The Last Linotype Book in America?

The latest volume of Studies in Bibliography has been praised as one of the strongest in the periodical’s six-decade history, but it is also special in another way, for it may be the last book in America produced from Linotype.

Linotype machines, first used in 1886, were designed to speed up several of the processes in printing. Before this, typesetters (or “compositors”) would have to assemble words by picking up one piece of type at a time, and then return the type — one piece at a time — to the cases when printing was finished. 

The Linotype eliminated the necessity for individual pieces of type by casting letters as needed. The operator’s strokes on a keyboard call into position the matrices and the spaces between words, and when enough have been gathered for a full line of text the machine pushes the wedge-shaped spaces tight to justify the line. This assemblage then moves mechanically to another part of the machine, where molten metal pours into the matrices, creating a solid “line of type” in the form of a metal slug. A small elevator immediately carries the matrices back to the top of the seven-foot-high behemoth, where they are guided into their original compartments by key-like patterns of teeth on each matrix. The slugs, meanwhile, accumulate in a tray below, ready to be placed on a press for printing. And when printing is finished, they can simply be melted down for reincarnation on the next job.

Studies in Bibliography has been printed from Linotype from the time that U.Va. English professor Fredson Bowers founded the journal in 1948. For the first thirty years the Linotype work itself was done mainly by what is now U.Va. Printing and Copying Services, which had three of the machines. The chief operator, Jerold Grizzle, developed such expertise that the Virginia State Printers’ Association eventually asked him to stop submitting his work on the journal for the organization’s annual prize, because he always won it. In 1978 the project was transferred to the venerable Heritage Printers of Charlotte, North Carolina. This firm had bought up the equipment of other printers as the world moved to phototypesetting in the 1960s and 1970s, and it amassed a collection of 1800 different fonts of type. 

For some time the staff of Studies has been pondering our own possible move away from Linotype.  It hasn’t been that we are adverse to new technology. In the 1990s we were in fact the first scholarly journal to make its extensive back run available, through U.Va.’s E-Text Center, in searchable form and without charge on the Web. But the cost of Linotype production remained competitive, we weren’t eager to face the additional work required by any transition, and we liked the appearance of the books. (The pages show the impressions from the metal used to print them.) 

Heritage Printers has been sold twice in the last few years, most recently to a firm that had little experience in Linotype and had never produced a full book. The proprietors inherited our half-completed volume and had to track down old-timers who still knew how to use the equipment. They have now decided to abandon book production and to sell their cache of Linotype materials, some of it at scrap-metal prices. (Listings on eBay suggest that the metal is widely used for casting bullets and for fishing-line sinkers.)

That change will have great implications for Studies, but this is not the first instance in which events in the history of Linotype have had social consequences. Introduction of the machine in the late nineteenth century caused great consternation among hand compositors, who were replaced by machine operators who could work ten times as fast. Linotype operators, in turn, eventually foresaw the end of their own era, and, for instance, in 1974 the printers’ union at the Washington Post negotiated a guarantee of lifetime employment. (The Post ended Linotype production in 1980; in 2000 the remaining printers retired in return for a one-time payment of $27.5 million.)

Training in the operation of Linotype machines was long a mainstay of programs in deaf education. About 25 percent of the Post’s operators were deaf, and Jerold Grizzle learned his vocation at the Virginia School for the Deaf and Blind in Staunton. As a memorial to Grizzle, the last Linotype machine from U.Va. Printing and Copying Services, the one Grizzle loved and at which he had spent nearly fifty years of his life, went to the museum of his alma mater after his death in 2000.

Given that most books printed in American during the first two-thirds of the twentieth century were produced from Linotype, the cultural importance of Linotype is immense. While any knowledge of how texts we read were created helps us to understand better what we read, knowing a special feature of the Linotype machine — the configuration of its keyboard — helps literary study in a particularly amusing way. When a Linotype operator knows that a mistake has been introduced into a line, the simplest remedy is to fill out the line by running fingers down the first two rows of keys. Because the Linotype keyboard does not have the same layout as that of a typewriter or computer, the result is the phrase “etaoin shrdlu.” The printers are supposed to remove the faulty slug, but evidence which is now all the easier to glean from digitized newspaper archives is that they often have missed it. James Thurber has an entertaining account of Linotypers and etaoins in The Owl in the Attic, and the phrase is even included as an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.

At the annual meeting of the American Printing History Association earlier this year, I asked whether any other commercial Linotype book printers remain after the demise of Heritage Printers. Though people were aware of hobbyists and odd-job printers who still use such machinery, no one could identify any large-scale commercial operation. Volume 56 of Studies in Bibliography, therefore, might well be the last book produced from Linotype in America.

Studies in Bibliography