This month, our globetrotting salesman Kenz found his way into the National Library of Latvia, where he captured this snap of a beautiful 16th-century printing press. Gini, our MD, worked out that it’d take a whopping 301 YEARS to produce just ONE month’s run of Your Local Link issues using this old-school press (that’s 91,000 copies of a 96-page magazine)… imagine setting those deadlines!
While the printing process has come a long way since the 1500s, the principle remains the same, and we’re proud to continue the tradition, especially as our city is closely associated with the history of bookselling, printing and publishing. As the site of The York Mercury, the first newspaper to be produced in the city around 1719, the Stonegate area was once an epicentre of printing and publishing. Evidence of this heritage can still be seen today, with landmarks including the famous Stonegate Printer’s Devil and the statue of Minerva with books, which sits at the corner of High Petergate and Minster Gates, once known as Bookland Lane or Bookbinder’s Alley.
In recent years, amidst an increasing deluge of AI-created content, the printing industry has evolved and returned to prominence. In part, this is due to the fact that physical publications provide a sense of credibility, trust and permanence that digital content cannot match, whilst offering a tangible sensory experience that AI simply can’t replicate… yet!
We still publish our magazine both physically and online, and we understand that, with the growing prevalence of often unreliable and sloppy AI content, the value of organic, human writing is now more powerful than ever. Many of our staff get stuck in with writing content, and all of our regular columnists and contributors proudly produce their work without the aid of AI. Each and every piece of editorial we publish is written by humans, not bots!
We’ve been proudly printing this magazine since 2003 (as well as a range of other monthly and quarterly publications, including Best Pages, Keep It Handy and What’s On) with specialist A4 and A5 Yorkshire web offset printers who’ve been in business for decades.
We still rely on a Lithoman printing press (although it’s not quite as old-school as Kenz’ Latvian find) to produce our publications, and no – we DON’T use AI to write it!
Visit www.issuu.com/yourlocallink?ps=24 to find the full archive of our magazines online. Watch the videos below to see of a Lithoman printing press in action!
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