Book review "The Printer"

The Printer

The Printer written by Myron Uhlberg and illustrated by Henri Sorensen is a wonderful picture book about a young boy whose father worked in a large newspaper printing room. The boy explains that his father would type the letters into words and set the printers to ready the paper to print. Every day the boy’s father would come home from work with that day’s paper and make him a newspaper hat just like the ones that he would wear at work. Then the boy tells us that his father is deaf. This was a common job for many deaf men in the larger cities during the early to mid 1900’s. One day at work the father noticed that there was a fire that was spreading quickly and he knew that he needed to warn the other workers. With the printing machines being so loud the hearing workers would still not hear him if he screamed. So what did the father do? He jumped onto an ink drum and waved his arms until he got the attention of a fellow deaf worker across the room and signed to him that they needed to tell the hearing worker that they need to get out. So sign language and the father save the day and everyone’s lives. Uhlberg took many ideas for this story from his own life; his father was deaf and did work for a major newspaper in the 1940’s. Uhlberg does a good job describing the sometimes loneliness that the deaf worker feels when it is difficult to communicate with your co-workers. Uhlberg’s insider perspective gives him unique advantage to seeing life through a child’s eyes when you have deaf parents. The story is simple yet at the same time informative about deafness and the relationship between father and son and the co-workers. Sorensen’s paintings that accompany the text only adds to the authenticity of the work and helps create a feeling for the story and the time frame in which it is set. When asked what readers will take away from his books, Uhlberg replied “The world of the deaf is invisible to the larger hearing world-invisible in plain site. It is only when the hands of the deaf come alive and begin to speak the beautiful language contained in them that the hearing are aware of the deaf world.” The authors note has some explanations about his own father and printing in the mid- 1900’s. There are also instructions on how to make a newspaper printers hat.