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.

Boats since the beginning of time have been built to float, or at least that’s the object, but Universal Studios (which of late does the unusual) has built a boat to sink. It sounds a bit odd, and frankly it looks a bit odd.

Gov. Francis W. Sargent came to Association Hall in Tisbury Saturday afternoon to sign the state land use control bill for the Vineyard - a bill that had its start in the same lovely white and blue meeting place in January of 1973.