Are Linotype typesetting machine still in widespread use, or have computers completely killed them off?
Are Linotype typesetting machine still in widespread use, or have computers completely killed them off?
Les sanglots longs des violons de l'automne blessent mon coeur
D'une langueur Monotone
Linotype is dead, at least in the developed world. I have no doubt there are still working ones in existence, but they'd be more along the lines of museum pieces than productive equipment.
They were pretty close to dead 25 years ago, if not earlier.
Back when I was a kid, we'd gone on a school field trip to the Chicago Tribune, and at that time (roughly 1980) they were down to two lino operators and everything else was being done with that new-fangled computerized pagination stuff. IIRC, even back then, they'd create the pages via a combo of mechanical and electronic means, scan the pasteups and shoot them electronically to the production facility.
I can't find any reference to this on Wikipedia to back it up, but I am pretty sure the "Linotronic" line of digital imagesetters were products of the Linotype-Hell company. These were a natural progression in typesetting: you sent a PostScript job to this machine, which was about the size of a clothes washer, and it exposed the rasterized image onto continuous fed photo paper or film, which fed onto a roll in a lightproof canister, which you then took to another machine which snaked the film or paper through all the photo chemical baths for processing. These were printers which, back in the late 80's, were printing at 1200 or more DPI onto film, which is in the neighborhood of what's necessary for commercial offset printing (we can go into resolution and halftoning and screen frequencies if anyone's interested). Agfa was also a big manufacturer of these types of machines.
Aside: Back when I was a software tester at Adobe, I was assigned to do printer compatibility testing for a while and used the QA department Linotronic L100, which proudly sported serial number 000001 (presumably something Adobe owned because the Lino was an early user of PostScript, so they had to share early units for testing).
ETA: looks like they were from the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. I guess they must have eventually become Linotype-Hell. Or maybe that was completely unrelated. The corporate history is less interesting to me than the machines themselves.
The newspaper for whom I worked made the change from hot lead to photo offset in 1974. They were a small town rag, so I can't say with authority if the larger papers such as the Philly Inquirer had already converted or still continued with lead for a while.
Opportunity is missed by most people, because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. Thomas Edison
At Last! I get to show off this bit of trivia!
The Twilight Zone, "Printer's Devil" 02/28/1963: Story revolves around a small-town paper being run out of business by corporate scum. Owner makes deal with devil, etc.
The point: This has a real, live, working linotype - with Burgess Meredith (as satan) operating it. (Yes, on DVD, Vol 32).
The story was that, even in 1962, they had difficulty finding an operable linotype.
Doubt there are too many linotype operator wannabes...
Go Team Venture!
I just read the full wiki article on that and it is by far one of the coolest things I've read in weeks.
Molten lead to form a single line of text in a slug? The Rube Goldbergesque track setup?
The stories of an error in making a slug leaving a space where molton lead fell, where the operator had to be quick at hand with a "hell bucket"?
Awesomeness.
I wonder what they'd think of me blogging from my phone.
I recall a story about a Linotype machine endowed with an alien intelligence (or something like that). "Etaoin Shrdlu", I think. Maybe Fredric Brown. Yes -- looked it up. 1942 story.
Great machines; never actually seen one in person.
They shouldn't have had a problem in 1962. My maternal grandfather was a linotype operator for The Westfield Leader during that space of time.Originally posted by happyheathen
Opportunity is missed by most people, because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work. Thomas Edison
I once read a collection of Paddy Chayefsky teleplays from the Fifties. One story dealt with an old-fashioned printer who had to make his peace with his company's new Linotype machine. (The story may have been set in the Thirties, but even that job shop would have been quite slow in adopting new tech - a great aunt of mine was running a newspaper's typesetting machine back in 1904.)
In eighth grade shop class (1968/69) they taught us how to set type by hand. I can't imagine why.
Back in Australia in 1965-1966 I was involved in the production of a student newspaper and a student magazine. It was a period of transition from letterpress to offset lithography, and we did some funny things to bridge the gap between use of hot metal (Linotypes) and photographic methods, but we did use a printer's shop that had Linotype machines. So my guess is that they went out of the mainstream around 1970.Originally posted by danceswithcats
Linotypes are very much still in wide use! If you count my garage as wide, 'cause I gots one. Well, an Intertype, but to the average observer it's the same damn thing.
Anyway, I use it a lot. I got the scars to prove it.
Eloise, the 1922 Intertype Model C
Also Eloise
Heh, cool. What do you use it for? I've also wondered about the fonts on these things. Switching fonts mid way through the process must be a hassle (to e.g. typeset a heading in a different font). Is it? Also, did they come supplied with a default font, like TeX and Computer Modern, that makes it easy to identify whether a document was typeset on a Linotype?
How did you get hold of the machine, by the way?
Les sanglots longs des violons de l'automne blessent mon coeur
D'une langueur Monotone
To switch fonts, you would need to:
(1) Finish off the processes for the last line in the old font, including waiting for the last letter mould to get sorted back into the right place.
(2) Pull out the rack of the letter moulds for the old font. (And I imagine it would have been quite heavy).
(3) Put in the rack of letter moulds for the new font.
(4) Probably make some other adjustments, such as line height and length.
They tended to do as much as possible without changing fonts, so if you had a long newspaper article with headlines every few paragraphs, you'd set all the body type in one go, change fonts, then set all the headines in one go, and finally insert the headlines in the right places in the body type. Or, if they had more than one machine, one might be dedicated to the one most common font (perhaps 10 point Times New Roman).
