...The aim of a graphic designer is to communicate
a message to his audience successfully through the
organisation of words and images. The graphic designer
is like a juggler, demonstrating his skills by manipulating
various ingredients in a given space. A well-designed
poster or book may appear to be the result of almost
causal effort on the part of the designer but this
is rarely the case. More often it is the result of
a lengthy process, including experimenting with many
options until a satisfactory one is found. Good design
has to take into consideration the practical constraints
imposed by a client's brief - the budget, schedule,
audience. The designer acts as a go-between, carrying
a message from client to customer. To do this well
a designer must be familiar with all forms of graphic
reproduction, and able to work with printers, photographers,
illustrators and other technicians.
HISTORY: Throughout its history graphic design
has influenced and been influenced by trends in fashion,
film, music, history, politics, painting, religion
and nostalgia. Early graphic design was produced by
craftsmen who were members of trades guild or printers
and signwriters. Many of the first designers employed
in television to produce captions trained originally
as ticket writers and signwriters. There was no graphic
design profession - one man carried out every task
required in the production of a book - editing, typefounding,
printing, publishing and selling.
Graphic design in its modern sense began with printing
and the amalgamation of artistic and mechanical elements.
It was in the mid-16th century that type design was
separated from printing by Claude Garamond and Jacob
Sabon. The earliest illustrations were printed from
wood blocks, until Gutenberg introduced metal blocks
in the mid-15th century.
The 19th century saw printing technology surge forward
after centuries during which little progress was made.
By the middle of the century, graphic design had spread
into the fields of packaging, presentation, display
and advertising and was established as a profession
in its own right. Graphic design continued to develop
alongside new ideas and techniques in architecture,
industry, engineering, technology and commerce.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) had great influence
on the modern medium of the poster. He understood
posters as a means of communicating with other people
and collecting an audience. He saw the importance
of translating his work into print and took advantage
of the developments in large-scale lithography. The
classical tradition of centred typography, using various
letterforms, had its origins in lettering and calligraphy,
but there were innovators who were prepared to challenge
existing values in the search for a more effective
and original means of communication. Painters such
as Whistler and Pissarro designed title pages for
books using assymetric arrangements of type, which
broke with accepted standards.
Graphic design today stems largely from the Arts
and Crafts movement founded by William Morris (1834-96)
in 1884. He established a design ethic based on the
individual's design skills as a reaction against mass-production.
His ideas were extended to printing and book production
as well as furniture, wallpaper and fabrics. In 1890
he founded the Kelmscott Press in an attempt to raise
the standard of book design and printing. Morris was
a socialist and there was a certain medieval quality
in his theory that all products should be created
by hand - 'by the people, for the people'.
The next significant influence on design was the
decorative arts movement known as Art Noveau, the
name of a shop opened in Paris in 1895. Stylistically
its origins lay in Morris's designs. The shapes characteristic
of this style are curved and flowing, like waves or
flower stalks. It was a graphic style of decoration
which was transferred onto a wide variety of objects.
The most important influence on contemporary design,
however, was the Bauhaus, established in Germany immediately
after the First World War. Walter Gropius (1883-1969),
architect, designer and teacher, founded the Bauhaus
School of Art and Design in Weimar in 1919. He taught
principles which have become fundamental to nearly
all aspects of 20th century design. The philosophy
of the school was to bring art and technology closer
together. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), one of the
other many gifted teachers at the Bauhaus, said that
typography in design should be clear communication
in its most vivid form. The Bauhaus created a new
typography, and also experimented with printing materials.
Herbert Bauer abandoned the use of capital letters
in trying to represent sound typographically.
At the same time, the radical Cubist movement was
under way in France, led by Pablo Picasso (1891-1973)
and George Braque (1882-1963).
This freedom from tradition was consolidated in the
1950s by the Swiss designer Jan Tschichold. He advocated
simplicity, contrast and primary colours. His asymmetric
arrangements of type display exquisite visual judgement.
He also combined photographs and type, which was a
rare occurence then. It is no coincidence that Swiss
graphic design is still held in high esteem. Switzerland
is a country with three official languages, which
all appear in most printed literature. The Swiss have
had to deal with the problem of order in a rather
extreme way.
