The Goss Community Press, which prints the Vineyard Gazette each week, rolled onto the Island and was delivered to 34 South Summer street on April 18, 1975 and completed its first print run on May 9, 1975.

This puts the old workhouse at 50 years old; definitely a birthday to celebrate.

On Tuesday, April 15 the community is invited to learn about and pay tribute to the press at the next Tuesdays in the Newsroom series, beginning at 5:30 p.m. Usually the series takes place the second Tuesday of each month during the offseason, but was delayed a week due to town meeting season beginning on April 8.

That first day, the press ran at a rate of 14,000 papers per hour — a huge improvement over the Duplex letterpress, which had been in use since 1929 and peaked at 2,500 papers an hour. The times and technology were a changing, and the Gazette was moving into a new era, one that included offset printing, a procedure where plates were made from negatives, then mounted on a cylinder and immersed in ink.

The Goss Press cost $65,535 in 1975, which translates to $401,363 today.

On April 15, Gazette librarian Hilary Willcox will discuss these details and more as she takes the audience through the history of printing the Gazette, which dates back to 1846, with a particular emphasis on the Goss Press.

Pressmen Music Moreau and Jim Pfeiffer will also be on hand to give a tour of the pressroom and talk about the intricacies and oddities of keeping a 50-year old machine, which takes up a good portion of the Gazette’s ground floor, in operation each week.

The event runs from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. There is no charge but an RSVP is requested. Register in advance at rsvp@vineyardgazette.com.