A film looking at the history and use of the Linotype type casting machine:
At a time when e-readers and the internet are changing publishing, it’s interesting and important to look back on the technology that came before. Sounds like a great film for anyone interested in print and publishing technology. (via Swissmiss)
I know it makes me both a geek and dinosaur, but I LOVE that stuff – old print/publishing techniques, paper making etc. Amazing stuff. That type of technology really kept us closer to the art of creating stories. Now that anyone with a keyboard, smartphone etc. can bang out a few lines of text, it matters less what we write, but just that we’re writing and broadcasting, which to me is a sad thing.
I love it too! The world needs more geek-dinosaurs. And I love your point about how the real effort involved in that kind of printing meant more for the written word itself.
That’s very cool. When I was in college (late 80s, early 90s), I worked in my residential college’s old-fashioned printing press (the kind where you did have to set the type, and even the spaces, by hand) and it was a thrill to print out the resulting invitations, posters, etc after all the painstaking typesetting. If we wanted to add an image, we would carve out a linoblock. I was also into journalism and remembered when we still pasted the text and images with rubber cement. So I guess I’m a geek dinosaur too.