The role of graphic designer gained real acceptance
in the United States, where mass production and mass
advertising, together with film, created the need
for specialist designers. The idea of producing a
corporate image for a company was pioneered by Lester
Beall. His design work for Caterpillar led to the
use of a company symbol on everything from the earth-moving
machines, to the office stationery, and deliberately
expressed the essence of Caterpillar's business.
In the last 60 years, the range of typefaces available
to a graphic designer has widened enormously. Names
of great significance during this period include Eric
Gill (1882-1940), who was a consultant to the Monotype
Corporation, designed Times and made many other faces
available commercially; and Adrian Frutiger who designed
the Univers type family in 1957.
Design originally had its roots in printing, and
advanced printing technology has influenced attitudes
to design. Web-offset printing - lithographic printing
on paper which is fed through the printing press from
a roll - and computer typesetting, have radically
changed the way in which designers work. The designer
has always solved problems within the constraints
of existing technology, and will continue to do so
as technology advances still further with laser printing
and computer graphics. New technology merely serves
to change or increase the parameters that designers
have to work with and will never actually replace
the process of design itself.
DESIGN TRAINING: A graphic designer is an
orchestrator of words and images. Every designer will
deal with typography, colour and composition in an
individual manner, producing different results. To
be a successful graphic designer requires an inherent
aesthetic awareness and artistic flair - these are
essential qualities. Developing these natural abilities
requires practical training. The emphasis now at most
colleges is on self-motivation, and, undoubtedly,
a period spent exploring ideas and experimenting without
the pressure and restrictions imposed by a commercial
contract, is invaluable for the development of visual
awareness.
Few colleges therefore, offer the working environment
in which students can appreciate why they are learning
certain skills. It is difficult to understand the
importance of good copyfitting or artwork unless they
are put in an appropriate context. The reason for
learning how to cast off, or how to mark up copy well,
becomes clear very quickly when you begin working.
If you are to succeed within this competitive industry,
you must be equipped at the outset with a range of
basic technical skills and a knowledge of design principles.
DRAWING: All children are encouraged to draw
from an early age, but as they grow older, greater
emphasis tends to be given to learning the skills
of written expression. Consequently, relatively few
children develop the skill of drawing more fully.
Drawing enables you to represent your ideas or environment
visually on a two-dimensional surface. If you compare
this process with the way a graphic designer produces
a visual, you can see immediately how useful drawing
is. If you can draw, your ability to express an idea
is increased. A few well placed lines on a sheet of
paper will instantly convey to a client what you are
trying to achieve. Many designers, however, feel unable
to produce a visual which contains people or objects
without having exact photographic references and an
enlarger so that they can trace the image. Developing
your drawing skills however, will give your visuals
a better look and more atmosphere.
A designer should be observant - weak drawing is
often the result of not looking properly at the subject.
Consider composition, proportion and tone. A knowledge
of the basic principles of perspective is essential,
in order to represent the three-dimensional volume
of an object in space on a two-dimensional surface.
This knowledge is invaluable, not only for your own
visuals, but for assessing the work of illustrators
and photographers which you may later commission.
COMPOSITION: When you juggle with areas of
text and pictures in a design until the results are
visually pleasing you are 'composing'. You are organising
the type, shapes and colour in such a way that they
work well together. The Classical concept of composition
was based on a means of dividing up space called The
Golden Section. This convention was devised to give
artists well balanced points of reference on their
paper, from which to work. It is a mathematical method
of working out 'ideal' proportions. Similarly, the
human figure provides a basis for mathematical proportion
- it can be divided up into eight equal sections.
Both these concepts are useful but should not be used
rigidly.
It is wise to regard systems as servants. Rules of
colour, proportion and perspective need only be observed
while they serve your purpose; as soon as they impede
it, it is your prerogative to change them. To quote
Renoir (1841-1919) 'There is much to painting which
can't be explained and which is essential. You arrive
before nature with theories and nature throws them
to the ground.' Artists and designers now work more
intuitively than in the past, but experience and confidence
remain the decisive factors affecting composition.
