonstrating his press at the Bodleian Library the previous day. After Wendover, the next destination was Stevenage. After that he was planning to cycle from Coventry to Sheffield via Much Wenlock, and then the final leg was to Edinburgh and up to Orkney and the Shetland Isles (taking trains and ferries as needed, as the bike isn’t quite that versatile!).

Simon Eccles