For our gathering’s booklet, we wanted to use the opportunity to learn how to produce it ourselves. By coincidence, there is an artist collective in Freiburg, Germany, that recently bought and restaured an old offset-printing machine, a Roto 614 from the 1970’s. They introduced us to it and assisted us in producing our booklet with their offset-printer. It is quite a complexe machine that is using printing plates that are exposed to light. Following exposure to light, the different areas of the plate take on ink, or are coated by the other liquid used by the machine, water with additives. At the beginning of the printing process, you have to adjust and find the right balance between the amount of ink, and water with additives, in order to get a good print. After having done all this, the offset-printer can print automatically all the copies of the page you prepared. The process has to be repeated for every single page. For finishing, we were able to usse the collective’s folding machine and a big stapler from their workshop.

All in all, we spent one whole day in their workshop, producing 300 booklets. Compared to the numerous working hours we spent on writing and editing it, that’s really not much time 😉