COLOUR: Understanding colour is an integral
part of being a designer. It is virtually impossible
to be objective about colour because we all use colour
in a subjective way. A basic knowledge of colour theory
is of course useful, but time spent experimenting
with colour is more rewarding. Colour theory shows
why it works as it does, but not how to use it to
create harmonious or shocking effects, for example.
Dayglo, neon and laser colour, in addition to the
natural tones we are familiar with, have had a profound
effect on the use of colour in design.
Daylight or 'white light' is a tiny component of
electromagnetic radiation and can be split up into
seven different colours, violet, indigo, blue, green,
yellow, orange and red - the colours of the spectrum.
The colour of an object depends on how much of each
of these colours is absorbed or reflected by the surface
of that object. The three primary colours are red,
yellow and blue. They cannot be mixed from a combination
of any other colours, but all the colours can be made
up from them. The three secondary colours are made
from mixing any two of the primaries together - green
(blue and yellow), violet (red and blue) and orange
(yellow and red). The shade of a secondary colour
will vary depending on the proportions of each primary
mixed. Those primary and secondary colours which contrast
with each other most strongly are known as complimentary
colours - orange and blue, yellow and violet, red
and green. Complementary colours do not have a common
primary colour.
For a designer, working with colour will mean choosing
colours which are made up out of the four basic colours
used in printing. These are yellow, magenta (red),
cyan (blue) and black. These four colours can be mixed
together in different proportions to achieve nearly
all the colours. It is important to remember that
colour is modified by light. This is particularly
important to a designer when specifying colours to
a printer. The quality and density of a colour will
change if you look at it in two different types of
light, so it is best when choosing colours to look
at them in daylight.
TYPOGRAPHY: The graphic designer is a co-ordinator
of words and images. An understanding and appreciation
of typography are essential for a designer to communicate
effectively. Letterforms are powerful and exciting,
they can make shapes and create colour. Good typography
should be individual and creative.
Many of the terms we use today refer to earlier typesetting
and printing techniques. You don't necessarily need
to understand the mechanics of these terms to be able
to use them, just as you don't need to understand
how a computer works to operate one. Your main consideration
is to achieve aesthetic appeal and legibility. There
are literally thousands of typefaces to choose from.
Some are suitable only for decorative headlines. Each
typeface has different characteristics: but they all
fall into two main groups - serif faces and sans serif
faces. Serif faces have little cross strokes, like
tails on certain characters' sans serif faces are
plain.
Typefaces are further classified into six basic groups
- Gothic, Old Style, Transitional, Modern, Egyptian
and Sans Serif - which roughly trace the development
of type design. It is worth buying a good typeface
specimen book which shows complete alphabets of many
typefaces in different sizes, and examples of text
setting. This will help you choose typefaces and decide
on sizes.
Originally, with moveable type, each character or
letter was on a wooden or metal body of its own -
and this determined the space between one character
and another. With modern computer typesetting equipment,
this space is totally flexible, letters can touch
or overlap, be condensed or expanded at will. This
flexibility however can also be a disadvantage. If
typesetting is too close or too open it can be very
difficult to read. This applies not only to the spaces
between words and characters, but also to the spaces
between lines (leading).
Graphic
Design Basics
New
Media in Graphic Design
The
Complete Graphic Designer: A Guide to Understanding
Graphics and Visual Communication
THE SWIFTS: PRINTERS IN THE AGE OF TYPESETTING
RACES
BY WALKER RUMBLE: Walker Rumble runs Oat
City Press, a small press in East Providence,
Rhode Island, which publishes limited-edition chapbooks
and broadsides as well as Paragraph, a journal of
short prose.
A few years after Tom Edison invented the electric
light and a few years before Henry Ford's Model T
ran the buggy whip manufacturers out of business a
man named Ottmar Merganthaler invented a type-setting
machine that ended centuries of setting type by hand.
Now another man, Walker Rumble, has written a nostalgic
book about printers and the printers trade in the
post-Civil War 1800s, before Merganthaler's Linotype
machine changed the industry forever.
Sounds pretty dull, doesn't it? Surprisingly it isn't.
