A shining addition

When Kiss & Bite attended the Bovey Tracey Craft Fair as part of the Real Art Make Print team, retired IT consultant David Wootton asked if we would like his late father’s Adana platen.

It was an HS3 model, made in the early 1950s, and had been stored in David’s loft for years, but thanks to refurbishment by Ocean Studios holder Matt Holmes it can now be used by the community.

It now works like new and has a sparkling electric blue livery. Adana presses can print anything up to A4 and are really mobile, so are great for use at fairs and shows.

Adana is Britain’s oldest maker of small letterpress machines and is still trading. It can trace its roots back to 1692 and had many of its components made in a factory in nearby Tavistock. These presses were built to last and are virtually indestructible.

In 2016, due to a resurgence of interest in letterpress printing as a hobby and a commercial product, the Adana ‘Eight-Five’ was put back into production by Caslon Limited. The relaunched press is the ‘85C’. Both old and new Adana machines can still be found today in the hands of enthusiasts and professional printers worldwide.

The Norwegian resistance movement used Modified Adana presses during the Second World War to print their illegal newspapers and the RAF delivered them by parachute under the cover of darkness.

Many were bought after war by demobbed servicemen who built successful printing companies from their kitchen tables.

Kiss & Bite’s founder Alan Qualtrough owns an Adana bought in Bury and whose Lancashire owner wrote and printed cowboy stories for his local community.