Interview with an 85-year-old printer

A good friend of mine, Helmut Pötscher, is a proud 85 years old and worked for over 40 years, more precisely from 1949 to 1996, in Tyrol's largest printing company. A trained printer and master machinist, he first worked at the Wagner University Printing House and then at Moser Holding, which to this day publishes the Tiroler Tageszeitung, Tyrol's largest daily newspaper.

HCG: You worked as a printer from 1949 to 1996. That was long before the digitalization we experience today. So you can certainly give us some interesting insights into what it was like back then. To give us an overview: How many printing companies were there in Tyrol back then? Was there any competition at all?

Helmut Pötscher: There was only one competitor for newspaper printing: Tyrolia, which was responsible for printing the Innsbrucker Nachrichten. Tyrolia was very small, however, and you couldn't really call it competition. The SPÖ also had the so-called Volkszeitung, which was printed in its own printing plant in Reichenau (HCG note: Reichenau is an eastern district of Innsbruck). But that wasn't competition either.

When I started at the TT (HCG note: Tiroler Tageszeitung), which was printed by Moser Holding, the TT had eight pages a day. So I started with eight pages. But since a newspaper survives on advertising, Mr. Moser, my boss, thought they needed to get in more advertising to earn more money. So he hired sales people to sell ads to stores. It took maybe a year until the TT suddenly ran to 32 pages on one weekend. That was a thrill that's unimaginable today.

Naturally, the editorial section was also expanded accordingly. Additional editors were hired. It was incredible; it was an explosive increase from eight to 32 pages. All advertisements during this time went to the TT, which is why it was so successful.

HCG: What else did you print back then?

Helmut Pötscher: We did print some advertising material, but mainly newspapers. During the day, we printed the Bezirksblätter (HCG note: newspaper for each of Tyrol's districts), which also did quite well; they also had a few advertisements. And at night, we printed the TT.

When I started there, the TT's daily circulation was 38,000 copies. When I left in 1996, the daily circulation of the TT was just under 90,000 copies. Mr. Moser was a very good businessman; he knew exactly what to do. For example, we had twelve VW deliveries to areas that a normal newspaper delivery driver wouldn't have been able to reach. Someone from Moser Holding was given a VW just so he could deliver the daily newspaper to a remote farmer somewhere high up in the mountains at 6 a.m. And this principle of total coverage worked.

HCG: What exactly were you responsible for?

Helmut Pötscher: I was responsible for printing the Tiroler Tageszeitung and had a team of 20 people under me. If there was ever a mechanical problem with a machine, it was my job to immediately call a mechanic and tell him, "You have to fix this today! The machine has to be running again by 6 p.m.". And fortunately, that always worked out well; but there was certainly a lot of luck involved, too.

HCG: What kind of qualifications did you need for this job? What was your education like?

Helmut Pötscher: I began my apprenticeship as a letterpress printer at the age of 15. After six months, due to personal differences with my supervisor, I switched to gravure printing, where I remained for five years. During my gravure training, I spent three months working on a sheet-fed press and another three months on a rotary press. This training period was important for mastering the machines.

One thing you had to have as a printer was a good eye - whether you were working in letterpress or gravure. This talent was a great stroke of luck for me. I had to be able to tell at a glance with the naked eye whether an image contained, for example, a tiny bit too much (or too little) cyan (blue), magenta, yellow, or black. If the yellow in one part of the image was too cold compared to the original, I knew it needed more magenta. Sometimes we copied pictures from painters. We made a print and held the original images next to it. When I saw a famous painter, I knew immediately, "The red is missing." The painter looked at me in shock, amazed by my precise eye for color reproduction.

Letterpress printing (or relief printing) works like a stamp. Today, these stamps are made of rubber, but back then, stamps were made of lead. And because the letters were assembled by hand by a typesetter, irregularities sometimes occurred. It wasn't possible to cast metal letters to an accuracy of hundredths of a millimeter. The letters were made of lead, antimony, and tin. This was heated to 280 degrees Celsius and poured into letterforms, which were then assembled for printing.

So I had to give the paper a chance to adapt to this lead stamp. It was never completely even; some letters were a bit thicker, for example, or a bit thinner in another place. You could see that the print result wasn't even.