And it isn't because it's not just a book about printers,
it's a book about a special breed of printer, the
swift. And it's also about the rise of the International
Typographers Union, about the place of women in the
trade and most of all about the long defunct sport
of typesetting racing. If you never heard of typesetting
racing you are not alone. Neither has anyone else
who is not interested in the esoteric history of printing
or who hasn't read Mr Rumble's "The Swifts."
Typesetting racing came on the scene after the Civil
War, hung around for 20 or so years and disappeared
into the musty annals of sports history coincidental
with the advent of the Linotype. But for a short period
it drew crowds of thousands and warranted serious
newspaper coverage.
The Linotype is a tremendously complicated piece
of machinery and at one time there was a story told
in composing rooms, very likely apocryphal, that inventing
it had driven its inventor mad. Regardless, Mr Rumble
takes care to note the tremendous impact it made on
the printing industry. He writes: "Between 1886
and 1899 hot metal Linotypes rearranged a world of
printing."
A little more than half a century later photocomposition
had begun rearranging it again and in the process
had brought about the demise of the machines that
had brought an end to the need for journeyman compositors.
Moveable metal type, the invention that made possible
the printing of newspapers and books, is generally
thought to be — although nobody is quite sure
— the brainchild of a German, Johann Gutenberg,
around 1436. Four hundred years later, during the
period about which Mr Rumble writes, compositors were
still setting type by hand, one letter at a time.
In fact, as recently as 1950 when I first went to
work on a newspaper, some specialty type was still
hand set.
In those days the International Typographers Union
reigned supreme in the composing rooms of the printing
industry. Almost every newspaper's composing room
was unionized and woe unto any non-printer, usually
a makeup editor, who thoughtlessly or out of ignorance
dared move or even touch a piece of type. At that
moment whistles blew, work stopped and a chapel (chapter)
meeting was called to determine what actions should
be taken to insure that such violations never again
occurred. And to heck with meeting that day's deadline.
In those days the ITU was strong, tough and militant
and went to great lengths to combat non-union shops
especially, those in newspapers. Strikes were only
one of its weapons. At one period in the 1950s and
60s it went so far as to start newspapers in direct
competition with a town's non-union paper. The effort,
the dying gasp of a trade union that had no idea it
was dying, failed.
And not long afterward it did die. By the mid-70s
when newspapers and the printing industry in general
had switched from hot type to photocomposition and
offset printing the ITU was all but defunct. By 1986
it had been decertified and its few remaining members
subsumed into the Communications Workers union. But
in the heyday of the swifts the ITU reigned supreme
and swifts almost without exception were union members.
Swifts were given their name because they were exactly
that — swift and accurate. They were the fastest
type setters and Mr Rumble is fascinated by them.
He describes in great and loving detail who these
men were, from whence they came, the places where
they worked—they moved from place to place and
job to job as the mood struck them.
Most of them, like most journeyman printers of the
time, died young, often before reaching 40, often
of consumption. It was an occupational hazard brought
about by vile working conditions, air befouled with
the stink of unsanitary toilets, the sweat and body
odor of unbathed men and tobacco smoke, hard drinking
and long hours. The ITU in those days apparently cared
little about working conditions and was primarily
interested in wages and in keeping women out of the
composing room.
In this latter effort it failed; for the most part
it could keep them out of the union but not out of
the composing rooms, largely those of job shops and
book publishers. While women were always scarce in
the back shops of newspapers, one, Freddy Brown, worked
for years as a proof reader at the Burbank, Calif.,
Daily Review. She had three daughters, one of whom,
Angie Dickinson, went on to star in movies and on
television.
You can't write about the swifts without mentioning
the great ones, the Babe Ruths, or Joe Louises or
Jesse Owenses of their peculiar sport. In every sport
there are three or four unforgettable figures. Among
swifts there was the legendary George Arensberg, known
as the Velocipede because of his speed. Others, including
the Irishman Joe McCann, Bill Barnes and Alexander
Duguid, broke his record just as others have broken
Ruth's. But still, Arensberg is acknowledged to be
the first of the truly great ones. When he died he
was an old man of 36.
