Printers Room and Equipment used

[Oliver K]

The Printers room is located on D-Deck as part of the 1st class galley, you can view a 360 panorama of the room here (which by the way is a great resource for checking out rooms on titanic)

My question is what kind of equipment and what printing process would be used to produce all the flyers, menus, announcements, etc, in this room, the large machine you can see in the panorama, my brother and i believes it is a photocopier.

I'd be enlightened to hear more information on this subject.

 

[Rob Lawes]

I am willing to bet good money it was one of these:

Gestetner - Wikipedia

We used a modern version of one of these made by the same company to bulk copy on our Navy ships in the early 90's.

 

[Oliver K]

Thank you! My parents claimed to have used hand-crank printers in school so i'm going to guess they were something like this!

 

[Rob Lawes]

Yes, we had one in my school in the late 70's early 80's.

You wrote the thing you wanted to copy on carbon paper then used that to put on the printer drum and when it rotated through the ink, where the carbon had rubbed off, the ink stuck to the paper and then transferred onto the copy. The ink was a purple colour and smelled terribly.

 

[Jay Roches]

The print shop used real printing presses. There are photos of menus that very clearly show embossed black letters. The shops also published the first class passenger list. I'll add that I'm intrigued about the small-caps typeface used on the menus. Every reproduction Titanic menu gets the typeface wrong, except for the props commissioned by James Cameron.

 

[B-rad]

This is from 1905