Monkey Coffin (More Troubles With Terminology, Dept.)

Ich bin kein Affensarg

In film days:

Printer: Human person who made prints, usually a darkroom worker making photographs on light-sensitive paper. Also, in commercial parlance, a person who operates a large printing-press, also called a pressman.

Printmaker: Artist or artisan who made fine-art prints using any of a number of craft-based method for creating multiple artworks, e.g. woodcuts and linocuts, copper-plate etching, silkscreen, intaglio engraving, stone lithography, etc.

These days:

Printer: A machine, usually but not exclusively inkjet, that makes prints.

Printmaker: Same as old definition.

Missing in action, or rather co-opted to the point of confusion, is a word for the human person who makes prints, including one who uses a printer! Is it really the case now that a printer uses a printer to make prints? Or is that a printmaker, who somehow switched from stone lithography or linocuts to Epsons? We need a new word. ("Printer" dates from the 15th century.)

I was very proud to be a printer, back when I was one. It was one of the few things I was ever expert at doing. I'm not happy with having my title usurped by a large plastic box the size of a monkey coffin that nobody can keep working.

That is all,

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Tom Burke: "'Computer' would be another term which has lost its humanity. Prior to the 1960s a computer was a person who performed calculations; NASA (and its predecessor organisation) employed many computers in the 1950s. Here's a link."

Mike replies: Lensmakers employed (carbon-based) computers as well, to calculate ray tracings. Silicon-based computers do it infinitely better, because far more calculations can be performed.

Bob Johnston [no relation]: "I know how you feel. I used to consider myself a good darkroom printer. I couldn't believe it when all that skill, accumulated over years of practice, was thrown on the scrapheap. I knew what was going to happen so I was an early adopter of the whirring box. Those early printers were terrible. It was well-nigh impossible to make a black-and-white print without a colour cast. Now they are really very good. My Epson P800 is still printing after six years of use. Oh for the days though that all you had to replace every year or so was the enlarger bulb.

"I still have my darkroom. It was fun to show my grandchildren how it was done but otherwise it's just nostalgia."

Stan B.: "The one that gets me is 'editing;' back in the day, it was separating the wheat from the chaff. Now it's for, it's for...ya know—making the thing look good. Don't know what the word for that is, or should be—but I thought 'editing' was already taken!"

Comments

[Terry Letton]

“IT person” making prints with a digital printer is purely a matter of manipulating computer files to instruct the machine.
Of course knowing what you want it to look like helps as ever.

[Richard Tugwell]

Same thing happended with "computer"

[Stephen J]

Indeed Mike, I am no Shakespeare, but like the apocryphal ‘monkeys in a room’, I very occasionally compose a nice snap.

On those rare occasions, I will email, or take an impression of same to a specialist printmaker, e.g. 'The Printspace' and pay them to make a thing, something that I can perhaps frame and hang on a wall or put in an album.

I believe in employing said artisan, when I feel it necessary.

As for whether I am wasting the time of said artisan, is a moot point, since art is in the eye of the beholder, but the really good stuff, endures.

Sadly, none of mine will ever fit into the “really good stuff” category, my walls are more akin to those found in 'Long Kesh' during the 1970’s.

[Yonatan Katznelson]

"Missing in action, or rather co-opted to the point of confusion, is a word for the human person who makes prints, including one who uses a printer!"

Printerer?

[Peter Barnes]

A good and timely question Mike, as one who has recently taken to selling his ability to take a file full of pixels and turn it into a passable print. There is no doubt in my mind that there is still considerable craft in doing this well, despite (or because of) the smarts built into the new technology. I don't think we need a new word, just an expansion in meaning of the old word. From henceforth, I proclaim, I am no longer a printer but a printmaker.

[Bear.]

Don't agree with the second definition. A printmaker is any human being with sufficient expertise to make that dang black box - sorry, printer - produce the prints they want.