George Arensberg was called “The Boy” when
the 19-year-old printing compositor arrived in New
York in 1869. Within a year, though, his shopmates
had renamed him “The Velocipede.” Arensberg
had EA Donaldson, a composing-room foreman at The
New York Times, to thank for his newfound fame. That
winter, Donaldson had offered the young Arensberg
an opportunity to prove that he was fast enough to
set four stickfuls of type—maybe five pages of
modern double-spaced typescript—in an hour. Then
Donaldson spread the word. Scores of printers from
New York’s newspapers and printing shops converged
on the composing room of The New York Times to bet
on the Velocipede. He did not disappoint. On the afternoon
of February 19, 1870, Arensberg set 2 064 ems of type
in a single hour, making him the world’s fastest
typesetter.
Composition had not progressed much since Gutenberg’s
day. It would be the last part of traditional printing
to be mechanized, lagging behind technological leaps
in other stages of the process, from rotary steam-powered
presses to curved-plate stereotyping. Even after the
introduction in the 1860s of presses that could produce
15 000 newspapers an hour, printing still required
battalions of hand compositors.
A hand compositor set type letter by letter. He faced
a case subdivided into compartments, each filled with
pieces of metal nearly an inch tall bearing a letter,
punctuation symbol, or number cast in relief. The
compartment for the letter e could hold a couple of
hundred characters, while the compartment for the
semicolon might contain only a dozen. The character
on each piece of type was reversed, so that when it
was inked and pressed onto a sheet of paper, the resulting
text would read normally. The typesetter placed each
letter upside down and face out into a hand-held metal
typestick—a shallow tray about as tall as 20
lines of type—beginning in the bottom left-hand
corner. As the letters formed a word, he placed a
shallower piece of metal on its right to hold the
space and started the next word; when the words formed
a line, he inserted extra blanks between words to
justify and then he started the next line right on
top of it. Once the typestick was full, the typesetter
transferred the matter (as composed type was called)
onto a larger tray called a galley. From there, the
finished block of text would be bound around all sides
with a cord and inked to make a proof (a preliminary
print for editors to check). Then a printer would
transfer the type to a perfectly flat table, correct
any mistakes found in the preliminary print, and add
illustration and headline plates to make a complete
page. After locking the whole compilation into a metal
frame, the printer made an impression and then cast
a plate of hot metal from it; this would then be used
to print the newspaper.
Printers measured the amount of type they set in
ems, a unit of measurement based on the width of the
letter m, the widest in the alphabet. The average
compositor could finish 700 ems an hour (including
time spent ensuring the lines were spaced evenly and
looking for typos). In doing so, the compositor’s
hand reached into the typecase some 2,000 times. Two
thousand ems an hour, the fastest racing pace, required
5 350 reaches: 85 to 100 letters picked up each minute,
7 or 8 every five seconds.
Such skill and speed commanded respect. There were
no shortcuts beyond nimble fingers, great stamina,
and total concentration. In the midnineteenth century,
the compositor was an elite worker, a member of the
International Typographical Union (ITU), one of the
oldest and best established labor unions in the country.
Artisans at some big-city dailies even achieved a
sort of gentility: The New York Tribune’s ace
compositor, Thomas Rooker, wore diamondstudded shirtfronts.
(Male printers only grudgingly admitted that women
might perform well in composing rooms. In fact, women
had always worked on those printing shop floors where
raffle tickets, books, and business cards were produced.
Especially at large firms in big cities, however,
women struggled for stature and, of course, wages.
Women rarely worked in the composing rooms of large
urban daily newspapers.) By the 1890s, Ottmar Mergenthaler’s
Linotype slugcaster would mechanize the composition
process, but on the eve of that innovation, every
American composing room and printshop had a local
typesetting speed demon, a “swift” who claimed
to be the fastest ever.
Fast typesetters almost invariably traveled from
job to job. New England’s champion, George Graham,
worked in nine different states between 1873 and 1884—“much
as the average printer’s life is passed,”
said the noted swift William Barnes, “roaming
about the country.” Printing unions everywhere
sponsored this kind of mobility as a means of keeping
wages high by keeping demand for their services up.
