Today it is the essence of obsoleteness, as impractical for current use as the hand-set type that it replaced well over a century ago. But in the not-so-distant past, it was at the very heart of the vast publishing industry. I'm talking about the Linotype, sometimes mistakenly called a typesetting machine but actually a machine that casts metal type in slugs, or lines, hence the trade name.
It has been called the most complicated mechanism ever devised, which lends credence to the story that its inventor, a German named Ottmar Mergenthaler (18541899), became a mental case. When you see one of these machines in operation, you wonder how anyone could have ever figured out those interrelated functions and make them all work together.
The operator, working at a typewriter-like keyboard, causes little metal molds or matrices to line up on a sort of rod. This assemblage is transferred to a compartment where molten type metal—an alloy of lead, tin and antimony—is forced into the matrices to create a line of type. After the slug is cast, an arm on the machine picks up the matrices and causes them to be distributed back into the magazine chamber from which they were released.
I mention all this now because I have had one of these machines—not in working condition—for several years sitting out in what used to be my garage. Now, with the help of some people in the San Jose Printers' Guild, I have hopes of getting my Linotype in operation. The Printers' Guild is an organization that supplies volunteer docents for the printing office in the History Museum at Kelley Park in San Jose. A lot of its members are high-tech people who get their kicks printing with hand-set type on their own little presses.
It should go without saying that the Linotype and letterpress (raised-surface type) printing in general all went by the board with the advent of computers and word processors. On a newspaper now, not only is the printing done by a word processor, but the pages are laid out on a computer screen. Everything is automated.
There's a Saratoga angle to all this. Even though it's stretching things a bit, I like to say that I was raised in a newspaper back shop. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of watching a Linotype in operation and a job press in its rhythmic production of printed copy.
This was because my dad, Llewellyn B. Peck, had his own newspaper, the Saratoga Star, which he bought in 1922. He had been assistant editor of the Berkeley Gazette, but it was his belief—maybe obsession—that the only worthwhile branch of journalism involved the country weekly. At the time, Saratoga's newspaper, the Star, was published by one Lewis C. Dick, who had established it in 1917. Even though it was a Saratoga paper, it was printed in Los Gatos.
When my dad took over, after he and my mother and older brother moved to Saratoga, he felt that a paper should be printed in its own hometown. So he had the Linotype and press moved to Saratoga, where he set up shop in back of the old post office on Big Basin Way, then Lumber Street. When the enterprise did not live up to his financial expectations, he moved everything over to Los Gatos, where he established the Los Gatos Star. He published the two Stars, which were essentially the same paper with different nameplates, until he sold the operation to Hyland Baggerly, then publisher of the Los Gatos Mail News. My dad then became editor of the Los Gatos Mail News and Saratoga Star.
It was during this period of my childhood and early youth that I became well acquainted with newspaper production, from the Linotype to the flat-bed cylinder press that printed the full-size pages. When I was in high school, there were nights when there was a 10-page paper when I would be called in to insert a single sheet into an eight-page paper, a process known as "stuffing." There would be a couple of thousand or so of these papers, and the pay was 50 cents a night. It was plenty. Ten cents of that went for a hamburger at the nearby Los Gatos Grill.
So I can say that I have lived with classic printing machinery, Linotype machines and flat-bed cylinder presses over a long period. Maybe it's second childhood , or the fact that I never got over my first, that accounts for this desire to resurrect the machinery of printing. So, let's say that I get this Linotype in running order and I learn how to use it. Of what use could it possibly be? What would I print with it? The answer is simple. The older you get, the less you need reasons.
By Willys Peck