Arts Centre sets up printshop

Press, 31 January 1986, Page 7

Arts Centre sets up printshop

Mr Murray Pyne jokes that he is the inhouse printer at the outhouse press.

He is the full-time printer at the Arts Centre’s Printshop, housed in the complex’s old toilet block. The former main men’s toilet now has linotype machines, a guillotine, hand platens, and soon — if everything goes as planned — a Heidelberg cylinder press. The purpose of the printshop, which has been open for the last four months but only printing since just before Christmas, is twofold.

The Arts Centre director, Mr Chris Doig, wants it to do all the printing for the centre’s tenants and be an added attraction for visitor?.

A visitors’ book started on January 1, proves the

shop’s popularity. It already has 350 names. “Those are just the people who signed,” says Mr Chris Pryor, the Aranui High School teacher who gave most of the equipment. The machines were used at the school’s printshop, run by Mr Pryor and some of his pupils. “We have moved about half of the school’s shop in here,” he said. Mr Pryor is a printing enthusiast and has spent much of his spare time in the last four months overhauling the machines. He acquired them from printing firms and a city newspaper office. He runs the tourist end of the shop, showing people how the machines work and setting them up for people to try printing. “Many Americans have said ‘Great, we only see

these things in museums.’ They have made sure they gat their photographs taken sitting at a press.” Then there is the printing. Mr Pyne says the shop will take orders, though it has not sought them.

Yesterday, the shop was printing the Creative Dance Studio posters. The Heidelberg press — the shop’s only offset press — can print the large posters for the Court Theatre and the Arts Centre.

Mr Pyne was a commercial printer in newspapers and private firms. He is employed at the centre under a P.E.P. scheme.

He says the shop will concentrate on its letterpress work, .but the offset press —( if sponsorship emerges — will allow more flexibility.

Why put the shop in the toilet block? “Well, it was a central space and we had a lot of trouble from vandals so we moved the men’s toilet next door and put the

women’s toilet in the paint room next door to. that,” Mr Doig said. The printshop will eventually form a walkthrough from a planned glassed arcade to the art centre’s quadrangles.