Early times of "The Times"

[Mechanic]

I'm sure most, if not all of us know what logotypes are, but how many of us knew that at one time The Times, London used this method for composition of the newspaper. On January 1, 2010 The Times celebrated it's 225th birthday. On that day The Times included an item revealing the early days of the newspaper's shaky start. The founder was John Walter.

In 1784 Walter purchased the patent to "logography", a new method of printing invented by one Henry Johnson: instead of typesetting each individual letter, logographic printing used fonts of ready-made words, or common combinations of  letters within words, to speed up composition.

The complete story can be found on:-

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article6972888.ece

[Dave Hughes]

I've had a little experience of this.

When working on the South London Press in the 1980s they had Linotype mats that had been fixed together to form the name of the paper.

The house style at the South London Press at that time was for the name of the paper to always appear in italics. The mats in the Linos were roman and bold.