7. Type Metal Casting

Metal Type Casting I was pleased to find some beautifully preserved metal type casting machines at the museum. For much of the industrial revolution, letterpress printing was an extremely labor intensive process.  Each letter had to be set into the form (composition) and after the book or newspaper page was printed, the form was taken apart and the metal types were redistributed into the cases for reuse.  Using hand set metal type is one thing for the casual printer of stationary, but the newspapers of the day demanded a better solution. In the latter part of the 19th century, a german born inventor named Otto Merganthaler perfected a very complicated machine that was to revolutionize the composing room, the Linotype. Linotype addressed two primary issues.  First, instead of setting type by hand, an operator would key in the book or newpaper copy on a specially designed keyboard, with the result being a row of molds being set into a continuous line.  The brass molds were called matricies, or mats for short.  This line would have molten type metal injected and out would pop a neatly and quickly cast slug, ready for imposition into the form and printing.  Second, there was no redistribution necessary, as after the print run, the metal slugs were simply remelted and cast again.  This put the future of type casting firms into jeopardy, as foundries depended on large printing operatios literally using up type by printing it over and over. This process, while straining the design limitations of its day, was a technical marvel, especially when you consider that each of the machine's tasks were controlled and actuated through entirely mechanical means.  Matricies had to be machined to very exact dimensions, and the linotype operators had to be machinists as well, to keep the machines running. Seemingly overnight, the careers of many typesetters were ended, and those that were not ready for the linotype had to find different work. Industry embraced this marvelous machine for nearly a century before phototypesetting and offset printing took over the trade.

Linotype

Here is a clear image showing the functional parts:

Linotype with magazine cover removed

Less automated casting was done with a machine called a Ludlow caster. Unlike linotype, Ludlow casters required the operator to set each mat by hand, but still capitalized on the ability to use the slug once and not worry about wearing down type.  There were many styles and brands of casters both in the US and abroad.

Ludlow

           

6. Historical Presses

The Hamilton Wood Type Museum is far more than display cases full of wood type, and if I'm going to be honest, the cold and hard iron machines presented here are something that really gets my gears spinning- even more so than wood type!    Here are photos of some of the printing presses and casting machines, generally ordered historically.    First up is a R. Hoe printing machine in really superb condition.   As with most letterpress machines going back to the 18th century, the prints were made one at a time.  In the case of the "Gutenberg Style" presses like this one, even the inking had to be handled manually.  Ink was applied to the horizontal form using a dabber or ink ball.   In modern use, a form might be inked by a rubber roller known as a brayer. An ink ball was made of sheepskin or sometimes goose skin, inside of which wool or horsehair was placed, and a wooden handle attached.  The finished product looks something like a pestle or a muller used for grinding paints.  The ink was applied to the outside of the sheepskin before it was applied to a letterpress. After inking, a blank page was situated in the manila colored tympan, shown here in the vertical position.  Gauge pins held the paper in place.   The tympan was then rotated down to rest upon the inked form and the whole form table was slid into place under the press platen.

 

The lever arrangement that caused the ribbed platen to press down upon the page had to overcome the pressure introduce by two very stout springs used to retract the platen after the print was made.  

 

   Once the impression was finished, the form was again rolled out and the page gently separated from the form and set aside to dry.   A very slow method of production indeed!

A truly massive Wesel press in the process of being set up

Before 1900, an improved design known as the "clam shell" press was introduced and perfected. This type of press automated the inking by introducing from one to four rubber rollers that picked up ink from a plate or rotating disk ink reservoir.  The rollers would on each impression roll over the form containing type just before the form impacted the paper.  This design had the additional advantage of situating the platen in front of the form so that the paper or card being printed was held in place on the tympan by gravity. These presses were made in many sizes, from tiny business card hobby presses to those that could handle a letter sized page or even larger.  Around 1900, it seemed as if any firm that could cast iron, had a line of printing presses.   Many are still in use today.  The most common lines that survived to the present day were produced by the Chandler & Price company of Cleveland Ohio.  Other common brands are the Daughaday Model Press, The Kelsey Press, and the Sigwalt.   Abroad, the Arab and Adana press was more common.  As with many ironworks of the day, there was much in the way of stylistic painting and embellishments to make the model distinctive. Here are a few designs, all operated via a lever.

