Over the years, many short stories have been written about the printing industry. If there are any you know of that aren’t listed here, please let me know in the Comments.

Etaoin Shrdlu by Fredric Brown

The tale of a self-operating Linotype machine and Walter Merold’s ingenious solution to its quirks.

The Mischievous Typesetter by Noel Loomis

How “High-Pockets” tamed the unruly Linotype No.7 at the Daily News.

The post Fiction appeared first on Metal Type.

Says Mike:

One of the hazards of typesetting is the possibility error. In the ‘old’ days, the days of hot metal, all typeset material was checked by the printer’s reader. The reader and his assistant often inhabited a quiet part of the building so they could concentrate. The reader’s assistant took the original copy and read it aloud to the reader, who kept his eye on the typeset material. Should there be a discrepancy between what was on copy and the proof, the reader made the relevant mark on the proof so that it could be corrected.

In some houses, there was no assistant and the reader’s eyes had to flick from copy to proof, back and forth all day.

Small Property Advert

On one occasion, the proof reader was checking a small property advert which I had typeset. On the proof, the price of the house read £69,000. The price on the copy was badly hand written, the digits appearing as several loops one after the other.

The reader knew I had set the ad and, as he knew I was also the overseer, he ticked the proof as correct. If I thought the price was £69,000, then that was good enough for him.

The following day I had to fend off an irate customer who went on and on about the stupidity of people who worked at the Times (Driffield, that is). It was explained to him that his hand-writing could be interpreted in two ways, either as £60,000 or £69,000. He insisted that he had written £60,000, but more than one person in the building read it as £69,000. Nothing would alleviate his anger. He demanded a repeat (corrected) advert the following week plus an apology.

All this was arranged immediately, and the atmosphere in the office returned to normal.

Late the following Wednesday afternoon, just before the pages were ready for despatch to the printer in Scarborough, a phone call came through for me from the advertising department.

The house seller was asking if the correction had been done and if his free ad was in place. We replied that this task had been done.

He then asked if the new ad and the apology could be removed.

We had to ask why, didn’t we? His reply amazed us.

He had sold the house for £69,000 and therefore didn’t need the apology.

The vendor made an extra £9,000 on the sale of his house and he didn’t even thank us for the error. Neither did he send a crate of beer round for the lads.

If you liked this story you may also like Printers’ Tales a compilation of similar stories, available in ebook and paperback formats.

The post Bad Handwriting! appeared first on Metal Type.

Says Mike:

The N.G.A. Chapel Rules book contained the ‘rules’ by which men who worked in print shops had to abide.

East Yorkshire Printers Ltd. at Driffield, to whom I returned after three years serving the country in the R.A.F., observed the requirements of the rule, but usually the men operating the printing machines, the Linotypes, or who worked on the stone, used their common sense and made the rules work in their favour whenever it was possible.

There were disputes in the trade, but more often than not they didn’t follow any upheavals in small country weekly newspaper offices. Fleet Street was the place for such activities and we often suffered from their actions.

I was in Germany with the R.A.F. in 1959 when there was a national strike in the industry, so I have no recollections about that at all.

The Chapel was made up of all full members and apprentices in their last two years of apprenticeship, and they had to pay a weekly subscription. At that time, unions were very strong and membership and payment was obligatory. The Chapel held meetings every six months. No-one really liked these meetings, only the men who were very union minded. They seemed content to pander to dissent while the rest of us just wanted to get on with the job and take our pay home to our wives and families.

Father of the Chapel

The Father of the Chapel was the only person who was allowed to discuss matters with the management, provided he was accompanied by two members of the committee.

Every new piece of equipment, every different procedure, every protest had to be discussed with management, with the very obvious intention of gaining higher wages, shorter hours or longer tea breaks.

There were times when the F.O.C. argued with management that there was insufficient time to carry out an extra task, but he would take more time to argue when he – and we – could have done the job with no extra effort at all.

I must admit that during my working life, I felt more restricted by the union than that they were working for my benefit.

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Says Mike: “One day, late in my career, I was production manager at Driffield Times. I now realise that I was not a very able manager, much preferring to be a keyboard operator.

I received a call from the reception office and was requested to speak to a gentleman who had called to complain about an advertisement in the Driffield Times.

I hurried through to reception where I found the telephonist and two huge men, obviously from the local farming community.

On turning to the men, I found I had to look upwards to see their faces. They must have been well over six feet tall and they were built, as the old saying goes, like brick outhouses (or words to that effect).

I asked what I could do for them.

It’s About the Advert

They looked at one another, and one said to me: “It’s about this advert we put in last week.”

My face framed the required question.

“Well, it’s about our mother.”

“Yes? What’s wrong?” I gathered there must be something wrong. No-one has ever returned to a newspaper office to congratulate the staff on a correctly spelled, properly laid out advert even though the paper is full of them every week.

