It was almost as big as a telephone box and from the late 1950’s to the 1970’s, most design studios and freelance illustrators had one of these beauties.
The Grant projector – a mechanical contraption to magnify or reduce artwork and project onto a light box so that the image could be traced off.
When scalable photocopiers were introduced in the 1980’s the writing was on the wall for the old workhorse, and then along came the Mac to finally killed it off. A few must survive in some old dusty analog studios or are slowly rusting in garden sheds up and down the country.
The illustrator Raymond Briggs wrote the following little appreciation (well, maybe not appreciation) of the Grant for AOI's magazine Illustrators back in the late 1970’s.
THE SEVENTIES ILLUSTRATOR'S PRAYER
Our Enlarger,
Which art in College,
The Grant be Thy Name.
Thy Copy come.
Thy light be on,
In Art as It is in Design.
Give us this Way our Easy Bread,
And Forgive us our Tracepapers,
As we Forgive Them that Trace Off before us.
And Lead us not into Life Classes;
But Deliver us from Drawing:
For Thine is The Kodak,
The Polaroid and Pentax,
For Agfa and Agfa.
Ah Me!
© Raymond Briggs
At the same time, the wonderfully witty Arthur Robbins produced this delightful ditty to compliment Briggs' poem.