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That could happen because Mergenthaler employed an existing series of mechanical parts to move each letter’s mold, or matrix, around inside of a Linotype machine, to ready the form then, after the line of type was poured, an ingenious set of shapes, like keys, on the bottom of each matrix guided the matrix back into the right spot in a rack full of matrices, called a magazine, so it could be used immediately in the next line of type. The type appeared and disappeared in and out of a melting pot, at the command of a keyboard. Not having to get the type from the case, print, and then put it back in the case, in fact stopping it from coming in the door altogether, was the virtual advance. Mergenthaler’s revolution was in text type, which was the hardest to set and wore out the fastest.
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It wasn’t that better type technology was invented to spread knowledge further it was that the demand for knowledge had been held back for hundreds of years by manual composition. You know the story-the spread of ideas during the Industrial Revolution via printing, blah blah blah-except possibly for the fact that the machines always lagged behind. The Linotype machine added a second layer of virtuality to type, especially text type, to serve the needs of a new kind of commercial immediacy demanded in the second half of the nineteenth century. Four hundred years later, it was still going strong, because, among other things, you could tie the text up and store it. Not much about letterpress may strike us as “virtual” today, but Gutenberg’s innovation of separating the formation of letters from the document they were formed on marked a step toward abstraction. And the letters shuffled from drawers to press until they were worn out and the metal got recycled, which could be a few days or months in the case of a font used for popular book text, or a few decades in the case of a font of holiday ornaments. These letters were sorted into the drawers, and then repeatedly used, cleaned, and sorted back into the drawers. In both cases (with the former being much more common than the latter), the letters in that drawer got to the printer in a heavy brick-shaped package of metal, either from a different department or from a company that made type. RIGHT: Close-up and drawing of one of the Linotype machine’s gonkulators, bottom left, and the magazine, where all of the matrices were stored. LEFT: This portrait of Mergenthaler looks a lot like the romanticized images of founders that hang on the walls of the offices of the succeeding presidents of the company, because that’s what it is. If typographers were pouring their own line of type, as they occasionally did for frequently used bits of text, they poured it into a form, let it cool, and had a line of type ready for the press.
At this point, if letterpress type was being used, the line or lines of type would be ready to go to the press. Much has gone into research and writing about the Gutenberg revolution, but some facets of the Mergenthaler revolution could bear a little more scrutiny, as you can imagine I am about to give them.īefore Mergenthaler’s lines of type, typesetting text-selecting and placing letters sequentially to form words and spaces-referred to typographers who were capable of reaching into a drawer, selecting the correct letter, and placing it into some sort of form holding one line of type or more.