Printers’ Picnic to be observed

Investor Strategy News will not be published next week, Easter Monday (April 13), a public holiday. We’re having a break. Believe it or not, it is more difficult to produce a media title in lockdown compared with being out and about. But the media has a long history of taking the Tuesday after Easter off.

From the early 20^th century until the 1990s, what became the Printing and Kindred Industries Union used to enforce what most of the population of Sydney referred to as “Children’s Day at the Show” (Royal Easter Show), because everything was half price. The PKIU held an annual picnic day. Printers didn’t work on that Tuesday, to the annoyance of publishers.

But most didn’t go to the organised picnic either, which was a fairly low-rent affair. Publishers – their clients – would usually be invited but only ever go once. The only one I went to was held in Cronulla Park near the beach in southern Sydney. Even as a journalist, I was shocked at how much beer was consumed that day.

With the changes in media due to digitalisation, the occupation known as “compositors”, who cleverly read mirror image so they could construct the newspaper pages made up of hot metal, and the typesetters who produced the ‘line-o-type’ for them, died out.

But, out of deference to the great history of printing, dating back to the Chinese in about the 6^th Century A.D., by historical accounts, or Caxton’s printing press in the 15^th Century by popular accounts, we will not next publish until Monday, April 20.

– G.B.

Investor Strategy News