It was a hot summer in Sydney in 1939, but it was even hotter for Ronald McCuaig. The writer, a fixture of bohemian Sydney, was producing his first volume of poetry, Vaudeville—the first book of genuinely modernist poetry by an Australian. There was no question of taking it to a printer—the material, mild for our era, was louche in the extreme for a country that had banned, among others, Madame Bovary, and would later ban Catcher in the Rye.

So McCuaig did the job himself. He purchased a platen press, a device that prints individual sheets between two flat plates, using a lever. The platen press has a history stretching back hundreds of years, the cornerstone of the pamphlet wars of the seventeenth century, and of the idea of a free public sphere.