I’m a chapter into Jeff Jarvis’s new book Hot Type. It tells the Linotype’s story from the top down — the tragic inventors, the media moguls, Mark Twain bankrupting himself on a rival machine. Publishers Weekly calls it “colorful and enthralling,” and the part I’ve read is. But reading it, I kept thinking about a story it doesn’t tell: not the story of one machine, but of a man who lived through three.
The first machine
My dad, Carl, was a Linotype operator, and later a foreman, at Dayton Typographic Service in the 1950s. The Linotype histories always start with Ottmar Mergenthaler, the engineer who built the machine in 1886, and they linger on the tycoons who bought fleets of them. That’s the inventor’s history.
The operator’s history starts with a man at a 90-key keyboard — arranged by letter frequency, which is why the most famous typo in newspaper history reads “etaoin shrdlu,” the mark of a finger run down the first two columns to flag a mistake. It continues with molten lead at 550 degrees, the clank and hiss of the caster, a smell that got into your clothes and never quite came out.
The Linotype didn’t deskill typesetting; it reskilled it. The hand compositors it replaced — the Swifts, who once held typesetting races before paying audiences of thousands — saw a centuries-old craft wither. But the machine demanded its own expertise: reading copy and keyboarding at speed, hearing a misaligned mold before it ruined a line, keeping a finicky foundry running through a deadline night. My dad’s generation learned that machine the way a musician learns an instrument.
On Saturday mornings he’d take me along while he caught up on work. I was watching a trade at its peak — I just didn’t know the peak was already behind it.
The second machine
Phototypesetting killed the Linotype the way the Linotype had killed hand-composition. My dad didn’t ride that one out. He left Dayton and, in Berkeley, opened a small offset print shop on Oxford Street, across from the Cal campus. The 90-key keyboard became an IBM Selectric; molten lead became offset plates. It was a real re-skilling, not a small one — a different machine, a different trade, at an age when most people stop learning new ones.
The third machine
The shop found its footing on a strange, narrow market: Berkeley then required graduate theses to be printed, not “Xeroxed,” and there was steady, respectable work in doing properly what a photocopier could only do badly. For a while, that requirement was the business.
It didn’t last. The rule changed, the copier got good enough, and the market my dad had built his second act on simply stopped existing — the same way the compositor’s market had stopped existing, the same way the Linotype operator’s had. Three machines, three trades, one man standing on each shrinking piece of ground in turn.
Whose story is it
Linotype histories, as a genre, get written about the men who owned the machines and the men who built them. Even the operator’s history — when someone bothers to tell it — usually stops at one displacement, as if a man who loses his trade to a machine either finds a permanent new one or doesn’t. My dad found three, in succession, each one narrower than the last, and the history of that — of re-skilling as a way of life rather than a one-time event — doesn’t get written at all. It just gets lived, by somebody’s father, and remembered, if it’s lucky, by somebody’s son.