The Cult of the Linotype Machine

I started this project because I was annoyed all of the designers  with whom Mike was involved and the resulting typefaces had Wikipedia pages and yet Mike did not.  Little did I know throwing this pebble in pond would set off waves of nostalgia in so many of my/our friends and lead to the reconnections.  Today, Mario Garcia got in touch.  I saw him briefly at Roger Black's Gramercy East apartment on New Year's Eve in 2007.  It's been a long time since Poynter Oldstyle concepts were floating around the St. Petersburg campus in the 1990s much like that not-a-pet alligator floated in Mario's Tampa home's back canal. 


Starting this quest for Mike has given me a new lease on life.  I am reminded of my friend, Bourge Hathaway's, quasi Buddhist/Jewish admonishment to me after my accident:
                 Accept misfortune as a blessing
                 Do not wish for Perfect health,
                 Or a life without problems.
                 What would you talk about?


Which brings me to the Cult:
Flashback to 1997 in Seattle.  Mike had licensed the Pages patent to Design Intelligence Corporation, a company I felt was 'designed' to flip into Microsoft as soon as the software gurus running it could get fast money.(exactly what it did.) He was living in a little house in Ballard and I was doing the bicoastal spouse monthly visit.  I have a good buddy from my Miami Herald days, John Joly, who was/is sorta still a Hearst executive.  I wanted Mike to have the connection because..oh, God knows why..I just connect people. We agreed to meet at the Four Seasons Hotel for dinner.  It was a wonderful evening.  I was sitting with two raconteurs of the first order and laughing myself sick. At some point, John mentioned he had begun his newspaper career as a linotype operator.  With that I knew a good 45 minute talk was in the cards so I took the opportunity to slip away to the ladies room.  The scene when I returned is burned into my brain:  The elegant dining room, low lighting, the serene music of the pianist in the corner, tablecloths, gleaming silverware, the requisite monster blossoming flower arrangement, the well appointed customers with fine manners and even finer fashion, ...and our table: Both men had rolled their suit trousers above their knees, were bent over with the candle from the table comparing their Linotype 'squirts', telling lies and the war stories of how the scars were inflicted and raucously howling with glee. The maitre d'hôtel shot me a disapproving glance that said, 'Madame, Get those bozos out of here'.


For those friends who are not part of this publishing world: I am a car dealer's daughter so think of it this way...the Linotype machine experiences are the equivalent of having a '57 Chevy convertible on a sunny summer day when you are 17 with your high school love beside you and Porky Chedwick on the radio. It just doesn't get better than this.


Another Miami Herald mon ami, Lee Templeton, exchanged a number of emails with me.  Lee was a Senior Executive when I first met him and he stayed in the management stratosphere for the rest of his publishing career at Playboy, Civil War Times Magazine and the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. I proudly placed him in the last two positions. In this stage of his life, Lee has been teaching Economics at the University of Pittsburgh, my alma mater in my home town. Lee has always been a magnificent communicator besides an aficionado of all things printing and publishing. He lectured in 2001 that the admiration/obsession of the Linotype machine was immortalized by Thomas Edison as the 'Eighth Wonder of the World'.  For your pleasure,  a brief of Lee's presentation:


Generations of printers insisted the machine drove its inventor mad, and would do the same for anyone else who worked with it. Thomas Edison called it  “The Eighth Wonder of the World.” Whitelaw Reid, publisher of the New York Tribune, exclaimed, “Ottmar, you’ve done it! A line o’ type!” when Ottmar Mergenthaler unveiled his typesetting and linecasting machine on July 3, 1886. The machine took its name from Reid’s remark, and, as the Linotype, revolutionized the printing business in general and newspapers in particular.

The Linotype was more than a machine. It was a miniature factory – a combination composing room and type foundry standing seven feet high by six feet wide, by six feet deep. A triumph of 19th century electro-mechanical technology, it allowed a single operator to assemble a row of brass matrices and then to cast a line of finished type from them. The machine automatically redistributed the matrices into a magazine. A touch of the operator’s  finger on the 96-character keyboard called them into play again. Old lines of type were merely dropped into the Linotype’s melting pot and recycled.  All of this took place at unprecedented speed. Gutenberg’s type was movable, but it moved slowly. In his time, and in Mergenthaler’s, it took at least a minute to set a line of type by hand, using a compositor’s stick. The Linotype initially could be operated at 3.5 to 4.9 lines a minute. With improvements, speed increased to 14 lines a minute with an unaided operator, and more than 60 lines a minute with a pre-punched paper tape. Before Mergenthaler, newspapers seldom were more than eight pages; the whole composition process was too slow to handle more copy. With the Linotype, more pages, more editions, and later deadlines all became commonplace. The information revolution had arrived. The Linotype was notoriously crotchety, in keeping with its mechanical complexity, but more than 100,000 were sold by the Linotype Company, and many more linecasters were produced by imitators such as Intertype. It is hard to visualize the 20th century development of newspapers without them. Magazines, books, and catalogues, are in Mergenthaler’s debt, as well. The Linotype defined high speed printing technology for nearly 100 years, until the Eighth Wonder itself was displaced by newer, silicon-based technologies in the last quarter of the 20th century. 


My first encounter with the Linotype was the "Machine" and its operators.  I was the department head in charge of placing and retraining the Miami Herald Linotype operators during the mid 1970s modernization to 'Cold Type' or computers, if you will.  I did not much notice the type itself, or the fonts, because -of the 50 or so displaced operators - a large number of them were deaf mutes with 8th grade educations. That was challenge enough for my 27 year old brain. It was not until I met Mike that the rich world of typography, and its fascinating players, opened to me.