The challenges and triumphs Nick Howard of Howard Graphic Equipment Ltd. (Mississauga, Ontario) faces as he pursues his passion for the esoteric tasks of acquiring and refurbishing antique printing and bindery equipment.

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2. A
s head of Howard Graphic Equipment Ltd., one of
the world’s longest operating suppliers of used and
reconditioned printing equipment, Nick Howard
obviously knows his way around machines. His day-to-
day work requires him to juggle all of the many intri-
cacies of machine mechanics, freight, logistics,
appraisals, international currency exchange, and im-
port/export controls in 72 different countries. His team
of specialized technicians at his Mississauga, Ontario,
rebuilding facility can overhaul virtually any piece of
offset, web, packaging, or bindery equipment, regard-
less how newfangled or complex.
But perhaps less well known is the fact that, in his
spare time, Howard devotes his considerable expertise
to the even more esoteric tasks of acquiring and refur-
bishing antique printing presses and bindery machines.
Following on last month’s cover story exploring the
recent revival of interest in old-fashioned letterpress
printing among printers (Letterpress Revival, PrintAction,
June 2013), their clients, and the general public, I spoke
with Howard recently about his passion for procuring
and restoring printing antiques.
Back to the beginning
Letterpress was the princi-
pal printing technology
from the time Johannes
Gutenberg commercial-
ized it in Germany in 1440
until the last half of the
previous century. Howard
explains that he has a per-
sonal, professional, and
historical affinity for let-
terpress because,“It’s a re-
version to where I started.
My dad sold letterpress
machines.”
Howard’s father, H. W.
Howard, known as Bill
throughout the industry,
was born in 1918 in Lon-
don, England, and left
school at age 14 to be-
come a letterpress ap-
prentice in a local printing
shop. After serving in the British Army, Bill immigrated
to Montreal, Quebec, in 1947, where he secured work at
the large printing and lithography firm of Ronalds-Fed-
erated Limited. After H. W. launched the family business
in 1967,Howard,started working alongside his father,ini-
tially on his summer holidays from school.
“Back then, almost all printing equipment consisted
of things like platen presses, hand-lever presses, cases,
gallies, compositor’s stones, furniture, chases, quoins,
keys, and reglets – so much specialized paraphernalia
for setting type and letterpress printing,”Howard rem-
inisces. “I love it all now, I guess because my father
taught me so much about it, and he was such a good
pressman.You have to be really skilled to be a letterpress
pressman, because the makeready is so complicated,
and the presses don’t have a single button on them.
Modern offset pressmen have no idea how much skill
it requires.”
As a young man, Howard often helped his father by
making pick-ups and deliveries of equipment by truck
between cities in Ontario and as far afield as New York.
What he remembers most was how heavy, bulky and
hard it was to stabilize old letterpresses and paper cut-
ters.“Boy, I hated moving that stuff,” he laughs.
Some of the equipment literally weighs thousands of
pounds, requiring Howard to use chain ratchet systems
and pipe rollers to move it – a task made even worse by
the narrow doors, hallways, and elevator shafts in old
buildings, not to mention the fact that his clients rou-
tinely lied or grossly underestimated the difficulties of
the move when they reported by telephone beforehand
where the machine was located or how many stairs were
involved.
VICTORIA GAITSKELL
JULY 2013 • PRINTACTION • 13
Continued on page 22
Restoring
Printing’s
Past
Restored printing equipment
come in all sizes, pictured is
a Cropper Peerless platen
press, circa 1920.
Nick and Liana Howard
have been collecting and
restoring antique equipment for
30 years. Here they stand beside a
Klein-Forst +Bohn cylinder press, circa 1870.
This ornate eagle is the
counterweight on a Figgins
“Coloumbian Iron Press”
circa 1887.
Photos by Clive Chan

3. 22 • PRINTACTION • JULY 2013
Hobby versus a business
Today, Howard frequents the Michael’s
chain of craft stores, where he combs the
shelves in search of materials he can use
to solve the myriad of detailing problems
that come with restoring antique equip-
ment. He observes that, although his fel-
low shoppers used to be mostly women,
he now sees more men in the store. He
also notices that both genders are often
browsing for craft materials to create
things of substance to give to others;
small handcrafted mementos or cards,
for example, instead of mass-produced
printed cards or e-cards.
