- My father promised a work permit for my 16th birthday. He always did have a warped sense of humor, but this time he wasn’t kidding. Thanks to his small-town connections I found myself employed by the Blue Island Publishing Corporation of Blue Island, Illinois. Sweeping floors. Washing presses. Carrying out the trash. I was a printer’s devil.
Hemingway tells of lying awake at night, fishing his way through the streams of the past, marking each turn and rock and dark place where the big trout lie, and I have found the same trick can be done with printing. I can close my eyes and take myself through the process of setting up a job on the Kluge press and running it, each step so deep recorded I can almost feel it. Say I’m running the weekly bulletin of the Grace Methodist Church, a job I was trusted with for nine consecutive years. Every Thursday morning, just after the Blue Island Sun Standard had been safely sent to press, the Reverend Kelly would arrive with his typewritten copy. Week after week we used the same form, same heading, same setup, simply inserting the fresh lines. After a proof is pulled and corrections made, I slide the form upon the lockup stone, frame it with a steel chase, insert the furniture, tighten the quoins by hand, pound everything down with a mallet and planer, tighten the quoins again, this time with the key, carry it to the press, attach a fresh tympan to the platen. . . Maybe I better go back and start at the beginning.
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When a compositor like Old Smitty takes a letter from the case, he places it in the stick (a small metal tray he holds in his left hand) without even looking at it–a little notch cut into each piece tells him up from down. He works swiftly, sometimes picking up the letters of an entire word with a single movement, and he obviously expects to find each letter in its proper compartment. For this reason I was not trusted to set or return type to its case. My employers immediately perceived I was the kind of a person who would mix the as in with the os and the ps with the qs, and they were probably right.
Luckily, most type at the Blue Island Publishing Corporation was set by that machine my father so abundantly admired, the Linotype.
The Ludlow had a companion called the Elrod, which simply cast spacing material in long continuous strips that the compositor later sawed to the correct lengths. In a letterpress form the blank spaces–what designers call white space–are actually filled in with metal slugs. So what appears in print as nothing actually is something, solid and real. The surfaces upon which type forms were assembled were called stones, because they really were stone, smooth dark slabs strong enough to hold the heavy forms. It took two grown men (or one teenage show-off) to carry a full newspaper page from one stone to another.
Stereotype mats entered our composing room in all sizes and shapes. Some would simply be cut out from a full-page newspaper stereotype, others were provided by the advertisers from various sources, much in the manner in which computer clip art is passed around today. Every Tuesday I would be given several handfuls of mats to piece together and cast on our own stereotype, which, unlike its cousin in Chicago Heights, cast everything in the form of a flat rectangular plate.
The printing process used in our job shop was fundamentally the same process Johannes Gutenberg used to produce his 15th-century Bible. Gutenberg used a converted wine press to perform this task, slowly. But he would have had no trouble understanding the machinery we used.