 

Lever on the right, so this is set up for a left handed feed

 

 

 (Car keys for scale) As you might expect, it was only a matter of time before these were automated using belts and motors, and this posed a safety issue.  Many printers of the day lost fingers because of the unforgiving nature of cold steel driven by an uncaring belt. Though not seen at the Museum, I did find this example of a clamshell press made by the New Champion company.  Note the treadle used for foot-powering the press. To address the safety issue of pinched and crushed fingers and hands, cams were introduced that rotated the platen outward towards the operator to more safely receive the page.   In some cases the platen was rotated nearly perpendicular to the type bed and form. By far the most popular of this style was the Gordon press, and later the Chandler & Price platen press. Here are a few seen at the museum.

This particular model is the very same as my press in my basement!

This design also included a spring locking mechanism that solidly locked the platen to be exactly parallel to the form at the moment of impression. Once the presses were automated with motors, it became necessary to provide a throw-off lever that would engage a cam, which would not completely close the press, avoiding an inked impression when the operator was not ready (for example if a page was misfed). Even with the platens that opened outward toward the operator, fingers were still jammed in the machine by accident.   It has been said that this machine would never be allowed to operate in a modern environment due to OSHA regulations, but even so, many "lone wolf" printers use these machines today, hopefully carefully!  (I am one of them!) The Chandler & Price platen presses were so successful, they came in four sizes, capable of printing an 8 x 12" page, a 10 x 15", a 12 x 18" and even a 2,000+ lb model that could handle up to a 14  x 22" page! Move forward a few years and of course automation continued.  It was only a matter of time and it became necessary to automatically feed the paper into and from the press.   There was an attachment to the Chandler & Price press known as a Rice Feeder, which used a vacuum pump and suction cups to manhandle the paper in and out of the machine.

The Brandtjen_and_Kluge company marketed the Kluge platen press with an automatic feeder similar to the Rice, but integrated into the press design.   A version of this press still exists today servicing the foil stamping industry, but it is barely recognizable as a press, covered as it is in layers of physical barriers.

A modern Kluge with safety shielding in place

 

Post WW2 Kluge feeder platen press

Platen presses of this day almost always impacted the paper all at once, with the paper approaching the type form in parallel.  This required a tremendous amount of force at the moment of impact, while also requiring a lot of time to make the press ready, which involved tiny bits of paper packing called "makeready" either placed under the tympan or behind the form.  Makeready was necessary to adjust the impression so that parts of the printed page were not overly dark or light. One answer to this problem was the cylinder press, which developed along a similar time line compared to platen presses.  In this kind of press, instead of a massive platen hitting the page all at once, the page is held by a cylindrical platen and is rolled across the inked type.   This resulted in pressure being applied along a much smaller area of the form as the paper picked up the impression of the type, and at the same time, makeready became a much easier process. As a result, the cylinder press was ultimately scaled up to room-sized presses in support of the newspaper industry. One very successful cylinder press that served, and still serves, the smaller shops is called the Miehle Vertical.  The name refers to the way the press mechanically rolls a vertically situated type form across a cylindrical platen that holds the paper.  The result is a really cool press to watch in action. Here is one on display at the Museum:

At rest, it's not much to look at, not helped at all by the factory applying battleship gray paint, but the press is a mechanical marvel.   Most of the "guts" of the press must swing out of the way to give the operator room to set up the form and inking system. The curators set up a stout table containing a locked-up form of type, so I thought I would reproduce that photo here, though it seems bigger than what would fit into a Miehle press.  This looked as if it had last been used to print a ballot for an election that occurred in the 80's.

