#linotype

Typography Tuesday

Today we present so-called Benedictine capitals, borders, and ornaments from The Manual of Linotype Typography, printed by the Plimpton Press for the Mergenthaler Linotype Company in Brooklyn, New York, in 1923. The Benedictine typeface family is a revival of a 15th-century type used by Bolognese printer Plato de Benedictis, redesigned by Joseph E. Hill for Linotype in 1915.

View another post from this manual.

As antigas linotypes, onde os jornais eram montados com placas de chumbo, antecederam o «offset» que, em Portugal, só surgiria na década de 1960. Provocavam aos tipógrafos uma doença chamada «vulcanite» (obstrução da visão por uma película resultante de anos de trabalho com chumbo a ferver).

Estes azulejos, com profissões e eventos ligados à Imprensa e desenhados por Jorge Barradas e Stuart Carvalhaes, foram arrancados das escadarias do «Diário de Lisboa». Uma ínfima parcela foi doada a dois museus.

Havia vários milhares, ao longo de três lanços de escadas. Marina Tavares Dias explica tudo, no volume IV da Lisboa Desaparecida.

The Linotype machine changed the world. Once called the “Eighth Wonder of the World” by Thomas Edison, it revolutionized printing, making newspapers, books, and mass communication possible on a scale never seen before.

Today, these once-great machines are fading into history, their operators growing older, their sounds—whirring, clicking, clanking—becoming echoes of the past.

On May 11, 1854, Ottmar Mergenthaler was born in Württemberg, Germany. Mergenthaler, a watch maker by trade, came to the United States in 1872. In 1885, he invented the Linotype Machine and revolutionized the printing industry. The Linotype eliminated the tedious need of hand setting type, especially for publication work like newspapers and books. Using a keyboard, the operator would tell the machine to send a matrix (a mold for each letter) to the assembly area. The Linotype would pump molten lead into the matrices, casting a line of type. The Linotype was in common use in newspaper offices until the mid-1970s when offset printing became the norm.