Dating U.S. Linotype Publications

[Dave Hughes]

Have you ever wondered what those seemingly random numbers and letters printed on the back of U.S. Linotype publications (pictured in Doug Wilson's Instagram post below) were?

View this post on Instagram

https://www.instagram.com/p/CyTjNHcLE9s/

"Before I forget, I'm the guy who cracked the Linotype publication code — specifically the date that a Mergenthaler Linotype document was printed was encrypted into combination of letters that represented the month and year of printing. Using documents that also had their month and year elsewhere such as newsletters, I was able to reverse engineer the lettered date code." – Jim Gard

You can use the code to find out the month and year the item was published! It's quite complicated (as you would expect from the company that invented the Linotype!)

Doug Wilson has more details on his blog here: Cracking the Linotype Printing Code