Dear Editor,
So few in governance past and present are aware of the fact that the Guyana National Printers is one of the enterprises nationalised at the time when larger business counterparts of the Booker empire were compelling greater attention in Guyana – like the former Bookers Sugar Estates, which alone now make up what is GuySuCo.
This printing powerhouse, located as it is today on the La Penitence Public Road, right next to the Punt Trench, was, in the pristine years of the 1950s, an edifice to behold, housing as it did, the B.G. Lithographic Ltd, a Booker Company, in the same compound as Bookers Rum Coy, and Bookers Pharmaceuticals Ltd which developed and marketed Ferrol Compound and its more famous survivor Limacol, amongst other products.
There was also the B.G. Balata Coy Ltd which was still bleeding balata from its fields at Apoteri, up the Rupununi River, where my grandfather worked as an electrician.
But my attachment to B.G. Lithographic was memorable, as it was where I first experienced ink being pumped into my veins. For in addition to the wide range of special projects, ‘BG Litho’ also produced the Guiana Graphic a daily newspaper sponsored by Bookers and representative of that company’s view of life in Booker Guiana. The Graphic in a sense competed with the Daily Argosy and Daily Chronicle. The whole complex of operations was officially known as Bookers Industrial Holdings Ltd.
My memories were mostly of fortnightly evenings when this young energetic Booker Cadet assisted the late Winifred Gaskin, its editor, to put Booker News to bed. It was largely circulated for employee consumption. Ms Gaskin, who much later became a Minister of Education, took licence at the time and published my first journalistic piece about my weekend trip by amphibian plane, piloted by the pioneer Art Williams, to Apoteri, where I found my grandfather’s tombstone – Joseph Lynch.
Fast forward to the 21st century in which the feisty inheritors of ‘BG Litho’ have survived what some politely would describe as immense stresses – led appropriately in this engendered age, by a woman of vision, immense fortitude and strength of character in Ms Marilyn Nedd, in a world not unlike that of Ms Gaskin. They deserve our tributes then and now.
It is so refreshing to see from TV advertisements that Guyana National Printers Ltd is alive and kicking.
Yours faithfully,
E B John
