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Tag: linotype

Farewell – etaoin shrdlu

Farewell – etaoin shrdlu is a half-hour documentary about the last day of hot metal typesetting at The New York Times.

The 1978 film by Carl Schlesinger and David Loeb Weiss shows the remarkable nightly production process for a daily newspaper and the changes to come with the transition computers.

The title ‘etaoin shrdlu’ refers the words made by the letters of the first two columns of a type-casting machine keyboard. If I understand this correctly, the phrase was used by operators to create an ‘obvious’ mistake in a line of type to be discarded.

And if this sort of thing is your bag, the video was posted to Vimeo by Linotype: The Film along with number of other archive films about typesetting that are worth checking out.

via PressPad Apps / Open Culture

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Something for the Weekend

Less Shit Please — A great article on British political cartoonists by Helen Lewis for The New Statesman:

[Martin] Rowson tells me that his fellow Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell always files as late as possible to make the staff grateful that the picture has arrived at all. “There’s a wonderful story about Georgina Henry, when she was deputy editor, going past the comment desk at about eight o’clock one evening and Steve’s cartoon had just come in,” he says. “It was a wonderful one of [George W] Bush as a monkey, squatting on the side of a broken toilet, wiping his arse with the UN Charter. And there’s all this shit splattered on the wall behind it, and she looks and says, ‘Oh God, no.’ [Alan] Rusbridger had put down this edict saying less shit in the cartoons, please – you know, the editor’s prerogative – and she and Steve had this eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation.” What happened? “He finally caved in. In one of the greatest betrayals of freedom of speech since Galileo, he tippexed out three of the turds.”

Holding On — An interview with Francis Ford Coppola at The Rumpus:

when I wanted to do Apocalypse Now, no one would do it. I couldn’t believe it. I was so disgruntled that I had played by their rules and won, yet they still didn’t want to make it. So I just went on myself, and took all the money and property I had, went to the bank, and made Apocalypse Nowmyself. When it came out it was very dicey. People didn’t know what to make of it; it got bad reviews. My films have always gotten a lot of bad reviews. I was very scared that I was going to be wiped out because the Chase Manhattan Bank had all my stuff. I decided I would make a movie that would be very commercial. Every time I’ve tried to do something commercial it’s always failed. So I made One From The Heart.

And what happened was that Apocalypse Now, little by little, started to be a big success and thought of as a classic, a great movie. But by then I was already making One From The Heart and that was a big flop and I lost everything. So from age forty to age fifty I just had to pay the Chase Manhattan Bank all that money, and I just barely ended up holding onto everything. So ironically, the thing I did to solve the problem ended up causing a problem.

Coming or Going? — Tim Parks on the unevenness of globalization for the NYRB Blog:

To what community does a writer belong today? The whole world, might seem to be the obvious answer in an era of globalization. Alas, it’s not that simple… I am known in England mainly for light, though hopefully thoughtful non-fiction; in Italy for polemical newspaper articles and a controversial book about soccer; in Germany, Holland, and France, for what I consider my “serious” novels Europa, Destiny, Cleaver; in the USA for literary criticism; and in a smattering of other countries, but also in various academic communities, for my translations and writing on translation. Occasionally I receive emails that ask, “But are you also the Tim Parks who…?,” Frequently readers get my nationality wrong. They don’t seem to know where I’m coming from or headed to.

And finally…

A new excerpt from Linotype: The Film, which will finally be released in mid-October apparently…

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Midweek Miscellany

Line o’ Type — John Hendel celebrates 125 years of Linotype at The Atlantic:

A German immigrant named Ottmar Mergenthaler invented [Linotype] in the 1880s and continued to promote and expand its use until dying in Baltimore in 1899. The Linotype’s power involved transferring a line of text (typed with meticulous care by a Linotypist onto a special 90-key keyboard) to a sheet, creating a “line o’ type” that could be rapidly printed onto many subsequent pages, thanks to the genius of matrices and hot metal.

A Good English ButlerDwell Magazine spends 30 minutes with designer Dieter Rams:

Never forget that a good product should be like a good English butler. They’re there for you when you need them, but in the background at all other times. Besides a few millionaires in London, most of us don’t have butlers.

The butlers of today are our products and our furniture.

And on a related note… Erik Spiekermann talks about typography and crowd-sourcing a logo for human rights with Deutsche Welle:

Typography is the famous crystal goblet – you drink the wine, you don’t think about the glass. I can make things a little bit warmer or colder, or squarer or rounder, but I am a servant to the words… I like to say, typography is like air – you only talk about it when it’s bad. It’s taken for granted, but we would certainly miss it if it wasn’t there.

Lying LiarsIan Leslie, author of Born Liars: Why We Can’t Live Without Deceit, on the connection between lying and storytelling:

[T]here is a gushing river of verbal creativity in the normal human mind, from which both artistic invention and lying are drawn. We are born storytellers, spinning narrative out of our experience and imagination, straining against the leash that keeps us tethered to reality. This is a wonderful thing; it is what gives us our ability to conceive of alternative futures and different worlds. And it helps us to understand our own lives through the entertaining stories of others. But it can lead us into trouble, particularly when we try to persuade others that our inventions are real. Most of the time, as our stories bubble up to consciousness, we exercise our cerebral censors, controlling which stories we tell, and to whom. Yet people lie for all sorts of reasons, including the fact that confabulating can be dangerously fun.

See also: Cynthia Crossen on the allure of unreliable narrators for the WSJ:

Today, unreliable narration does seem to be in vogue. Could that be because so many people are chronicling their lives online now, and we can see how unreliable most personal narratives are? As David Fromkin wrote in his history of civilization, “The Way of the World,” “Life is a story that each of us tells to his or her self; and it therefore is a tale told by an unreliable narrator.”

And finally…

Author Umberto Eco on the books we haven’t read for The Guardian:

There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven’t read, that we haven’t had the time to read… And yet I’ve a fairly accurate notion of what I haven’t read. I have to admit that I only read War and Peace when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then. The Mahabharata – I’ve never read that, despite owning three editions in different languages. Who has actually read the Kama Sutra? And yet everyone talks about it, and some practise it too. So we can see that the world is full of books that we haven’t read, but that we know pretty well.

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Linotype: The Film

Linotype: The Film is a work-in-progress documentary about the revolutionary Linotype typecasting machine.   Director Doug Wilson has just released a new trailer for the film:

You can help fund the Linotype: The Film at Kickstarter.

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