Typesetters with union cards were guaranteed employment,
or at least hospitality, in any shop room in the country,
so they could seek work wherever the pay was highest.
Printing journeymen called jobs “situations,”
or “sits.” Tramping was an honorable way
of life.
Typesetting races contributed to the celebrity of
the printing world. Compositors had raced from the
first day there were two of them, usually for beer.
Drinking was part of the life. “Exhausted after
the tiresome night’s work,” the swift Joseph
McCann once explained, journeyman compositors “sought
the convivial cup to restore their shattered nerves.”
Drinking and betting—saloon life —provided
the essence of a bachelor subculture, a shop-floor
alternative to union plenary sessions held in hotel
banquet rooms. For every local typesetting hotshot,
there was a composing room full of colleagues willing
to bet money on him. After the Civil War, printers
competed with increasing energy and in widening circles.
Printshop composing rooms held contests, kept records,
published challenges, and generally encouraged interest
in the industry’s intramural sport. By the 1880s,
names such as Thomas C. (“Bangs”) Levy and
Clinton (“The Kid”) Dejarnatt dominated
a newly emerging circuit of touring professionals.
Arensberg, like his colleagues, had begun his career
on the move. Born in 1850, he grew up in Pittsburgh
peddling the Dispatch. Eventually, he graduated to
the composing room, and at age 16 he elbowed his way
into Pittsburgh’s printing local. He thereupon
hit the road—or, more accurately, the river—arriving
at New Orleans by way of the Ohio and the Mississippi.
Unable to find a “sit” there, Arensberg
signed on as a cabin boy, worked his passage back
upriver to Memphis, and held a job briefly at the
local Bulletin. From there he went to Louisville,
where he stayed a year and a half, learning typesetting
from some respected compositors. By 1869 Arensberg
was in New York applying for work at The New York
Times.
Donaldson had high hopes for him on the afternoon
of February 19, 1870, as did the large numbers of
New York journeymen who gathered in the composing
rooms of The New York Times. The affair nonetheless
attracted plenty of doubting out-of-towners, most
of whom, according to the New York Sun, “backed
time.” At 3:00 P.M. Arensberg picked up his typestick.
A Mr. Stanley, called “the shortest and best
compositor in the business” by a Sun reporter,
was on hand to referee. Arensberg started fast—too
fast, some said. He completed his first stickful in
only 13 minutes, 55 seconds. He was bound to wear
himself out. “Backers of ‘time’ felt
quite jubilant,” reported the Sun. But when he
finished his second stickful even faster, by 5 seconds,
his doubters began to hedge their bets. He came in
with a time of 14 minutes flat for his third stickful,
and the issue was settled. Barring collapse, he could
reach his goal of four stickfuls in the next 18 minutes
or so. A losing bettor frantically accepted a side
bet against his setting 2 000 ems in the hour. But
Arensberg carried the day. Not only did he finish
his fourth stickful in 14 minutes and 10 seconds,
he worked on the fifth stick for the balance of the
hour. He had set four stickfuls in 55 minutes and
55 seconds, winning the bet, and he covered all sides
by hitting 2 064 ems within the hour. Shopmates mobbed
him at the finish. His backers challenged the entire
world. This was the fastest typesetter in creation.
A half-dozen years and several races later, Arensberg
had become legendary. He could work when and where
he wanted, and by his late twenties he had held jobs
in most of the major cities in the eastern United
States. In 1877 he arrived for work at the Cincinnati
Enquirer. Soon after, John Bell, the foreman of the
Enquirer’s composing room, had offered what Printers’
Circular called “a bold challenge from the West.”
For stakes beginning at $500, the Enquirer was prepared
to back its fastest swift against any other shop’s
challenger, its fastest pair against any other shopmate
pair, and so on, up to any 10-man typesetting staff.
And with good reason. With Arensberg’s arrival,
the paper had a ringer in a composing room full of
first-rate swifts.
Soon, however, Arensberg would face fresh competition.
