Don Bosco's "Peerless Pulp-to-Paper-to-Print Machine"
-or Love's Labor Lost

by Fr. Michael Ribotta, SDB

Four years before his death, Don Bosco's Salesian schools began to dot the globe. In Third World countries especially, the Salesian trade school was becoming the hallmark of Don Bosco's efforts to educate the children of the poor. And by 1884 the Oratory vocational school in Turin's Valdocco district had become the jewel in the crown of his work among the sons of the city's impoverished population. It was in that same year that the city of Turin hosted the young nation's first National Exposition of Italian Industry and Commerce in the beautiful Parco Valentino on the left bank of the Po River.

Turin's "Expo '84" was to become the bittersweet culmination of Don Bosco's remarkable and varied entrepreneurial career as author, printer, and publisher. He had sought and obtained a license to unveil his vocational school's unique contribution in the exposition's Mechanics Hall section of the "Labor Pavilion." The school's exhibit featured a wondrously efficient, if lumbering Rube Goldbergian creation. It consisted of a complex assembly of several state-of-the-art machines which was best described in the press as "That Peerless Pulp-to-Paper-to-Print Marvel." This almost grotesque "marvel" was fed at one end with rags and wood pulp, and at the other end it disgorged a printed book as its final product.

The space that had been allotted to the vocational school's exhibit took up four separate sections. The first, which occupied approximately a 150 by 20 square foot area, highlighted an amazing motor-driven Escher Wyss paper-making machine. It gulped down large batches of rags and wood chips, speedily processed the mixture, compressed it through a rotary cylinder and in a trice delivered long sheets of paper which were then cut to size. A spiffy and gleaming Bavarian-made printing press operated in full view. Consuming paper produced by the Wyss machine, it ran off flawless pages of Carlo Breschiani's elegant Italian translation of Cardinal Wiseman's popular novel Fabiola, complete with attractive illustrations. In the background, but in plain sight of the spectators, the school's typesetters and bookbinders, supervised by their Salesian shop instructors, displayed their skills to an admiring public.

A crew of 20-students and Salesian shop instructors-manned the entire operation. To supply the paper-making machine, a lumbering wagon from the nearby town of Mathi regularly delivered a load of pulp mulch and rags from which about a ton of paper was manufactured each day.

Though Turin's Expo '84 drew its biggest crowds on Sundays, Don Bosco's unique exhibit was shut down on the Lord's day. This respite enabled the work crew to attend Mass and enjoy a well-deserved rest.

Even with this closure, Don Bosco's exhibit was a smashing success. Throngs waited in line to view what one paper called "That unbelievable machine from Don Bosco's school." But a keen disappointment awaited him. He had calmly brushed aside the carping derision of the nattering nabobs of the anticlerical press, but when he learned that his boys had not won the prestigious gold medal for the best exhibit, he was crushed. Instead his "unbelievable wonder" was awarded the silver medal. In its commendation the awards committee noted that Don Bosco's exhibit merited only second place because it had used foreign-made machines at the expense of Italian products. Moreover, the committee had awarded the silver medal, not so much for the school's exhibit, but as a recognition for the Oratory's vocational school's achievements in the field of the graphic arts over the years.

The Catholic press was outraged at such blatantly narrow views of the committee. One journalist writing under the byline of "The Old Curmudgeon" protested testily:

The wonderful presentation of Don Bosco's vocational school received a slap in the face for its efforts instead of the gold medal which it richly deserved....This is the man whose workshops train countless boys to earn an honest living; this is the man who takes into his institutions homeless boys who, if left to roam the streets, would only swell the already alarming number of juvenile delinquents whom the police cannot cope with; this is the man who is helping to control the increasing mob of young barbarians who daily threaten our citizens because they face a future that offers them nothing but frustration and despair. And how was he rewarded? He was damned with faint praise.

Don Bosco did not accept the committee's sop with Christian resignation. In a lengthy and uncharacteristic letter of protest, bristling with indignation and muted anger, he laid out his grievances in very blunt terms. The bottom line was unmistakable: The awards committee had done his boys wrong and he would not be placated. As for the consolation prize -- refusing to be consoled, he rejected it.

Perhaps Cardinal Alimonda, archbishop of Turin, best set the entire affair in a proper focus in his eulogy on the occasion of the month's mind Mass following the death of Don Bosco. His compelling analogy put Don Bosco's triumph of failure in perspective:

Don Bosco had an extraordinary gift of transforming what was crude and ugly into a work of art, much like the paper-making machine and printing press which he so proudly exhibited at the Turin Exposition of 1884. There, astonished onlookers watched with wonder and amazement as unsightly cartloads of rags and pulp were magically transformed into attractively bound books.

In similar fashion he transformed young boys who were society's castoffs into his perception of Christian youths. In this way he imitated the marvel he exhibited at the exposition. Where the exhibit turned unsightly heaps of tatters and wood chips into beautiful volumes, the priest crafted the homeless children of society into beautiful souls for God. As for his exhibit, I have been told that not even the renowned printing firms of Pomba, Treves, and Sonzogno, have been able to duplicate an operation that could create a book from start to finish as the boys of Don Bosco demonstrated at our Turin Exposition.