Typesetting before the age of the linotype – The Public Domain Review

The rise of competitive typesetting amid a period of increasing labor conflict pointed to an uncomfortable truth confronting the world’s printers: while the rest of the printing process had become increasingly automated—with steam-powered rotary presses, folding machines, telegraphs, stereotypes, and all manner of other industrial innovations—the final step of hand-pasting type remained stubbornly entrenched in the fifteenth century. Human composers waged a courageous but ultimately doomed battle to keep up with the machines. When industrialization took hold, their work underwent a dramatic change. While the printers of old had relied on printers who functioned as jack-of-all-trades—able to tamp down the paper, proofread it, compose it, tread the pelts, and, not infrequently, slip their own writing into the pages of the newspapers they composed—the new breed of workers in the composing rooms of major cities were hired to perform a single task: setting the type. As William C. Barnes, a noted Swift, noted in 1887, a printer had once been “capable of performing all the various duties incident to the trade.” But now, “he just has to be skilled at it.”