“It’s what it says. It’s wrong.”

He held out his copy of the paper. His rough finger pointed to a line on page two. Page two held all the BMDs: births, marriages and deaths. In those days local papers had a page dedicated to these personal ads and often the page was nearly full.

“Here,” he said. “Look.”

So I read the line. The advert was an In Memoriam, where the living paid tribute to those who had passed away. They are not so common these days. The first words were the name of the deceased, their mother I guessed. Then followed these words: “In memory of our ever-living mother . . .”

Perhaps you can guess how sorry I was for the error. I was sorry. The men were obviously upset about it and I couldn’t help but agree with them. However, my explanation that the letter ‘i’ is next to the letter ‘o’ on the keyboard cut no ice. Neither did my argument that my operators (me included) were keying such adverts and news at perhaps fifty/sixty words a minute, all day. Nor did it help to mention that it was likely to be the only mistake on the whole page, and perhaps in the whole newspaper.

Eventually, however, they were consoled and went away having made their point. I can’t say positively, but I think we returned their money for the cost of the advertisement.

I have thought since that, had I received a sack of spuds from their farm with one bad one, I might well have complained to them!

If you liked this story you may also like Printers’ Tales a compilation of similar stories, available in ebook and paperback formats.

The post In Memoriam appeared first on Metal Type.

Says Mike: “After I had officially retired, I occasionally typeset material for local printers as I had a Macintosh computer at home.

One of my clients was Yorkshire Ridings magazine, at that time produced in Driffield by a former Driffield Times editor, Winston Halstead.

I enjoyed the work and I once received the copy – that’s the bare words – for several advertisements.

After creating the ads, I read them through for accuracy, printed them and the took the bus to Driffield. I handed them over and caught a bus home.

Some days later, my telephone rang. After I gave my name, the voice at the other end said: “Mike?” in that tone similar to a child who has something to confess to his father and says: “Dad?” where the voice dips in the middle and back up again. You hear your name this way and you know something is wrong.

I replied, “Yes?” in the same manner.
The voice then asked if I remembered the adverts I had set some days earlier. Of course I did. I wondered what was coming next.
“Well?” he said, in that querying tone.
“Yes?” I replied in the same way.
“Well, one of them had a mistake in it.”
“Oh, I am sorry about that. I hope you sent the client a proof.”
“Oh, yes, we did. We always do.”
“Good,” I said, because that meant the responsibility for the accuracy of his advert was now his, and not mine, although I had made the original error.
“Ah, but . . .”the voice continued.

I shuddered. What was coming now?
“He passed the ad, but didn’t tell us about the mistake. He sent the printed advert from the magazine to a national newspaper and they reprinted it, as it made them laugh.”

Good grief, I thought. What did the advert say? What had I done?

The Falcon Inn

Then Winston read out the advert for me: “The Falcon Inn, Whitby Road, Cloughton, near Scarborough. North York Moors National Park. Luxury Home Comfort in fabulous countryside. Bar Snacks and Lunches served every day. Sunday Lunch in Carvery Restaurant (booing advisable). En-suite bedrooms available in delightful courtyard setting. Phone 0723 870717 for colour brochure or booking.”

I hope you spotted the error. It was humorous. “Booing advised.”

I am looking at the advert now. I kept a copy. It was published in the June/July 1994 edition of Yorkshire Ridings Magazine.

That’s over twenty years ago, as I type this page! And I can still remember that phone call and the memory makes me flinch.

If you liked this story you may also like Printers’ Tales a compilation of similar stories, available in ebook and paperback formats.

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Says William: “My claim to fame is that since 2009, there is finally a printer in the heritage village of Rockley, mid west NSW. And it is a Yorkshire born tradesman that’s done it. My wife’s historical research tells us that I am the only one, ever!

While I’ve reduced my student intake to only the most likely students, I still do train in the Art. Students need to go through a rigorous testing, as I did so many years ago, to learn from me.

Real Tradesmen & Women

I might even claim that being an original tradesman, my shop is truly first generation teaching, and not a University knock-off pretending to teach. I might even claim that my classes are comprehensive and can produce real tradesmen and women and I believe the only real school in NSW.

Amberly and Florent were the makers, Two Lands. I thank them continually for the time they spent making this video.”

The post Pressed Letters Printing, Australia – Video appeared first on Metal Type.

It tells the story of Rupert Murdoch’s move to Wapping through the eyes of a journalist who made the move.

Make sure you also take a look at “Fortress Wapping” written by award-winning journalist John Pilger. The Forum also has a great video on the dispute called “Wapping and The Wire.”

IT started with the mysterious “Wapping cough” and ended when Rupert Murdoch’s moonlight flit revolutionised an industry.

