PRINTERS FUND PRESS RELOCATION

Printers around the country have contributed to a $5000 crowdfund to bring a historic Heidelberg press, dubbed the press that defied Hitler, from regional NSW to the Penrith Museum of Print. 

The 1939 Heidelberg Zylinder Automan had been used to print the Don Dorrigo Gazette for the past half century, before the publisher Michael English had to close operations last month.

The five-tonne press will now be decommissioned and moved from Dorrigo to Penrith, where it will be restored by the band of ex-printers who run the museum. Everyone who contributed will receive a letterpress-printed certificate of gratitude, once the Heidelberg Zylinder Automan is in and working.

According to industry identity Andy McCourt, the late John English, the father of the last owner Michael English, bought the press from a dealer in 1970, but it actually arrived in Australia in 1954, with Seligson & Clare installing it in South Australia.

McCourt says the press was actually finished in the Heidelberg factory in 1939, just three weeks before the outbreak of the second world war. Heidelberg’s managing director at the time, the legendary Hubert Steinberg, was no Nazi, and managed to keep the press, and all others that Heidelberg had at the time, hidden away from Joseph Goebbels, who was busy destroying any that weren’t under direct control of the government.