La Bella Macchina

(CN) — I knew that if I complained about a print job, I would have to go to the printing house to OK the redo. But the printing house was in Verona, Italy, so it was not such a terrible prospect.

The book is called “Spain Back When," and it contains my father’s black and white photos organized into chapters preceded by one-page introductions I have written. The printer had gone too light on the prints, draining them of their drama and mood.

So I took the 14-hour plane ride to Rome and a four-hour train ride to Verona to make sure the tone on the reprint was dark enough.

I went with our Italy-based bureau chief Audrey Rodeman to EBS Editoriale Bortolazzi Stei in the town of San Giovanni Lupatoto outside Verona. It was a spread-out printing plant. There was a central administrative area and warehouse-like wings on either side of it, with huge floor spaces where pallets holding printing paper were stacked high.

In one of those wings were two Koenig & Bauer Rapida presses, a good 60 feet in length, that printed the pages in the book. A third smaller press ran the covers. I was immediately at ease, even happy, around the presses.

For no reason that I know of, printing has always been a subject of deep interest for me. I think of Ben Franklin and the revolutionary pamphleteers. It is the instrument of communicating the written word, with all its power.

So I learned something about the printing process by working with the master printers who, over the course of two shifts, controlled the huge machine. Every hour or so, after one big sheet with 16 images on it was run, we had to go down and check it and OK it.

We walked down from a kind of conference room, with art-book-filled shelves at either end, down to the printing floor. Once I OK’d the sheet, which was about 5 feet by 5 feet, the printer presented me with a felt pen to sign on the sheet itself.

The press, the KB, is comprised of four towers about 6 feet high connected to each other, each applying one tone: a base black, a highlight black and a gray, which the printers called pantone. The fourth is used when running color. On the large sheet of 16 images, the master printer could adjust tones for each row of four. If an image was too dark, he gave the row more pantone or more highlight black.

The master printer, Giovanni, was quick with his fingers on a control panel, adjusting the tones. But for each change I requested, he had to run off about 50 of the huge sheets off the press, which were then used as paper rags to clean the machine. There was no pushback when I asked for adjustments. But I stopped after three.

We stayed there from about 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., through two shifts of printers. When we arrived in the morning, we had to go in through the door used by the workers on the printing floor. I liked going in that way because the smell of ink hit me right away. It was everywhere in the building. And we walked unquestioned across the floor, because everyone knew us after a while.

One of the young apprentices, Matteo, showed us the tumbler-like machine that flips the sheets that have already been run on one side so they can be sent through the press a second time. I hadn’t thought about it but, of course, a book is printed on both sides of the page. So the big sheets had to be sent back through the 60-foot monster on the second side also, then adjusted by the master printer, as needed or requested.

The last part of the process where the sheets are cut, then sewn together and the spine is glued to the cover — and the end pages glued to both the cover and the first sheet inside the book — took place at another company after the pages were printed.

We Ok’d the final sheet on a Thursday in the evening, and by then most of the folks we worked with had gone home to their pasta and wine. We came back the next morning for no other reason but to go around and say thanks and give abbracci — which were received with wide and true smiles — to the master printers on each shift, their apprentices, the graphic artist who adjusted the cover, and the Bortolazzi family member who runs the show.

The whole run of working together made me love the Italians, because, as a tourist, I had not. And for the next couple days it felt kind of empty to not be heading down to the print shop in the early morning.