In January 1986 the editor of the Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie, called me into his office. I knew it was serious because he asked me to close the door, which was somewhat unusual, and then spoke almost in a whisper, which was virtually unprecedented.

After asking me to swear not to tell a soul about our conversation, he told me to put every important item from my desk and filing cabinets into two black plastic bags and take them to his waiting chauffeur at the front entrance. “He knows where to take you,” he said, “and you won’t be coming back.”

It was hardly a surprise. I was about to join a select band of executives who had vanished from the Sun’s office months before. Their disappearances had been explained away with a range of cover stories, some almost believable – such as the mooted launch of a London paper – and some hopelessly far-fetched. Who would believe that the feted night editor had really taken early retirement?

It was an open secret among the journalists that our colleagues had succumbed to the “Wapping cough” and were really learning how to operate the computers that were supposed to transform the way we produced newspapers. Not that many of us gave that plan much credence.

Newspaper owners had been talking about introducing what was laughably called “new technology” for years and several of them had even gone so far as to install computers in their offices only for the print unions to prevent them being used. Surely the unions would use their industrial muscle once again to prevent Rupert Murdoch from switching production of his four papers – the Sun, News of the World, Times and Sunday Times – away from the traditional headquarters?

An Embarrassing Farce

On the drive to Wapping I remember thinking I was due to take part in an embarrassing farce. I thought Murdoch would fail because I was imbued with a culture in which the print unions always seemed to come out as winners. It was true that the miners had been defeated two years before and there were new laws circumscribing industrial action, but the printers were invincible, were they not?

All my newspaper life, stretching back to the beginning of my apprenticeship on a local weekly in 1963, I had been overawed by the strength of the print unions. In Fleet Street I discovered that they ran the show. Indeed, throughout the 1970s I had been a militant member of the National Union of Journalists, so I had first-hand experience of wielding union power.

During the winter months of 1985 it was obvious that MacKenzie was convinced that the Big Bang was about to happen, often confiding to us that “the boss [Murdoch] is going to show those bastards”. On occasion he openly taunted compositors: “You lot haven’t got much f**king longer… You’re history.” The printers were baffled – was he just being his usual obnoxious self or did he know something they didn’t? Asked to explain, he would simply hold a finger to his lips and give an exaggerated wink.

The very idea of a wholesale sacking of the mechanical staff was too impossible to imagine. How could a paper be prepared without the linotype operators, compositors and proof readers? How could it be printed without the hundreds of skilled men who manned the presses? Even if it could be produced, how could it be distributed when the rail unions would support their printing brothers?

I soon changed my mind after entering the place that was soon to become known as Fortress Wapping. I stepped first into the clean, airy press hall to see shiny blue machines being tended by men in spotless overalls.

Upstairs, in what was to become the Sun’s rough and ready editorial office for the following couple of years, were lines of new desks. On each one sat a computer terminal and keyboard. A posse of electricians scurried around, tugging at wires snaking through open ducts in the floor. The Wapping vanguard of journalists under the guidance of the giant figure of a night desk executive, David Banks, were working frantically, readying themselves for the moment the unions walked into Murdoch’s trap and he ordered the moonlight flit from Bouverie Street and Gray’s Inn Road to Wapping.

Murdoch had prepared the ground well for his great revolution. First, he had the money, having benefited from the flotation of Reuters, and knew there was a lot more to come when he sold the Bouverie Street building. Second, the Conservative government’s Trade Union Act outlawed secondary picketing. Third, there was the parallel planning of a non-unionised paper by Eddy Shah, a diversion for the unions. Fourth, Murdoch’s managers had organised a distribution system, including the purchase of a fleet of lorries and vans, to avoid the need to use trains. Fifth, and most important of all, he had negotiated a deal with Eric Hammond, leader of the electricians’ union, the EETPU, to provide all the manual staff. Hundreds of electrical workers were then covertly trained to run the presses while many of their relatives were schooled in the composing room tasks that pre-dated the on-screen make-up now in use.

Murdoch opened the trap in the autumn of 1985 when he gave the print unions a three-month ultimatum to agree substantial staff cuts. Their response was a ballot giving them the right to call a strike if Murdoch tried to impose compulsory redundancies. In the following months Murdoch grew so confident that he dared, on January 18, to print a special section of the Sunday Times at Wapping.

At an edgy meeting with all the print unions five days later Murdoch told them that “the horse has bolted”. As he anticipated, the unions issued a strike threat and Murdoch closed his trap by ordering the wholesale move of the journalists on his four papers to Wapping.

The Sun and News of the World staff, with very few exceptions, quickly packed their bags. They were heavily influenced by a history of antagonism with printers who had refused to support them when they took industrial action. Journalists at the Times and Sunday Times, despite similar experiences, agonised longer and many more of them decided not to go, earning the nickname “refuseniks”.

