Thin Ice Press York

Yorkshire Post

A new Centre for Print has opened in York, celebrating the city's rich printing press history. There are to be workshops and events, and soon a gallery and shop, and it has a museum element with great iron printing presses in use that date back to the 1850s. Prof Helen Smith is head of University of York's English Department, which helped launch a temporary version after lockdown and has now secured philanthropic and grant funding for a permanent home.

Transcript

00:00I'm Helen Smith, I'm a Professor of Literature at the University of York,

00:04but I'm also Director of Thin Ice Press, the York Centre for Print,

00:07and that's where we're standing today.

00:09The centre is tucked into the lovely St Anthony's Gardens in the heart of York,

00:13and it's an open access centre for anyone who's interested in printing or printmaking of any kind.

00:18We set up recently, and we're opening up to members,

00:21to anyone who wants to learn new skills in our workshops,

00:23to people who just want to drop in and see what we're up to.

00:26We'll have a shop and selling gallery, and we'll be running all sorts of courses

00:29and offering lots of different opportunities for people to get involved.

00:32The centre's needed for different reasons.

00:34So one of them is that, as you've seen,

00:36the equipment that you need for printing is often bulky, it's heavy, it's hard to maintain.

00:41We've got a really brilliantly equipped centre,

00:43it's looked after by our technicians, there's lots of support on hand,

00:46so anyone who wants to get their hands on to old-fashioned printing equipment

00:50and have a go at creative work, or who has a project that they want to carry out,

00:53can come here and can get access to the equipment and the materials that they need.

00:57But most importantly, print is on the verge of dying out,

01:00so old-fashioned printing, and especially letterpress printing,

01:03is on the red list of endangered crafts.

01:05And if we don't intervene, and if other people don't step in

01:08to preserve these skills and these materials and this knowledge,

01:11then it won't survive for generations to come.

01:13We've picked up our equipment from a lot of different places.

01:16It is old, and it's got a lovely history,

01:18and that ties in, of course, with York's brilliant and lengthy history of print.

01:21But the equipment that we have, some of it has come from a place called the Type Archive,

01:25which has its own fantastic story of a search to secure and recover this equipment

01:30when it was really on the verge of getting lost in the 1980s and 1990s.

01:35So when type was getting thrown into skips,

01:37when presses were being dismantled and sold for scrap,

01:39there was a woman, Sue Shaw, who collected an awful lot of it and brought it together.

01:43And we're really lucky to be able to give some of that a new home

01:46and a new life here in the York Centre for Print.

01:48We call ourselves Thin Ice Press for two reasons.

01:51So in the winter of 1739, the River Ouse in York froze over.

01:56And as happened in European capitals all over the place, they had a frost fair.

02:00So people poured out onto the frozen river.

02:02There were ballad singers, there were ale sellers, gingerbread sellers,

02:05and there was an enterprising Dublin-born printer called Thomas Gent,

02:09who lived and worked here in York.

02:11He went out onto the ice with rollers and a blanket,

02:14and he set up a souvenir print so you could go along, get your name set in type,

02:17and keep a souvenir of the day.

02:19And in his autobiography, he talks about the idea that the ice started to creak

02:23and to crack around him, and everyone ran away.

02:25And then he wraps up by saying that actually everything was fine, no one got hurt,

02:28they came back and he made loads of money.

02:30So we thought we'd call ourselves Thin Ice Press,

02:32partly to acknowledge that when we set out on this journey,

02:35we were treading into new territory and a little bit uncertain,

02:38and partly as an homage to York's printing history

02:40and the brilliant stories that there are behind printing and its legacies.

02:43The reception has been fantastic so far, and it's lovely to see people in here.

02:47So when we've had workshops, when we've had people in and working,

02:50it's just lovely to have that buzz and that creativity and that energy.

02:53And we've had visitors from all over the globe already,

02:56so already we've had volunteers from a printing museum in Germany dropping in to see us,

02:59someone setting up his own press in upstate New York.

03:02So it's just been fantastic, and we're really keen to see people

03:05and to get that buzz and to keep things running in really exciting, creative ways.

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