As the 75-year-old Fengyi Printing Plant transitions from analogue to digital, its owners said they would keep the factory’s eight molding machines and 250,000 Chinese-character press pieces as family heirlooms.
Fengyi was the largest printing house south of Taichung in its heyday, said Lo Sheng-mao (羅伸茂), 72.
The company was founded by his father, Lo An-kuo (羅安國), in 1943 and called Lo’s Printing Bureau, Lo Sheng-mao said.
After World War II, it changed its name and moved to its current location in 1956.
Lo Sheng-mao said he joined the family business after his father told him he would make little money working as a teacher.
As the business grew, his father bought lead molds for characters, which proved to be a profitable investment as orders surged, he said.
The demand for letterpress pieces was driven in part by the 1964 Baihe Earthquake, which caused devastating fires in Chiayi City and destroyed the lead types at many plants, he said.
Fengyi thrived with the demand for letterpress, employing more than 100 mold machinists, typesetters and printers at its peak, he said.
The molding machine for lead characters had three fonts — Regular Script, Imitation Song and Black Body — and each font came in seven sizes, he said, adding that the production cost per lead character was NT$50 and the pieces were sold in sets of 10,000.
One full set of bronze mold plates cost NT$9 million [US$294,098 at the current exchange rate] at the time, which was “enough to buy a street back then,” he said.
The family printing shop printed some of the past century’s best-selling books in Taiwan, including the 1970s novel Broken Boat in a Stormy Sea (汪洋中的破船) by Cheng Feng-hsi (鄭豐喜), he said.
However, the 1970s were also a time of great peril for printers, because typological errors could be construed as ideological crimes during the White Terror era, he said.
One time, a weary-eyed sorter at the plant picked up the wrong type — gong (共) instead of yang (央) — and ended up printing “communist government” (中共, zhong gong) instead of “central government” (中央, zhong yang).
The security services descended and investigated the sorter for a long time before concluding that it was an honest typographical error, Lo Sheng-mao said.
Another time, a sorter took the character ruo (弱) for qiang (強), its antonym and neighbor in the box, changing the meaning of a propaganda slogan.
Both cases ended with the sorters involved turning in written apologies, he said.
“Everyone could have landed in jail or worse,” he added.
Lin Shu-jung (林淑榕), Lo Sheng-mao’s wife and co-owner of the plant, said she still remembers how the most skilled sorters could pick 9,000 types in six hours of work, or 25 types per minute.
“The times have changed and the sorters are gone,” she said, adding that their son, who has a business management degree, has taken over the plant’s operations.
Nobody wanted to buy the molding machine or the types at anywhere near the price that the plant paid for them, she said.
“Anyhow, they have become our heirlooms,” she said.
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