As the steamer Nobska slipped past the Chops on the ebbing tide late yesterday afternoon, there was none of the celebration that greeted her arrival in these waters just about 50 years ago.
Her decks were empty, her boilers cold. When she left Nantucket slip yesterday she didn’t sound one long blast on the steam whistle people hereabouts have come to know as hers just by the sound - she was on the end of a Coastline Towing Company hawser.
This morning’s Gazette is the first printed on our new Goss Community offset press. It’s also the first to be printed on the Island in the familiar South Summer street shop since January 31, when we abandoned the hot metal-letterpress printing process in use at the Gazette for half a century. Since then the paper has been printed for us by commercial printers in Arlington.
From 1846 when the Vineyard Gazette was founded by Edgar Marchant until 1920 the paper was printed from movable types, first invented in China in some unestablished background of the past, and invented independently by Gutenberg in Europe in the mid-15th Century.
James and Sally Fulton Reston, publishers of the Gazette, have announced plans to replace the paper’s traditional hot metal letterpress printing machinery with modern photocomposition equipment and a web offset press. Next Friday’s Gazette will be typeset and printed by the new method.
Nuzzling the shoreline with the curiosity and daring that made its ancestors easy prey for whalers, a young right whale is swimming slowly northward along the East Coast toward Martha’s Vineyard. The 20-ton mammal is keeping odd company with a giant sea turtle, and together the silent mammoths have been snooping lazily around Long Island for about two weeks.