Historical type
(Photo by David Zentz)
By Dean Emeritus Ralph Lowenstein
Many alumni remember the old Washington hand press, harking back to the Colonial era, which stood in a hallway of the stadium when the College was located there, and since 1980 in the second-floor lobby of Weimer Hall.
I thought we should also have a Linotype, to preserve the period when it dominated the back-shops of newspaper, magazine and book publishers.
In 1984, Bill Ebersole, JM 1949, MAMC 1957, publisher of The Gainesville Sun, agreed to give the College the Sun’s last Linotype, which the paper kept in storage since it could not bear to part with a machine that was the last of an era. Weighing almost two tons, the Linotype could have crashed through an un-reinforced ceiling to the floor beneath, so we found a spot in the first-floor lobby that had nothing but solid ground underneath.
For about 100 years prior to the 1970s, reporters and editors from the high school newspaper to the largest metropolitan daily had memories that included the clatter of Linotypes as printers translated newsroom copy into lines of solid lead. We all had the thrill of carrying home our first byline in the reverse lettering of a line of type, or of becoming the butt of the Linotype operators’ perennial joke – handing a new reporter a line of hot type and watching the greenhorn gasp in pained surprise.
To all this we owed the genius of Ottmar Mergenthaler, a German-born machinist living in Baltimore who revolutionized newspaper, magazine and book production in 1884 with his invention of the Linotype. Instead of picking letters by hand, one at a time, from “job cases,” the printer could now sit at something that looked like a typewriter, set up copper matrices in what would eventually become a printed line and allow molten lead to flow into the form, producing a “line o’ type.” Printers placed the leaden lines in forms and they eventually became the columns of type in flatbed or rotary presses.
Mergenthaler’s invention tripled or quadrupled the hourly production of a printer. It was the most significant change in printing since Gutenberg invented moveable type in the 15th century. “Cold type” processes promised even greater speed with fewer printing personnel, and by the 1970s all publishing media were junking their dinosaur Linotypes. But I didn’t want our students to completely forget the machine that in its day had so completely delivered printing into the modern age.
As the Sun’s heavy-duty forklift set the old beauty into its final resting place in the Weimer Hall lobby, two students came through the door from the second-floor stairway. When they spotted the Linotype, one said, “What do you think that thing is? Maybe it’s an old printing press.”
At that moment, I realized that not only was the Linotype the last of an era in publishing, but so was I.
