Hot Off the Press!
A blog post by associate director Anita Kassof.
This past Monday, I traveled to Cheverly, Maryland with the Fleischmann family and Amy Freese, designer of Lights & Shadows, Arnold Fleischmann’s memoirs. Lights & Shadows, which I edited, is Arnold’s account of his family’s flight from Nazi Germany, his service with the U.S. Armed Forces, and his participation in the postwar transfer of power in Germany. The book is lavishly illustrated with historical photos and documents that trace Arnold’s journey.
Those photos and documents were one of the main reasons we traveled to Cheverly, home of Mosaic Press, which is printing the book. We wanted to make sure that as it came off the press, the photographs printed well, the colors were true, and the reproduction quality was consistent.
So, what does a press check consist of? Fortunately, Arnold’s son, Alan, snapped some photos of the process.He’s looking at PDFs of the book, which Mosaic had produced for Amy Freese and me to review before things went on press. A couple of weeks ago, she and I checked these proofs to make sure all the text and photos were in place, and the pages were in the right order.
Groups of pages are printed more or less at random, cut down, and put in the right sequence. The press sheet is in a light box that enables you to see the colors as accurately as possible.
After approving the first press sheet (it looked great, though we did ask them to add a little more varnish to the photos to really make them “pop” off the pages), we toured the press room. With several huge machines running at once, the racket was quite something.
Please join us at the Museum on November 9, from 6 to 8 p.m. for a book signing event with Arnold Fleischmann and see for yourself what a beautiful book we’ve produced.