But Murdoch’s calculated gamble paid off. Despite the problems inside, not least the need for sub-editors to learn how to use a computer with hardly any training, and hostility outside due to the rapid formation of picket lines, the papers were published.

Disturbing

In the following weeks and months going to work in Wapping was disturbing. I often glimpsed compositors I had known since 1969, some of whom I counted as friends, screaming behind the police barriers, mouthing my name and shaking their fists.

The resentment and anger of the strikers, whose crafts had been eliminated for ever, often boiled over into violence, especially when joined on Saturday nights by hundreds of workers from other industries. There was bad behaviour on both sides of the conflict, with examples of unacceptable police heavy-handedness matched by mindless violence from pickets.

On one night in February alone, eight policemen were injured and 58 people were arrested as 5,000 demonstrators tried to storm the printing plant.

Inside, we journalists revelled in the joys of doing as we pleased, though there were many frustrations as we struggled to make edition times. I once spotted a figure in a grey sweater stooped over a paste-up board who seemed to be taking ages to stick down a piece of copy. “For f**k’s sake,” I shouted. “Are you going to take all night with that?” He turned slowly and I was about to add another epithet when I realised it was Murdoch. He simply smiled.

Nothing could upset the man who had led a revolution. Some 13 months later, after 1,262 arrests and countless people injured, the unions relented by agreeing to accept redundancy deals.

Every other newspaper proprietor followed Murdoch’s lead, moving away from Fleet Street and dispensing with their unions. Profits flowed in. A new national title, the Independent, was founded. All papers expanded in size, adding supplements and magazines. Colour pictures became the norm. Nowadays, hot metal printing is a faint memory and many journalists nowadays, possibly the majority, know only a post-Wapping world.

However much we older hacks may yearn for the village that was Fleet Street none of us would really wish to turn the clock back to the days when we never knew whether our papers were going to be published. And that’s the measure of Murdoch’s industrial transformation.

The post The “Wapping Cough” appeared first on Metal Type.

I WAS in Bad Ischl (Austria) a week ago, sought out an antiquarian bookstore for anything on printing and was told by the prop that there was nothing, but on the way out I looked down and under a stack of stuff there was a case of what appeared to be wood type.

I told the prop I’d be back to have a closer look, to discover a couple of days later that it was a remarkably full font of relatively standard gothic with all kinds of accented letters, not in wood, as I had suspected, but foundry type metal – weighed half a ton!

Case was marked 72 pt, but looked larger. The type had been milled down, to what height I have no idea, and I don’t travel with a .918 caliper. Alas it was only lower case, so I passed it up.

Interesting part was that a couple of years ago at a street stall in Bad Ischl I had picked up a mounted electro just out of curiosity to find when I got home that it was to .918.

Seller wanted to know whether I knew what it was or not; my (positive and detailed) answer probably surprised him and likely raised the price, but what the hell.

It would/will take some more research, but I wonder if, in the postwar 1945-55 occupation period, there hadn’t been a printer in Bad Ischl who worked to the US standard. Relatively nearby Salzburg province was under US administration.

If you liked this story you may also like Printers’ Tales a compilation of similar stories, available in ebook and paperback formats.

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Printers Tales is a compilation of over 30 stories, from various authors, about the printing industry in the pre-digital age.

Before computers became common-place in the late 1970s, to produce a printed page required the skill and expertise of a multitude of time-served craftsmen.

Compositors worked with lead type to create words letter by letter. Paper was pressed on to inked letters to reproduce words and sentences. Many of these skills have long-since been forgotten.

This compilation brings together memories of the printing and newspaper industries from that era.

A lot of the stories involve the Linotype machine, a mechanical typesetting machine, that was used to produce newspapers, and other publications, from the 1880s until the computer revolution of the 1970s/80s.

There are stories, poems and limericks from authors from the USA, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand, all of whom share a common workplace experience.

From tales from American “tramp printers” who were able to travel the length and breadth of the United States working on various newspapers on the way, to the unique language and terminology used by compositors on a London Fleet Street “companionship” and lots of stories in between.

Ebook Version

Available for Kindle on Amazon/Apple Books.

All Ebook formats available at: Smashwords

Print Version

Printers’ Tales is also available in a print version. Just over 100 pages, nicely laid out on cream paper, with a matte soft cover. Available now on Amazon.

Below are a couple of samples from the print version which uses gothic headings and easy-to-read serif type.

Please note: All the stories in the book are published on this website.

The post Printers’ Tales appeared first on Metal Type.

While the recent increase in public interest in letterpress printing is welcome, it would seem to be centered around the “craft and artisan” areas, not so much larger, more industrial equipment.

The article reperoduced below, from the Taranaki News, suffers from the usual journalistic faux pas of describing every piece of machinery associated with the printing industry as a “printing press.”

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