I wonder about the toxic hazards of working with so much lead. Does OSHA even allow that now?
Primarily, it's a source of personal exasperation. I got it in part because I'm interested in the history of printing, having worked in that field on the digital side for years, and partly for the challenge of learning to operate and maintain the machine. It's seriously the most complicated mechanical device I have ever seen.Originally posted by CRSP
I also have a letterpress, so you could say there's a certain practical value to having your own source of fresh type handy.
It's not so bad. Like other posters have mentioned, in general use back in the day, swapping type would be a rare thing. You might be setting body copy at a newspaper, for example, and not switch out the face for years. You'd probably handset the headlines, or use a Ludlow, and you'd have a different machine set up for classifieds and so on.Switching fonts mid way through the process must be a hassle
My machine is one of the simpler models in terms of type handling. I have three magazines loaded at any one time, and all I need to do to change faces is turn a big old crank once the previous line has finished distributing back into its magazine. I may or may not need to make some changes to the mold or the trimming knives depending on the size of the new face, but that's pretty easy. Most all Linotypes and Intertypes carry four molds at any one time, and switching between them is just a matter of turning a knob until the right one comes into position.
More complex machines are called 'mixers' and could hold anywhere from four to eight magazines, and as the name implies, mix faces from differing combinations of magazines. A special notch in the bottom of each matrix (piece of type) would ensure that the distributor mechanism knew where to send the matrix.
One thing that makes it a little easier is that most matrices have two characters on them, usually regular and italic, but sometimes regular and bold, and occasionally strange combinations that must have made sense at the time. No switching required to use the two different characters, there's just a small lever you pull that works in the same sense as a shift key on a typewriter. The mats align in high or low position at your choice, and the same line can contain both alignments in any combination.
No, not really. The key to identifying something set with a Linotype or Intertype is the date. A newspaper or book printed between, say, the late 1890s and the 1970s was almost certainly machine set.Originally posted by CRSP
Same way as everything these days. Craigslist! There is a small but active community of people preserving these type- and linecasting machines and there are always machines available for the hauling. One cool thing is that I can take my '20s era parts catalog and still order anything using the part numbers in the book. There are a couple of guys still sitting on warehouses full of parts, and that's not even using spare machines as donors.Originally posted by CRSP
True fact: there are still professional Linotype mechanics out there. The one I work with finances his retirement travel by arranging service visits throughout the summer roadtrip season.
The lead is not a hazard as it is in metallic form and not a salt and thus cannot be absorbed through skin. Handwashing before eating is really the only required precaution. It's extremely rare for a Linotype operator or a hand-set compositor to show elevated levels of lead in the blood. OSHA is much more concerned about the exposed gears and cams than lead. And there's nothing they can do about it as I have no employees.Originally posted by Baldwin
Hell. I think I killed the thread.
I think it's completely awesome that you have one of those machines, and if you want to keep talking about it, I'm fascinated. Got any videos of it running?
Ah hell, you'd have to ask. A friend and I went out to the garage to shoot some operation video just a couple of evenings ago. Now, I last ran the machine with the lead molten (you can run it with the pot cold and just stop short of casting) sometime last winter. Well, it got cold (no heat in the garage) and a death in the family had me out of town for an extended period this spring. So when I fired her up, I expected a little more than the usual day to day tweaks before everything fell into sync. But no, we barfed lead all over the floor and into the justification vise, and man! it takes forever to pick the solidified lead out of the works. Of course, now that she's cleaned up again, she won't cycle at all. Ugh. Video will have to wait. Time to consult the reference books, all of which assume you've gone through your full apprenticeship and only need the barest reminders of what to do.Originally posted by McNutty
This thread is making me wish this place would hurry the hell up and finally open to the public. I found out about it when I was chatting to one of the blokes who works there in the pub a while back.
Not sure on Linotype, but he said that they still did a pretty constant trade in Monotype matrices and whatnot for developing countries where cheap labour was a more reliable resource than digital computers and electricity. Said they did a roaring trade in Euro signs as well when the single European currency came into force.
Hmmm... actually I was thinking of doing an article on Edward Johnston in the next month or so, might see if I can be cheeky and wrangle a press visit.
It may of interest to note that we still have 3 Linotype machines up and running, albeit only a few hours per week these days, 2 Model 31's and a Model 33 Rangemaster 72 channel wide magazine. While the machines are mainly used for small 'overprinting' applications, we have on recent occasions produced the type for 5 limited edition books. At the present time we are looking for replacement 'V' belts for the top position of the Mohr saw for these machines. (Hard to find in our little backwater country). We are still able to operate but having to cast all slugs on 30ems and cutting them down to size on a serarate saw is a bit time consuming. If anyone out there can helf we would be grateful.
Depending on the country, there are many possibilities. V-belts are usually fairly universal between different type of machines. You need the widest and narrowest widths and the full circumference.
Companies in the US like Graingers, McMaster-Carr and several others charge a small fortune for these belts but I have had great luck tracking down the belts I need on EBay. A $70 belt for $15 is my recent example for getting my lathe completed. Also several belts for my Lawn Tractor where I paid under $20 with shipping and Sears wanted $60+.
Welcome to Mellophant. I hope that is either of some help or maybe helps you ask more questions that can lead to a solution.
Don Black (http://www.donblack.ca/) will almost certainly have the correct belt and/or the proper cross reference for you. If not, also try Dave Seat at Hot Metal Services (http://www.hotmetalservices.com/).