I purchased a bunch of old Linotype books (manuals and such), and I found a slip of paper tucked into a copy of I.T.U. Lessons in Printing: Linotype and Intertype Unit VIII: Secrets of Success as an Operator, published by the International Typographic Union Bureau of Education, c. 1931. (This is basically an operator's manual, with keyboarding lessons and such.)
The paper, from some other source, is printed on parchment. I have no clue as to the source, but it's obviously much later than 1931. It contains this (sentimentality alert!) text:
The Epitaph of the Linotype Machine
Many words have passed through me, but now all fail as confusion takes over and grips the very heart of my every moving part.
In all the years I have resided in the many places I was forced to live, I have fought off the elements of man and nature only to become less wanted everyday of my remaining life.
Time moves past the window of life but for me the window becomes more cloudy every day. There are still some places where I can honestly earn my pay but there are those who think I'm living on borrowed time...no matter what I say. Yet, in the past I have kept the world informed of news both good and bad and made some intelligent who read the words that have passed through me. My wish is that they be quality and be for eternity.
Now my future is truly dim, for I cannot keep pace with this progressive world, nor can I be trained for a new job as the end nears for they tell me that I have too many cogs and gears. No matter, I think I'll be around for many more years.
I'm really thankful to all mankind for making my life so long and good. I've always done the very best I could.
I don't know where I'll finally lie when the day comes that I must die, but no matter still for I have printed all of my will and left with man. So let speed come, go as fast as you can and I hope your future is as good as the past for if it is we will achieve our goal at last.
I have no regrets, there is always the remote chance that someone will keep me, just for a pet. There are those who like to reminisce and are sorry the world is moving as fast as this.
Memory lane!
I worked as a copyeditor and typesetter at my college newspaper. When my liberal arts degree failed to land me a job, I did a lot of work as a typesetter 'til I decided on grad school. I'd have starved otherwise. I still annoy my friends with "name that font!"
I remember the IBM typewriter-typesetters; I thought they were much cooler than their little brothers, the Selectric typewriters. (Mmmm. Maybe I could find one of them on E-bay.) The ones I used could only set body type, since the fonts were on Selectric-like balls, and we had a real torture device for setting display type: a primitive phototypesetting unit. This device -- not really a machine, little more than a light-safe spool of paper on one side with a take-up reel on the other and a light-safe chamber in between with an exposure light -- used fonts on film. Each size and face combo was a different film strip. Type was set by hand. Imagine setting LetraSet press-type in the dark.
You slipped the film strip between the paper and the light source, centered the letter in the exposure chamber, and hit the light, exposing the paper. You then advanced the paper enough to avoid overlapping the next letter. Of course, you couldn't see the letter on the paper until it was developed, so it was an exercise in visual memory to "see" the letter on the paper, "see" where the next letter would be (does it need to be kerned?), and advance the paper appropriately. The font strips had little tick marks to serve as clues, so if you moved the font and the paper together, you were supposed to get the right spacing. Needless to say, the two never moved together smoothly, so you usually just did it by visualizing. And if you needed to change the face or size, you had to switch strips, which really made it easy to lose the visual memory.
Then you developed the paper and hoped that you didn't have any overlapping letters; big spaces could be excised with the power of X-Acto, but overlaps had to be reset. With practice, you could set perfectly acceptable type this way, but it took a lot of practice.
And I loved the computerized phototypesetters. I used both Compugraphic and Varityper machines. The blue Compugraphic machines had the fonts on big filmstrips that you clamped to a drum inside the photo unit. (On the one we had, the drum squealed when you applied the brake to change the font. Ugh.) The most annoying thing about this system was that the fonts and the font metrics were stored separately. You had to insert a metric card corresponding to the font into the computational unit, and then have the machine count the type ("rejust" was the command, IIRC). If you forgot to swap the card when you changed the font strip, you'd get a mess of ugly type, like bad font substitution on a printer. As I recall, these strips typically included two or four faces, so you'd have a light, an italic, a bold and a bold italic, but you couldn't mix, say, Garamond faces with Helvetica faces in the same block of text. While this was rarely an issue in body type, it made setting display type a pain. You set all the Helvetica type, then all the Garamond, and the actual assembly again required the power of X-Acto.
The Varitypers had the fonts on the plastic wheels, with the metrics also on the wheels. This was much nicer; you just had to change the wheel. Each wheel could hold four faces, and the machines we had could take four wheels, so you could actually set camera-ready copy in mixed fonts. I really loved these machines; most of the operators knew only the bare minimum. My official job was copyeditor, and I wasn't supposed to play with the typesetters, but I knew those machines could be used better than we were using them, so I used to take the manuals home and study them, amazed at the stuff you could do with them. I'd sneak time on them to play, sending home elaborately typeset letters on photopaper. Eventually, I became the unofficial Varityper guru, and I got to set all the "hard" (fun) stuff for our weekend magazine.
We also had that table-top developer unit, which was a real pain. The chemicals were smelly enough on their own, but if you bumped the unit, the chemicals would mix, resulting in this white, kinda egg-whitey mess. Then you had to take the whole unit apart and clean it thoroughly -- especially the rollers, since the paper feed seem to be where we had most of our problems. The paper goes in but it doesn't come out. You open the box, and all your paper is neatly accordioned up, again mixing the chemicals.
I hit grad school just in time for the digital/desktop-PC revolution, but I was so frustrated with the early stuff. Ugly Machintosh fonts, and the awful documents by people who seemed to believe that they had to use every font they had. For a while, I despaired for the future of typography and the legible printed page. I even wrote a paper on the history of typesetting that was eventually published as an entry in (I think) the Encyclopedia of Information Science. Then I discovered TEX and the various roffs, and the good digital type foundries, and life was worth living (or at least formatting) again. But I still miss the phototypesetters, except that one.
I never got to use a Linotype machine, and I've always regretted it. Someday.... You can occasionally find Linotype machines on E-bay. I have seen several, although only one has been within feasible transport range, and the seller never answered my mail (fool). Someday, one will be mine. (See Heavy Metal Madness: The Horrors of a Global Marketplace for the adventures of someone who saw it on Ebay and couldn't resist.)
I tried to look at the White Smoke demo, but I just got a blank page. I did look at their User Guide and commend it to all.
It's a series of screen shots that illustrates how to "upgrade" (their word) the following sentence: I admire your work.
First, you choose the text to torment by "Stand[ing] with your mouse cursor on the desired text." (OK, when can I sit back down?)
The word admire is highlighted, and scrollable lists of modifiers and replacements are provided. The visible modifiers include "greatly", "incidentally", "naturally", and "scarcely". The replacement list includes "respect", "appreciate", "commend", and "applaud".
There's also a handy Accept All button which, presumably, yields I greatly, incidentally, naturally, and scarcely respect, appreciate, commend, and applaud your work. Definitely an upgrade! (And if all the choices in the scrollable lists are used, all the better.)
But further down, the lists change. At first, I thought it was the result of a scroll-down when the screen shot was taken. The modifiers now include "legal", "learned", "mysterious", and "papal"; the replacements include "account", "case history", "data", and "documentation."
I mysterious documentation your work. That can't possibly be what they mean! So I looked again, thinking that maybe now we were upgrading the word work. But no, the highlighted word is still admire, so I papal case history your work is apparently considered a reasonable "enrichment" (again, their word).
The instructions definitely sound like the work of a non-native speaker. To select my choice from a list, I must arise again, as I'm instructed to "stand inside the box with my mouse cursor and click on it". Or perhaps they have used the product to upgrade the original instructions.
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