The Royal Press presses on after nearly 90 years

Ask Ee Soon Wei about his school holidays and he remembers the stacks of paper that towered over him at The Royal Press (TRP), his family’s letterpress printing house on Jalan Hang Jebat – better known as Jonker Street.

Letterpress is a traditional printing technique in which blocks bearing raised letters or characters are arranged, inked and pressed against paper.

Soon Wei’s grandfather, Ee Lay Swee, founded TRP in 1938. The printing house produced calendars, liquor labels and other items in multiple languages, including romanised Malay, English, Jawi, Tamil and Chinese.

After Lay Swee passed away, his wife, Lim Kim Bee, took over and helped the business grow. Soon Wei’s aunt, Ee Joo Guat, later took the reins.

For Soon Wei, however, TRP was also a place filled with memories of visits with his grandmother. After university, he found himself drawn back to it.

“I wanted to understand my father’s background better and find out a bit more about my family history,” the 46-year-old told FMT Lifestyle.

That search drew him into preserving the old printing house. By then, modern printing methods had transformed the industry and TRP’s commercial work had gradually dwindled. In 2010, it ceased operations as a working printing house.

Rather than let the old presses fall silent for good, Soon Wei gave the space a new purpose as a museum. Today, visitors can step inside and view the machines that once kept the business running, along with the small letter blocks painstakingly arranged by hand to form words.

A grant helped fund conservation work on the former Dutch colonial house, which stands in the heart of Melaka’s Unesco World Heritage Site, while a specialist helped restore the old presses.

Today, TRP’s collection includes about 30 machines. With a history stretching back to 1938, Soon Wei believes it could be one of the world’s oldest surviving polyglot letterpress printing houses.

Among the machines FMT Lifestyle admired was the hand-fed job platen, the earliest printing machine Lay Swee used to produce greeting and wedding cards. Made in Hong Kong and believed to be at least a century old, it was last used in 1978.

While the platen offers a glimpse of TRP’s early days, the Linotype Model 78 shows how the craft evolved. One of the museum’s crown jewels, it sped up typesetting by casting an entire line of text in a single piece of metal.

TRP’s collection of more than 150,000 letter blocks in various languages gives visitors a sense of just how much energy and effort was saved by machines such as the Linotype Model 78.

Putting together even a single line by hand took time and patience. “They had to manually arrange the letters one by one from right to left,” museum supervisor Muhammad Al-Amin Fadeli explained.

Once printed, the words would appear the right way round. Before running a full batch, printers could make a trial print, or proof, to check for mistakes.

Amin shared some of the everyday things TRP once printed, from bus tickets and monthly newsletters to school report cards: a reminder of just how much work went into producing even the most ordinary items.

Now, visitors can get a small taste of that process at a stamping workshop, where they press inked wooden blocks onto paper to create their own prints.

The family’s printing story also continues in Bangsar, Kuala Lumpur, where part of TRP’s collection is on display at APW.

The site once housed Art Printing Works, another of the family’s printing businesses, before Soon Wei helped transform the former factory into a space for cafés, shops and events.

Ultimately, Soon Wei hopes visitors, especially younger ones, will leave with a better understanding of how printers once pieced together a page, one painstaking letter at a time.

“I hope they will appreciate that before technology advanced to where it is today, there was a deliberate process to produce good work,” he said.

“If there’s a takeaway, it’s that good things take time.”

The Royal Press
29, Jalan Hang Jebat,
75200 Melaka

For location, click here.

Opening hours: 10am-8pm daily. Workshop sessions end at 5pm.

Admission is free, but fees apply to larger groups. For more information, contact The Royal Press on Facebook and Instagram.

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