Many thanks to Mike Topper for sending in these pictures he took at the Christophe Plantin Museum in Antwerp.
Christophe Plantin Print Shop
Category: Composition
Austrian Type Height
Many thanks to George Hamilton from Vienna, Austria for sending in this story.
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.
British Print Trade Union Cards 1946-1993
From the late Dave Bowles’ collection of London Fleet Street compositors items comes this great collection of trade union membership cards from 1946 right through to the 1990s.
We have another page of union membership cards, covering the period 1924-1945 here: British Print Trade Union Cards 1924-1945.
Automated Typesetting, 1971
Many thanks to George Finn for sending in this video from the Sydney Morning Herald.
Says George: “The video was extracted from a video tape I was given when I retired in 1989. It was used to give visitors an overview of newspaper production prior to taking a tour of the plant. Sorry the quality is not the best.
“Banging In” at Spicers
Roy Bowker’s story of the possibly unique “banging in” ceremony at Spicers, London.
SO WHERE do I start? Well my first insight to the printing game was at secondary modern school when the teacher asked if anybody was interested in joining a printing class that was being started. My hand went up basically because a friend of mine had volunteered.
Linotype Model 1
Single-letter machine. The Model 1 Machine was later improved and built for double-letter matrices.
(This machine produced type faces up to 11-point and type bodies up to 12-point, in all measures up to 30 pica ems.)
Compugraphic Universal 2
It would appear to be one of the Whittaker company’s early photosetters.
Steve Robertshaw, Ex Whittaker & Compugraphic UK Engineer, updated this page with the following:
Intertype Fotosetter
It is an early photosetter that used mainly linecaster technology to produce photoset output.
Interested in early photosetting technology? Check out the Early Photosetting Chat section of the Forum.
Linotype Linocomp 1
This is an early, computerised typesetting machine. The operator selects a character on the keyboard, which triggers a stroboscopic flash to set the type.
Four type styles, each with 105 characters, were available to the operator through filmstrips held on a drum.
Whittaker S.A.M.
S.A.M stood for ‘Sets All Matrices.’ It was a hot-metal linecaster made by M.H. Whittaker & Son.
This would then be cast in the machine. S.A.M. could use matrices from Ludlow, Linotype, Intertype and Nebitype companies.