A genuine American eccentric dies

By Dennis McLellan

Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — In England they called him "that crazy American who ships junk iron to the States."

Ernest Lindner didn’t mind. He was on a mission: to hunt down and save 19th- and early 20th-century printing equipment to preserve the history of an industry that launched mass communication.

To do it, the Los Angeles printer and printing equipment dealer traveled to China, Russia and India over the course of 50 years. In the process of wandering through old printing shops, warehouses, antique stores, abandoned basements and ghost towns, he assembled the largest private collection of antique printing machinery in the world.

Lindner, who made his collection available to the public by founding the International Printing Museum in 1988, died of heart failure early this month in his home in Glendale. He was 79.

"He spent his lifetime saving the artifacts, tools and machinery of an industry which continues to have lasting importance on our civilization, the industry of printing," said Mark Barbour, director of the museum, which hosts up to 20,000 visiting school children a year.

The museum, which moved to Carson from Buena Park in 1997, houses 150 major pieces of equipment.

"I was able to search out exactly what I needed in a way that no museum would have the time or resources to match," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1984.

Over the years, he turned up an 1875 Grasshopper hand-powered newspaper press in a dilapidated print shop in Calico, Ark., and an 1850 Imperial printing press in the basement of a tobacconist shop in Long Sutton, England. One of his most recent finds was a rare 1840 Columbian hand-press he found in the basement of a print shop in India.

Old printing presses weren’t Lindner’s only passion.

He restored vintage automobiles and drove in the "London to Brighton Run" in pre-1905 cars six times. For 10 years, he was a member of a gas-balloon racing team that flew over the United States, Australia, Germany, Lithuania and Russia.

And advancing age didn’t curtail his spirit of adventure.

At 70, he went on an expedition to the North Pole. A year later, he co-piloted a MiG jet over Moscow. And the year after that, he joined an expedition to the South Pole.

Just three days before he died, Lindner returned home from a 1,700-mile trip through Switzerland, Germany, Italy and Austria with a vintage car group.

Lindner is survived by his wife of 55 years, Harriet; and children, Kris, Ernest and Jennifer; and four grandchildren.

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