Ludlow Model M Promotional Video

[Dave Hughes]

Continuing the series of videos bringing you footage of rarer typesetting machines is this undated promotional video of the Ludlow Model M.

The series began with a couple of videos of a Rogers Typograph in action: Operational Typograph Machine - Video

There is a small sound issue with the video, nothing major, it just seems to fade in and out a little. And, of course, there's a bit of cheesy music!

Overall though it's a good, thorough look at the Ludlow Typograph system.

The poster, Harry Harrison, says: "Ludlow UK Promo video for the Model M typesetting machine. Our family from what I know ran the UK division of the Ludlow print company. This is from a digitised cine film."



https://youtu.be/BWUKy7bpAEA

[Bruce Anderton]

Good to see those shiny new mats!
The main bugbear of the system was having to cast blank slugs for supporting those faces larger than 12pt, and when the firm I worked for brought in an incentive scheme the operators could no longer waste time in this non-productive manner and henceforth 12pt blank strip material was cast on a Nebitype strip caster and cut up into the various column widths employed in the newspaper, single-column up to four columns wide (11·5ems to 47·5ems) and stacked near the make-up point: this saved a great deal of time in assembling the completed headings but meant that the 12pt blanks were being cast almost continuously on the Nebitype.
We also acquired a Nebitype casting machine, which produced a 42em slug when it was in the mood for doing so: it could be somewhat temperamental!

[Keri Szafir]

Interesting. Got any Nebitype manuals, documentation etc. material? The Book Art Museum has one but I haven't ever seen any papers for it.

[Bruce Anderton]

Alas no. I've never seen any Nebitype publicity material, though it must have existed when Società Nebiolo were trying to get customers for their casting machine, which was also supposed, apart from using Ludlow matrices, to be able to cast from Linotype mats, "or the matrices of any other slug machine" to quote Allen Hutt in his book "Newspaper Design", published by Oxford University Press in 1960. Thus it was a latter-day All Purpose Linotype variant.