He had made his name and won $50 at the New York Times
wager, a prize guaranteed to turn heads when printers
working at the top of their profession earned $30
a week. Quickly, racing enthusiasts upped the ante,
attracting an assortment of new performers, any of
whom might eclipse Arensberg’s legend. As early
as 1881, Bangs Levy won $1,000 competing in Winnipeg.
By 1885 typesetting races had become a well-attended
public amusement, breaking out of the prosaic local
printing shops: Dime museums would equip their halls
to look like composing rooms and hold weeklong speed
tests. Bigger races became events nearly as popular
as billiards, bicycle racing, and boxing. Printers
in many Eastern cities promoted organized typesetting
races. George Graham beat a gathering of Boston’s
best printers; William C. Clarke won in Pittsburgh,
Joseph Farquhar in Rochester. In the South, W. H.
Van Bibber triumphed in Memphis. Challenges circulated
widely, increasingly farther from the confines of
individual shop floors. The International Typographical
Union even published a standardized set of racing
rules.
Union leadership supported type racing, at least
for a while, but there was no question that the strongest
interest in typesetting matches remained on the shop
floor among printing’s rank and file. As the
ITU held its 1885 meeting in New York City and Henry
George, the author of Progress and Poverty, addressed
labor officials from a stage he shared with Mayor
W. R. Grace, printers of a different stripe arrived
at the composing rooms of the New York Sunday Star
for faster action. Joseph McCann defeated Ira Somers
that day as 300 noisy printers put their money down.
Among the spectators was William Barnes, a Canadian
working at the New York World with ambitions of his
own. That September, he challenged McCann to a mid-December
match race: four hours for $500 a side, winner take
all. On race day, McCann got off to a sluggish start,
and the crowd, betting on the fly, was tempted to
write him off. Observers knew little about Barnes,
but his motion was “free and graceful,”
according to a reporter from the New York Herald,
while McCann, a six-month sensation following his
match with Somers, seemed “stiff.” McCann
grabbed type, snatching it “in about the same
way that an unsuspecting child would touch a red hot
stove.” But he soon found his rhythm and, driving,
pulled abreast of Barnes. The minutes passed, and
they “were heard clicking together at the end
of each line.” Excitement gathered. Spectators
were so uncertain of the outcome that betting slowed
to almost a halt. “Oh, boys!” cried the
typographer Jimmy Hart at the end of every stickful.
“Oh, boys!”
Almost 16 years had passed since Arensberg’s
epochal 1870 wager. Men such as McCann and Barnes
had always chafed under the burden of Arensberg’s
reputation. But now he was sick. A Philadelphia newspaper
reported that he was “broken down in health,
although still working occasionally in the composing
room of the New York Times.” A New York Herald
reporter, on the scene for the McCann-Barnes match,
spied Arensberg, quiet in the background. The Velocipede
was there to watch, “glad,” it seemed, “to
be out of the trouble.” In any case, the printing
fraternity was about to crown his successor. Joseph
McCann, the winner, was now the man of the hour.
Half a year later, in the midsummer of 1886, Arensberg
entered New York’s Bellevue Hospital. He died
on July 28 at the age of 36. According to The New
York Times, he succumbed to “a complication of
disorders.” Friends called it an early death,
but he had been a printing legend since he was 19
and seemed an elder statesman. The swiftest of all
had not raced in nearly a decade. As Arensberg was
dying, technological innovation promised the demise
of them all. During his final weeks, coincidentally
and with melancholy timing, Whitelaw Reid, the editor
of the New York Tribune, installed Mergenthaler’s
new Linotype machine in the Tribune’s composing
room. Human hands, no matter how swift, could not
outpace this machine. The Velocipede and his colleagues
were suddenly also-rans.
No printing history of that period would be complete
without mentioning women, who strove, largely in vain,
to find a significant place in the ITU. For a while
in the late 1800s they made gains under the dynamic
leadership of a young woman named Augusta Lewis. But
eventually Augusta went off and got married and not
long afterward the drive by women printers for equality
with men within the printers union pretty much petered
out.
But even as it did, three non-union women racing
among themselves (the men wouldn't stoop to racing
with them) beat the records of the best men. And for
all practical purposes that event, along with the
coming of the Linotype, brought to an end the sport
of typesetting speed racing, although it was not officially
banned by the ITU until 1900. It was the only time
women competed in recognized races. That was in 1886.
