Memories on the Block

By Nicholas Basbanes on February 15, 2011 4:31 PM

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Call it bittersweet, if you like, but the sale next week of the entire contents of the City of Boston's Graphic Arts Printing Plant at 174 North St., is yet another passing of the torch, and proof positive that the times surely-are-a-changing. Some 175 lots will be hammered down, according to Stanley J. Paine, the auctioneer retained by the city to clear out every vestige of a printing operation that closed last year after 78 years of service, and everything, in his words, is not only old, but downright antediluvian. "We're selling the room," he told the Boston Globe. "It's all antique. All of it. Everything has its own particulars and story."

Anyone want a Vandercook Letter Press? Or a Linotype Model 31 Typesetting Machine (there are two of them)? A Heidelberg Sheet-Fed Printing Press? A Miehle Vertical Letter Press? Saddle stitchers, folders, paper cutters, collators? Drawer after drawer filled with wonderful metal type? A Super Portland Paper Punching machine? Some splendid oak filing cabinets from the 1930s and '40s? The sale will start at 10 a.m. on Thursday, Feb. 24, on-site, and for those who can't make it, bids can be submitted online via Bidspotter, where a complete list and description of the lots--with photos--is listed. (Bids, in fact, are already being accepted.) I am particularly charmed, I must say, by Lot 154, pictured here at right, identified only as Antique Letter Press S/N 28546. I don't have room in my cellar--and I don't imagine my wife would be much too pleased in any case--but I sure am tempted.

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Memories on the Block

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