So I made a proof and looked at the back of the paper. There I could see where the imprint was more or less pronounced – like with a stamp, when you press harder in some places and less in others. I then had to manually level it out with tissue paper. I found the spot that was least imprinted, drew on that spot, and added a piece of tissue paper. And so I looked at everything in detail. One page, for example, needed three places of tissue paper to level it out. This "finishing" (as it was called) was glued behind the paper to be printed, and this way these inequalities could be evened out by typesetting.

That was the art of the letterpress printer. Today, we only use offset printing; letterpress and gravure printing are dead. And in offset printing, there are no such differences caused by the metal type.

HCG: You witnessed the transition from letterpress and gravure to offset printing firsthand. What was that like?

Helmut Pötscher: In August 1994, I retired as a printer. Then I went on vacation with my wife for a week in Carinthia (HCG note: a southern part of Austria). After I returned, however, I received a phone call asking me to come into the office. I was of course very surprised, given that I had just begun my well-earned retirement. I was asked to return to work as an offset printer.

I was very surprised. Especially because I had never trained in offset printing; that would have required a four-year apprenticeship. And we already had trained offset printers at Moser Holding at that time. So, at 60, I was offered an apprenticeship as an offset printer. Of course, I had to discuss it with my wife; after all, we would finally have more time together as a couple now in my retirement. My wife then said that it was a great honor for me as a person that my employer wanted to rehire me just one week after my retirement.

Well, I agreed and limited my renewed working hours to one year, during which I learned offset printing in Germany, Vienna, and Salzburg. Well, then, at my advanced age, I suddenly found myself a department head again – but this time for offset printing.

Offset printing was much easier for the printer. At the same time, the quality of the final result was much higher. Today, a newspaper can achieve such high quality; previously, such quality was only achieved with art printing.

HCG: What did a typical working day look like for you back then?

Helmut Pötscher: Back then, the workweek in letterpress printing was 48 hours (Monday to Saturday noon). However, the gravure printing industry was much busier, so I was required to work 12 hours a day, Monday to Friday, and six hours on Saturday for five years. In my first year, I got one week's vacation; in my second year, I got two weeks. Back then, there was simply no more than that (HCG note: nowadays, employees get 5 to 6 weeks of holiday per year in Austria).

When I arrived at the print shop early in the morning, I would turn on the machines and check if we had enough ink to print. Then I would take care of the printing plates, the daily print schedule, etc. Sometimes we wouldn't finish the work despite a twelve-hour shift the day before. Then I would have to wipe the printing plate with a rubber band so we could continue using it.

I had to have a razor-sharp eye for the rotary press that clamped the sheets of paper. First, the paper was printed with yellow, then magenta, and from there it all began. What we now call registration marks in printing, had to be done manually by eye in the past. Of course, the machines back then were considerably slower than they are today, but I still had to keep an eagle eye on ensuring that the colors were printed with meticulous precision. I could manually adjust the rotary press using a spindle.

I spent virtually the entire day checking the prints with eagle eyes and concentrating hard, and manually adjusting the machines millimeter by millimeter.

In gravure printing, the inks were mixed with alcohol to allow them to dry quickly. (In letterpress printing, on the other hand, you had more time, as the inks were oily.) We worked with these alcohol-based inks all day long. And these alcohol fumes naturally spread throughout the room; we were constantly breathing them in. After half an hour of work, we were all drunk. That was the norm.

Apart from me, none of my former colleagues are still alive; they also drank alcohol in their free time. I, on the other hand, always drank milk. I don't know if that's what kept me alive to this day (laughs), but that was the only difference between my colleagues and me, and I'm the only one still alive (laughs).

HCG: What did you enjoy most about your job?

Helmut Pötscher: I've always felt a certain satisfaction and pride in the products I printed. And when things were particularly time-consuming, I thrived. I loved the challenge. I was at my best under time pressure.

HCG: In your opinion, what was the biggest challenge for the printing industry at that time?

Helmut Pötscher: The invention and establishment of the television. However, newspaper circulation remained stable. So television wasn't really a competitor. Because: There's no television in the toilet, and you wouldn't believe how many people read the newspaper on the toilet. (laughs)