And I've saved the best for last!  Possibly the finest platen press in history is the Original Heidelberg, also known as the Heidelberg Windmill.  An automated platen press design, the engineering behind this press is marvelous.   The paper feed was innovative and is still unmatched, with the blank paper being carried into the press by a gripper arm at the same time the printed page is being pulled out by an opposing gripper. Here is the beast in all its glory, as photographed at the museum:

12x18" Heidelberg without inking cylinder

Here is a view showing both gripper arms with the press in the open position.

10 x 15" Heidelberg with inking cylinder

1957 Heidelberg production assembly

  The windmill line had a very long run, with some models produced before WW2 still in operation!  Try that with your inkjet! Many of these presses are still in service, in spite of the last of them rolling off the line in the mid-1980s.   The Heidelberg is a favorite of letterpress printers and it can also be used to imprint foils on paper using a heated form.   We'll see one later in the blog that is set up for production. Here is a larger cylinder press with a horizontal type bed, called the Little Giant made by the American Type Founders (ATF). They are difficult to find in use today.

Finally, a curiosity - a printing press solely designed for printing lines on paper.  I guess for the accounting industry? What an interesting old press!

...and the gadget in the corner is an early model of a "guillotine" style paper cutter.  

4. Wood Type Manufacture, Part 2

   A view of one of three operational pantographic routers I saw. A skilled wood carver known as a pattern maker carved the master letterforms in wood, and after these were checked and finished, they are mounted on the source side of the device and clamped in place.  On the other side is mounted a new piece of type-high wood (0.981 inch exactly). The pantograph copies the contours of the pattern, magnifying each curve by usually a factor of three, and on the router end, the new wood block is carved.  One at a time! See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantograph It should be noted that Hamilton manufactured wood type in many different languages and therefore the pattern makers had to be skilled in many languages using a number of alphabets.  Patterns were carved on wood that did not need to be type-high and since this wood never was clamped into a printing press, was probably not hard end-grain maple. Here is a view of the tools of the trade for pattern-makers:

A word about measurements in the letterpress trade: The basic unit of measurement for printers is the point, about 1/72 of one inch.   Twelve points equals a pica, and wood type was generally vertically measured in lines, where one line equals one pica.  Therefore a ten line font was approximately 120 points high.   Metal type was rarely cast higher than 72 points, though some casters could handle up to 144 points by jury-rigging the matrices (molds) used to cast metal type. Here is a view of a very large pantographic router used to make particularly large letterforms on the order of feet rather than lines!

Below i have a photo showing the wood type WALL that visitors can see on entry to the museum.  Really remarkable!  Look at thre size of that numeral 2! This is the kind of art that usually makes me sad, because it fuels the idea that wood type is no longer useful as a collection of letters and is only useful as an art piece.   So crafters will buy fonts from unsuspecting and uneducated estate managers, and split them up  to make wall art or other displays.  In this case, I will give the Museum a pass, though, because they can make their own wood type for this kind of art, and are dedicated and smart enough to not destroy a useful font for this purpose. There is nothing wrong with wood type hanging on a wall if it's no longer useful because it's broken or warped, but I have seen perfectly good wood type sold as scrap and made into these wall hangings and coffee tables.   Though this occurs usually out of ignorance that anyone could ever actually, you know, print with wood type.  But sometimes, flea market pickers are fully aware of the value of type, and sell it to artsy types anyway out of expediency.   If an artist needs to show wood type as art, it's better to get someone to carve letterforms into cheaper wood.  Not to be too dramatic, but using the real thing is disrespecting the history of printing, in my opinion.   Real wood type is a real part of history.

Below I've included a photo showing one example of a wall hanging available on e-bay that appears to be made of priceless wood type ligatures.  I dont want to get off on a rant about this, but if this item was made with real wood type, a number of priceless historical fonts were ruined in the production of one object!  A friend of mine, Peter Spooner in Maine feels so strongly about this topic, he actually makes "fake" wood type out of cheap pine so that it can be offered to the trade as an alternative to wasting the good stuff!  It takes careful, patient education to dissuade crafters from doing this, but the hard fact is that people love this stuff, so they buy it.  We need to start thinking about wood type like we think about other rare materials from an endangered source, such as ivory from elephant tusks.

A retro-chic arrangement of priceless ligatures.