History of the Linotype Company

[Mechanic]

Frank Romano has written a book about the Linotype Company.

Frank Romano, now an Emeritus Professor with RIT, worked at Linotype for eight years. He has written a brilliant book about the company—not a dry list of milestones, but rather a work of love and appreciation.

I think it is a little ironic that millions of dollars were spent inventing and building typesetting machines that would assemble and justify lines of type. Today when it is possible to justify and hyphenate lines of type automatically, half the stories in newspapers are set ragged right without hyphens. Now the book that tells the story of the first machine to cast type fully justified is set ragged right.

The reviewer is critical of the book's format and the fact that it is set ragged right.

To quote from the review.

I also do not understand why the book is typeset ragged right. Narrow unjustified columns produce a strange look since the sizes of the gaps are visually comparable to the column width.

http://www.tug.org/books/reviews/tb112reviews-romano.html