You Have WHAT in your Library?

During the design process of our library renovation project, a comment was made by another department head at one of our many meetings, that he wanted a big piece of machinery out of a storage building because it was taking up too much space. When I looked puzzled, our mayor mentioned that it was the old printing press used for the local newspaper and that it had been donated to the City of Thomasville when the Thomasville Times relocated buildings a decade or two ago because they would no longer have space for it. Originally, the mayor wanted to display it in the Civic Center Gallery when it was remodeled over a decade ago, but they didn’t have room for it there either. A small cabinet of typeset was in the Gallery of the Civic Center but nothing else had been taken out of storage since being donated to the City. Being familiar with typeset and having my own small version at home for bible imprinting, I asked to see it. We left the meeting headed for the storage building, as it was only walking distance away and as soon as I saw it I knew I HAD to have it in the new library!! I had the perfect space for it that could be seen as soon as you walked in the door! The photos immediately below were taken while the machine was in storage on the day I fell in love with it. The mayor sent a number of city employees over the course of the next year to round up the rest of the pieces that were donated with it because they had been scattered in various city buildings for storage. The rest, you could say, is history! Without this machine, who knows if we would have ever created the museum within our library. It was this piece and one other that I'll post later, that inspired the museum portion of the Thomasville Career Readiness Center, Library, and Museum.

While I am not certain of the exact purchase date, this Linotype was purchased from the Mobile Register and printed The Thomasville Argus (1898-1900), The Thomasville Echo (1900-1921), and The Thomasville Times (1921-today). While the Linotype stopped printing the actual Thomasville Times newspaper around the 1970s, it was still used into the 1990s to print address labels for newspaper deliveries.

It took many hands and a lot of work to get the Linotype in our building, but the beautiful Linotype is on display at the Thomasville Career Readiness Center, Public Library, and Museum and can be seen during regular business hours, alongside other machinery used to print newspapers and other publications long ago for our small community.