In the 1970s, punctually every day (except Saturdays) at 9.15pm, an elderly priest (Dun Karm Tonna?) used to leave his house in Siggiewi and drive his old Bedford van towards Blata l-Bajda and Il-Hajja Press.

There he used to find his treasure, the huge letterpress printing machine, that he and only he knew how to deal with its temperamental character especially on cold and humid winter months. When the problems became insoluble, there was the Nazzjon's Beninju (who unfortunately died recently) to call and get extra help.

The letterpress machine was old, certainly second-hand. In my first weeks of employment someone told me with bated breath this machine was so old it predated "bronzini", whatever that might mean.

The Il-Hajja Press succeeded the Empire Press, as it was called when it was housed in the basement of the Catholic Institute in Floriana. In turn, after I left in 1987, it became and still is the Media Centre.

Not all employees welcomed the move to Blata l-Bajda. It had become a habit for some of them to spend time underneath the grating on the street side and watch women passing on top. Once, one employee so engaged became so engrossed that he lost count of everything else and was almost caught out by the manager, Dun Pawl Cortis, nor did he remember he was upskirting at some distance from the floor and he ended up falling and getting quite hurt in the process.

Although housed in a new building, Il-Hajja Press remained anchored to the letterpress technology until 1987 and it was only when it was renamed as Media Centre that it was given sufficient funds to change to offset.

This book straddles the two technologies reflecting a Britain between these two technologies, when the big dailies were switching to the new technology and leaving Fleet Street for suburban and cheaper locations making huge savings on the cost of employment.

Yet, the solid tradition remained and this is reflected in terms that we used in Malta, terms which somehow found their way to Malta, such as "chase" or the metal tray in which pages are made up in the hot metal system.

Somehow we got such terms from the practice in Britain. We obviously had linotypes and also Ludlow to cast headings.

We were a good team, almost a family - Philip Ciantar, Mose Debono, Mario Tonna, Alessio Tabone (who died recently), Leli Pavia and so many more.

The book being reviewed today targets what is called the back bench in newspaper production - the backroom procedure that turns the rough copy submitted by the journalists into a copy that is pleasant on the eye and free from confusion.

Unfortunately, given the massive explosion of the media and the very tight limits within which newspapers and the media have to operate, many opt to do without the back bench. And can I tell them it shows. It surely shows. Those who have some solid background in English despair many times at the huge number of mistakes that are allowed to appear on a daily basis.

Those who text on mobile are the worst but those who mangle English are not far behind. English is not the easy language we think it is and those who do not have a good grounding soon give themselves away. So too the media that employs them.

The bloopers one meets on a daily basis - "where" and "were" become interchangeable, cases that should be accusative become dative or the other way around. The worst is when we think we can correct what we have written, for many times we become our worst enemies.

Those of us who cut their teeth on letterpress (those who worked in Maltese perhaps worse than those who used English) thank heaven those days are over - the counting of spaces, the juggling of words to fit a heading, the race against time... All this and more is done by computers today.

The book also includes as an appendix the Press Complaints Commission's Code of Practice for the Press, as revised in July 1993, in case any bright spark might still think we here can re-invent the wheel.