The place was Austen and Stone's dime museum in Boston.
Races were six-day affairs with printers setting identical
straight matter — nothing fancy — and with
time off between relatively short bursts of activity.
Both speed and accuracy were essential.
The women's race followed on the heels of a men's
race which had been won by a swift named George Graham.
Three of the four women, all using phony names set
more type than Graham had been able to. And that seems
to have been that because afterward, as Mr Rumble
notes, something funny happened, or rather didn't
happen. Typesetting racing didn't die a lingering
death, it just stopped. Cold. And then came close
to being forgotten entirely.
Mr. Rumble surely deserves a kudo or two for digging
up and bringing back, fittingly in print, a unique
bit of 19th-century Americana. True, typesetting races
probably would not excite today's amusement saturated
public, (although sports cable will televise just
about anything that smacks of a contest) but for a
little while the swifts romanticized their trade while
providing what for then was an exciting new sport
for the entertainment of the American public.
The LINOTYPE machine
The Linotype machine used a 90-character keyboard
to create an entire line of metal type at once. This
allowed much faster typesetting and composition than
the original hand composition with the Gutenberg-style
system, in which operators place down one pre-cast
metal letter, punctuation mark or space at a time.
The machine revolutionized newspaper publishing, making
it possible for a relatively small number of operators
to set type for many pages on a daily basis.
First produced by Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1886, the
Linotype was 6 ft 11 in (2.1 m) tall. Keystrokes retrieved
letter molds from the magazines. Once an entire line
of molds was assembled, the machine poured molten
type metal, which is an alloy of lead usually also
containing tin and antimony, into the stacked-up molds.
This produced a complete line of type in reverse,
so it would read properly when used to transfer ink
onto paper. The lines of type were then assembled
by hand into a page.
The complexity of a Linotype machine was necessary
not just so that it would place letter molds in the
proper place as the operator typed on the keyboard,
but so it could return the molds to the proper place
in preparation for their next usage. This was vital,
because returning letters to the proper part of a
case (termed "redistribution") is the slowest
and most difficult part of setting type by hand. The
Linotype machine used a clever design of coded notches
on each letter mold, rather like the indentations
on a key which make it fit a lock, so they would slide
back into the proper spot when replaced.
In addition, a Linotype machine could produce "justified"
type (where the spaces on the lines are expanded so
that the text fills the line to the right-hand margin).
It did this by inserting "space bands" rather
than simple fixed-width blank molds whenever the operator
pressed the spacebar. These space bands were wedge-like
devices that could expand side-to-side when their
top and bottom edges were compressed together. They
would first be inserted into the line set to their
minimum width. When the line was completely composed,
levers would press down uniformly on the set of molds
that formed the line of type, forcing each of the
space bands to expand from side-to-side. When the
line had expanded to the point where it was pressing
against the left and right margin stops, the line
had been correctly justified and could now be cast.
Except for the determination of which lines to justify
and which lines to leave "ragged right",
this process was entirely automated.
The "hot type" (or hot metal) method of
typesetting is virtually extinct today, replaced first
by "cold type", in which lines of type were
generated by computer-controlled exposure devices
onto photographic paper and pasted onto large paper
"flats" by hand, and then by pagination
and desktop publishing systems in which the entire
page is created in the computer and output as complete
pages directly to film or printing plates.
The Linotype may be best remembered for the layout
of its keyboard, which had letters arranged in decreasing
order of frequency in everyday English. The first
two vertical rows were usually ETAOIN SHRDLU, a phrase
that occasionally appeared in print because Linotype
operators who made mistakes would run their fingers
down the keyboard to fill out the line with nonsense,
and sometimes the slug of type would accidentally
get used. This phrase is in the Oxford English Dictionary
and has been used as a character name by a number
of authors.
The keyboard usually had the following alphabet arrangement
given twice, one for lower-case and once for upper-case
letters, with extra keys for numbers and symbols located
between the two cases: etaoin / shrdlu / cmfwyp /
vbgkqj / xz
(excerpt from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
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