Archive Maintenance

Since Covid closed down the Art Institute in March, we’vebeen to the archive only twice. Once inthe spring to complete a dummy publication, and again in September, when KarlHudson of Hudson Grafik in Germany came to service our Linotype-Hell Topazscanner. The scanner had not been maintainedfor decades, and needed attention. There’s another post in the blog further down about our acquisition ofthe scanner in 2017, and how we had it trucked from Ohio to Chicago, andinstalled in the archive.

The Topaz scanner was built in 1994, when the world ofanalog was moving to digital. It’sbrilliant piece of engineering, and for various reasons–the software and thelens–makes wonderful scans. Of course,there are great new scanners made today, but the beauty of the Topaz is that ithas a great depth of field–so it captures both the image and the field onwhich the image is inscribed–so it shows the folds and drop shadows of paperexceptionally well. The scans appear more three-dimensional thantwo-dimensional. A couple of days agothe NY Times had an article about retrocomputing than can be found here: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/style/retrocomputing.html The Times titled the piece “The Impracticalbut Indisputable Rise of Retrocomputing,” but we beg to differ: when itcomes to scanners, some retro scanners are very practical, useful, andirreplaceable.

Karl originally worked for Heidelberg company where hefocused on Pre-press operations, before starting Hudson Grafik in 2003. He is the only technician in the worldspecializing in Heidelberg/Linotype-Hell scanners, which he both services and restores. When we learned he was in theUSA this past fall, we had him come to Chicago to attend to our Topaz, whichneeded both cleaning and lubrication, as well as a new support computer.

Karl basically took it all apart and put it back together,and installed a new Mac, as well as a new chip for the scanner. Our old data transfer process depended onusing a 100MB Iomega disk drive, lol–but with the new computer we can transferdata via USB flash drives. We could haveupgraded the entire scanner to a Topaz X–ours is one of the earliest versionsmade–but we decided to keep our old beast, which we love.

Karl at work: