The Press Before Monterey
The Zamorano Printing Press is known by many different names, including: The Old Monterey War Press and Logada Press, and The California Ramage.
As the name suggests, the Zamorano Printing Press was a ramage type printing press. Edward Kremble, a press historian, references a similar type of press when he writes “This old Franklin machine, with its worm eaten and well worn timbers is an exact counterpart of the press which, also furnished by the city of Boston…” (Kremble 50).
An Interesting fact about the Zamorano press is that it had a Spanish typeface and that it had no letter "W." During this time period, Spanish did not have the letter "w" in it's alphabet and thus when it was used to print in English, two "v" had to be used to make a "w." (Kremble 60)
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The Zamorano Printing Press, as it is referred to as these days, had a very interesting Journey to the west. It was brought to Monterey, California in 1834 in the Logada, which was a whaling ship at the time.
An interesting fact about the Logada, was that it was supposed to be named after the Russian Lake Lodaga. Somewhere during the painting of the ship's name, the letters 'd' and 'g' got switched around and it became the Logada. The sailors during this time were very superstitious and believed that correcting the name would cause bad luck. So instead, they decided to keep that name.