In the Print Shop.

I’ve long been fascinated by the process of old-fashioned printing (see this 2004 post), and when I used to work in a printing and design shop I liked nothing better than listening to grizzled old printers reminisce. So it is with nostalgic pleasure that I present Peter Campbell’s posthumous LRB essay (it was left unpublished at the time of his death in 2011; he designed the LRB and wrote more than three hundred pieces for it), which begins:

It was noisy​ in Harry H. Tombs Ltd, the New Zealand print shop where I served a small part of an apprenticeship that would have made me a compositor. I worked upstairs in the composing room where the rhythm was set by the Linotype machines: the tap of the keyboard, the rustle of the matrices sliding from the magazine into their place in the line, followed, when the line was full, by a heavy thump as the spaces were wedged home. There were clanks and bangs as the line of matrices was offered up to the mould and the molten type-metal that glistened in the crucible behind was injected. The hot, bright line of newly cast type joined others in the tray with a metallic slither. Meanwhile, we hand-compositors stood at our frames and quietly clicked type into our composing sticks for the odd heading or display line, or dissed it, dropping used type back into the case with a louder click. We assembled the metal lines of type (called slugs) and titles and any other elements of the printed page, and grouped them together with other pages for printing, creating what was known as a forme. From time to time there would be a thump as one of us heaved a forme (four, eight or sixteen pages of type weigh a lot) up onto the stone – the metal table on which they were put together. The pages of the forme were wedged into a metal frame, the chase, where they were held firm by quoins (wedges). A hoist creaked as the finished formes were lowered to the ground-floor press room. That had its own sounds. The hiss of air as suckers picked up a sheet from the stack at one end of the big flatbed press and passed it on to be grasped by the cylinder. The sound of engaged gears as the sheet was rolled against the inked type on the moving bed of the press and then released to be carried onwards and added to the pile of printed sheets at the other end of the press. What had been Linotype slugs, type and illustrations upstairs were now pages of the New Zealand Commercial Grower or a scientific paper on the best way to collect ram semen. Each of the three presses had its own voice. It was an inky world dominated by machines that had been milled and drilled from heavy castings, which needed grease and oil to keep them healthy, and a machine minder who, like a good childminder, had an ear tuned to unexpected sounds as well as an eye tuned to imperfections in inking.

I have spent most of my life following up what I began then. I still work with print and play with words, but the sound of typesetting is now the tapping of a writer at a word processor, and I move pages about on my computer screen not on a stone. The formes we sent down to the press room are now files sent over the wire to a printer. Typesetting, once handwork, is now screenwork, a branch of computer graphics, and the presses that output printed sheets are governed electronically. […] Print itself is losing its primacy; newspapers, book and magazine publishers are looking for ways to defend their properties with web-based versions and extensions. Ebooks have begun to sell better than hardbacks.

It isn’t surprising either that letterpress printing – the essentials of which changed little over the first five hundred years – is dead as an industrial process, or almost dead in this country anyway. Someone who came to printing in the 1950s wanting to make books like the ones he or she had read and admired knows that little remains of the constraints, the rectangular grid imposed by type and chase, the limited number of typefaces and sizes of type, which set limits (including an architecture as orthogonal as the warp and weft of woven fabric) on the look of typeset pages. Hot metal typesetting sped thing up: instead of having to arrange existing metal type by hand, the compositor took prepared lines of text from the casting machine, which created new type as quickly as you could tap out the letters on the keyboard. But printing remained an entirely physical business.

After discussing the history of type (“Many practitioners and historians, including Harry Carter, whose 1968 Lyell Lectures, A View of Early Typography, are still the best account of the early history of type design, have known how to cut a punch”) and the preservation of the past of letterpress printing, he continues:

Monotype setting was as good as it got. When I was serving my time with Harry H. Tombs, I already knew that for high-quality printing Monotype, not the Linotype clunking away in the composing room, was the preferred machine. There was some snobbery in this. Linotype was used for books, particularly in America, but American books were less mannerly than British ones and New Zealand was only just emerging from aesthetic Britocentrism. I was fogeyish in my tastes even by those standards. But Harry H. Tombs had, earlier on, been a rather adventurous printer and publisher, and in the back office there were issues of the Fleuron, a handsome annual of typography issued between 1923 and 1930. The last volume had specimens of faces that Monotype had issued or would later issue. There were Venetian 15th-century revivals (Centaur and Bembo) and new faces (Gill’s Perpetua and Jan Van Krimpen’s Lutetia). But it wasn’t just a matter of faces: I knew that some Linotype faces were very good indeed; my feelings were more like those I came across when I read Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring. It’s set in Moscow in 1913 (the Monotype machine had, by then, been around for just more than a decade). She describes what Tvyordov, the head compositor in a printworks owned by an Englishman, thinks about mechanical typesetting:

There was no mystery about Tvyordov’s attitude to the machine room. Linotype, he felt, was not worthy of a serious man’s carefully measured time. It was only fit for slipshod work at great speed. To make corrections you had to reset the whole line, therefore you had orders not to do it. The metal used was wretchedly soft alloy. Monotype, after some consideration, he tolerated. The machine was small and ingenious, and the letters danced out as they were cast from the hot metal, separate and alive. They weren’t as hard as real founder’s type, still they would take a good many impressions and they could be used for corrections in the compositor’s room. When, or even whether, Tvyordov had been asked for his views was not known, but Reidka’s did Monotype and no Linotype.

I read that with feeling. A Monotype machine, like an expensive car, was clearly a masterpiece of mechanical engineering. […]

Is a hankering for Monotype setting to survive more than a sentimental attachment to visible mechanical ingenuity? The question would be theoretical if, in 1992, when the Lanston Monotype Corporation factory at Salfords, near Redhill, was being sold off by the receivers, a group of enthusiasts led by Susan Shaw had not been able to persuade the National Heritage Memorial Fund to subsidise the purchase of a vast amount of Monotype material: machine tools, casters and matrix and punch-making equipment, as well as the company’s paper archive and hundreds of thousands of copper character patterns. While it was still at Salfords, the production of matrices went on. In 1992, a building in London was found for the collection. The first steps towards the foundation of the Type Museum – later renamed the Type Archive – had been taken. […]

To keep the knowledge of handprinting alive, letterpress printing – the plainest link with the craft as it existed over its first five hundred years – must also be sustained. Letterpress has its own aesthetic. A raised surface – type and blocks – is inked. When it is pressed against a sheet of paper, the raised surface digs into it. It was the tactile quality of the object as much as the detail of the image that distinguished the private press books made around the end of the 19th century from the smooth, commercially printed pages of the books they wanted to improve on. Handmade paper and an even, black impression make the page a three-dimensional object, not a two-dimensional image. But you can have too much substance. An over-attachment to it made many private press books precious. A kind of Midas touch made them unreadable: not because they were illegible or ugly but because that kind of fine printing went against the nature of the book as an object to be picked up and, while you read it, ignored. The book as art object was a dead end. Commercial printing and publishing, on the other hand, did seem to have lost touch with whatever it was that made one of Aldus Manutius’s little books from late 1400s Venice so modest and attractive. Through the first half of the 20th century, commercial publishers and printers and university presses brought a seemliness to British book printing that was sound and conventional, like a St James’s Street shoe. During those years the ‘impression’, the way type dug into the paper, almost disappeared while, as Mosley puts it, ‘the skills of the typefounder, the compositor and the machine minder, and the quality of the machine technology that they used, reached a level of perfection that it is a bittersweet experience for us to look at now.’

And it ends:

The total that should be preserved is much wider than the field outlined here, which excludes, for example, photogravure and thus the volumes of black and white reproductions of paintings that the Phaidon Press produced in Germany and England in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. It ignores the huge field of hand-drawn lithography, and thus a vast amount of music printing and commercial printing. But words set in type and printed on paper constitute a subject large and coherent enough to have its own archives, museums, workshops and what have you.

Which takes one back to typefaces and the Monotype machine. If you are making a book with no pictures, the text type, which in a picture book or illustrated magazine registers as a grey mass, punctuated perhaps by a heading, initial or quotation, asserts its individuality. The ‘bookmen’ I admired were essentially literary: Glover, as poet, publisher and printer, condensed the whole book-making process into one career. The text-only book, the reading book, is something you pick up, hold, take to bed, carry about with you. To design a book is to decide on its weight, shape, ease of opening, ease of reading, things as important as the look of the page.

Does this history matter? If it does, which skills and tools must be preserved? The quantity and nature of what needs to be stored and made accessible is not monstrous. The downside is the speed with which links between old and new ways of working dissolve when a large organisation decides to outsource its printing. The OUP was using its own hand-cast 17th-century type well into the 1950s. The historical material may not be lost, but without a connection to a working printing house its use becomes archival and antiquarian. If big machinery – the presses and typesetting machinery of, say, a moderately large book-printing works of around 1950 – are to be preserved as more than a curiosity they need to be shown at work. But printing is a business, it doesn’t fit the model of flypasts by World War Two aircraft (a little less well represented at every anniversary). It only makes sense to keep mechanical, hot metal setting alive, commercially or otherwise, if a case can be made for its use. If it can’t, it must be given a fond farewell, as manuscript-making was.

Incidentally, does anyone know of a history of printing in Russia? I was wondering when innovations like Monotype arrived there.