Making of the Encyclopaedia | Prof. George Menachery | Part 21

 

   Saturday Evening Post

Making of the Encyclopaedia

From the Horse’s own Mouth

George Menachery

Twenty One

I went to P. Orr. & Sons from the Madras Central Railway Station carrying all my heavy and bulky luggage and deposited it all in the two bath attached rooms rented by me on the first floor. The Taxi driver and one of the room boys were very helpful. The first thing I did was to tightly close the water taps in one of the rooms. In this room I put down most of my precious cargo of manuscripts, reference books, etc. That tap was never opened in the next several months. In the other room I freshened up, took my bath and put on fresh clothes and sailed forth; I might almost say sallied forth, because I was entering the fiercest fight in my life against time, against sleep, for money and against hatemongers. Crossing the street I entered the unassuming vegetarian hotel in the corner. I ate three idlys and a meduvada and topped it off with a lovely cup of filter coffee. The bill came to only one rupee and a quarter. For most of my stay in Madras till in 1979 I shifted to an Anna Nagar hotel I used to breakfast in this same hotel. When I came out of the hotel there was a leper always sitting on the footpath with his begging metal mug. I dropped a coin into the mug and went back to my room. Thereafter almost every day I was breakfasting in the same hotel and coming out always saw the same beggar sitting in the same place. And as every day I was handed some change by the hotel’s cashier after I paid my rupee and a quarter I used to drop a coin into his tin mug. After many years, may be after thirty or forty years, a beggar came to my house in Ollur. When I looked at him he averted his gaze, but later I recognized him as the beggar I used to meet every day in Madras. It is indeed a small world.   

After breakfast I used to go back to my room, change, and come out to catch the bus to Vadapalani. The trip was around one hour. Often I used to take a Lassi at the bus stop where the No. 26 buses would stop. That big glass of Lassi which tasted divine in the hot Chennai climate was sufficient to keep hunger away till two o’clock or three o’clock until I could come back from the press at Vadapalani to the city and maybe visit my favorite Chinese or Italian hotel. This lunch was the only luxury I used to permit myself. On occasions when my pocket was near empty I visited a vegetarian rice meal hotel near my hotel where the full meal was less than 10 annas and half meal 6 annas or less. Or I used to opt for a ChannaBatura with a cup of filter coffee, but this was more expensive than the rice meal.

When I reached the press I placed all the manuscripts and photos on the table of Mr. Nayak, the manager. He summoned the head compositor of the morning shift – the press was working in three shifts of eight hours each – and handed over all the manuscripts to him with the instruction to hand over these to the Monotype typist. Then he called the Monotype typist over the phone and told him to compose the material in 8 pt. Times Roman font for double column printing on A4 pages. He ordered coffee for us. He told me that next time I came he would take me for a tour of the vast  establishment and that if I could come back in two or three days’ time some galley proofs would be ready for my proofreading. Actually because I was expecting the final drafts of some articles to reach me only in a month’s time I gave the order in which the pages were to be printed only later so that many pages which were made machine-ready at first could be printed only much later. 

Therefore I started with the printing of the art plates in B&W as well as in colour. We used Japanese real art paper 60 pounds for the B&W plates and 80 pounds for the colour plates. There were some 20 odd German Heidelberg double demy machines available at the press but Mr. Naik wanted to experiment with the new HMT machines purchased. I was a little anxious for the result at first because I did not have much faith in Indian manufacturers. But the results obtained with the HMT machines were quite good. All my doubts were gone when the colour printing for the Encyclopaedia won first prize at the national  Excellence in Book Production ceremony. And Mr. Naik was proud of his decision to use the HMT presses. But for the letter press text printing he sticked with the maevellous Heidelberg machines. When I started printing the first Volume in 1976 they  gave me galley proofs for 120 pages at one go. No other press in south India could lay up so much metal for so many weeks.