“We’re bombarded. No one has the
chance to read all the information that
comes to them,” he theorizes, “but by
contrast specially handcrafted messages
stand out as being personal and impor-
tant. I think this is one reason why letter-
press is growing again in popularity.”
He also thinks that, although all the
disciplines involved in printing are com-
mon to other industries, such as machine
tool making, printing is unique because
people feel a special appreciation for its
products: “No one wants to look at a
flange after it comes off the production
line, but printing is something everyone
wants to spend time looking at. People
especially love to
see how a sheet of
paper comes off a
letterpress with the
ink still wet and the
paper embossed by
the pressure of the
type.Whatever comes
off these machines
seems very special
and is something
you keep.
“Letterpress
printing seems to be
an especially good
creative outlet for
people in later mid-
dle-age who have
more disposable
income and want
to invest in a pas-
sion,” he adds.
Howard tracks
the current revival
of popular interest
in letterpress through
his own profes-
sional network of
specialized con-
tacts, as well as on
the Internet: “Once in a while I enjoy
checking the U.S. Website BriarPress.org
[a 75,500+ member letterpress commu-
nity], which provides classifieds, discus-
sion groups, and a listing of many of the
little letterpress operations and some
more substantial ones that are starting
up. At the Iron Handpress Group on
Flickr, you can see photos by over a hun-
dred people from all over the world who
are enjoying the freedom of choosing and
setting type and printing whatever they
want to print on handpresses.”
But he says a lone guy in a garage with
a Chandler & Price platen who will fiddle
around with any printing job you ask
him to for a price doesn’t really have a
proper business going. He continues: “If
people want to create a successful busi-
ness around letterpress, they shouldn’t
venture outside the realm of what it’s
good at doing. They will certainly have to
stay small and specialist. Just like book
binderies, whose work requires so much
skill that it’s hard to find craftsmen who
can do it well, you can’t have 30 guys
working in a letterpress shop.
“But to earn some decent income with
letterpress, you have to create a new niche
for things like greeting cards, wedding
stationery, personal announcements, and
high-end advertorials where the client
wants to get away from anything to do
with modern, high-volume printing,”
says Howard. “Ad agency campaigns for
luxury products like Aston Martins can
use letterpress to blow the pants off some
really special printing jobs that will be
hand delivered to the customers. That’s
the kind of project where letterpress is
going to excel commercially.”
Antique printing sources
Howard inherited some of his antiques
from his father, who just happened on
sundry old bits and pieces in the course of
doing his job. H.W.’s legacy to Howard in-
cludes a curious little tabletop pencil
printer, possibly dating from the 1920s.
Howard explains that,after the pencils were
printed, they would have been dipped in
varnish; so originally the pencil printer
would probably have
come in a kit which
also included a rack
used to dry the
varnished pencils.
Howard explains that
olden-day printers
would have bought
devices like the pen-
cil-printing kit in
order to serve a par-
ticular customer’s
needs or to extend
their company’s
products and serv-
ices with new value-
added offerings.
Howard’s more
recent acquisitions
derive from an odd
variety of sources.
For instance, he
bought a collection
of several antique
machines that had
once belonged to a
dealer in Antwerp,
Belgium, from the
dealer’s sons, who
did not share their
father’s interest in the collection. (Howard
says in general other dealers, especially
the younger ones, have little interest in
antique equipment.) His other recent
purchases have included a press that a
seller in one Ontario city had cleared out
of a defunct printing shop in another city
200 kilometres away. Another press was
sold to him by a contact in Salt Lake City,
Utah, whose father had been a printer for
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints in Palmyra, New York.
“In the States, it’s much easier to find
antique equipment than in Canada, be-
cause of all the abandoned buildings,
warehouses, and factories in Rust-Belt
[former Factory-Belt] cities that have
Gaitskell
Continued from page 13
Continued on page 24
In order to restore the ornate decorations
of some of the older presses, graphic
designer Anita Kumar was hired to hand
paint designs.
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4. 24 • PRINTACTION • JULY 2013
stopped paying their taxes,” explains
Howard. “Reality-TV shows with people
bidding on the contents of abandoned
storage units have started appearing on
American television for similar reasons.
At one time, a lot of manufacturers
would have had their own print shop, so
it’s not unusual to find printing equip-
ment in some of the older abandoned
factories.”
Although auctions were once another
reliable source of antique equipment,
Howard says he now finds they have
dried up, mainly because other dealers
have already snatched up most of the de-
sirable antiques, and any that remain sell
at auction for ex-
orbitantly high
prices.
Additionally,
over years of col-
lecting, he has
come to accept
the fact that cer-
tain types of an-
tique printing
equipment are
simply too rare
to be acquired:
“At first, my
master plan was
to get one of
everything ever
made. But I
found it was like
planning to
climb Mount
Everest. When I
got to the first
plateau, the air
got thin. Then
after I dug
deeper and real-
ized how little I
knew previously
about the history
and manufactur-
ers of printing
equipment, I re-
alized it was an inconceivable challenge
to collect each and every machine. There
were too many different manufacturers,
many of whom have practically disap-
peared off the face of the earth, along
with their equipment. As a result, it is
only possible to collect the makes and
models that were manufactured in suffi-
cient quantities because some of them are
still around.”
He adds that a further challenge in
buying old machines occurs because
hard-to-find parts often go missing. For
instance, because Golding letterpresses
were so often used to print short runs of
things like tickets, the printers who oper-
ated them typically discarded the press’s
ink fountain and simply dabbed ink di-
rectly onto the disc to ink up their jobs.
Consequently, it’s a challenge nowadays
to find a Golding letterpress with the ink
fountain still attached.
A labour of love
Although Howard has been collecting
antique equipment for the past 30 years,
he says he and his wife/business partner,
Liana (whom he met in 1978 when they
were both working for the family busi-
ness) have been spending more time on
it lately. They will text each other excit-
edly whenever one of them happens
upon a tempting prospective acquisition
for their antiques collection.
So far, despite all the challenges that
acquisition and restoration entail, Liana
and Nick have already filled a large room
at Howard Graphic Equipment with a
dozen or so machines dating from the
past two centuries, all lovingly restored to
pristine working condition. Metal parts
and paint jobs gleam like new, and some
of the equipment displays such quaint
artistic finishes as gilded edges, decora-
tive finials, or other metal or painted or-
naments.
Recently Howard, who was recruited in
2012 to serve on the seven-person steering
committee for the
Mackenzie Print-
ery and Newspa-
per Museum in
Queenston, On-
tario, has donated
a beautifully re-
stored Heidelberg
T platen press to
the museum’s col-
lection.
Still more an-
tique machines are
awaiting restora-
tion at the rear of
the company’s re-
building facility.As
a general practice,
Howard says he is
first concentrating
on refurbishing
the simpler, more
straightforward
old machines and
is leaving restora-
tion of the rarer,
more complicated
ones for later. In
some cases,he and
his technicians
must rely mainly
on their own past
experience and ex-
pertise in overhauling modern machinery;
but in other cases, they are lucky enough to
have for reference one of the many antique
operating manuals in Howard’s huge, im-
pressive printing library. Alternatively they
may find guidance by studying similar early
machinery in museum exhibits like Henry
Ford’s printing equipment collection in the
Detroit metropolitan area.
Does Howard foresee strong commer-
cial prospects for his own special niche of
restoring antique printing and bindery
equipment?“Only four of my technicians
have the exceptional skills required for
this kind of work. Restoring a smaller,
fairly simple piece of equipment might
typically take them about 200 man-
hours. But restoring a large, complex
piece might require $15,000 or $20,000
worth of labour,” he estimates.
“Would most of these labour-intensive
restorations find a market that would be
willing to match these prices? Nope,
probably not.”
Gaitskell
Continued from page 22
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In addition to working on modern presses,
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vintage pieces.
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