[crashryan]

I never worked in the newspaper industry, sad to say, but as a kid I did get a peek into the backrooms of our local weekly. A friend's dad was a typesetter there. I remember most of all the huge Linotype machines, intricate mechanical creatures that almost dwarfed their operators. They bristled with pulleys and gears and mysterious adjusting wheels. Near each station was a pot full of molten metal which would be injected into matrices (molds) to form typeset lines. The room was hot! The pots were gas-fired and as the tops were only partly covered you could see the red-hot metal inside. The rapid tapping of the keys was drowned by the whoosh of the burner and the clatter of the matrices as they marched along their track, did their bit to shape a line, then fell back into their places in the magazine. Watching it thrilled me sixty years ago and I imagine it would thrill me all over again if I were able to visit an old-school pressroom.

Reading this booklet I'm reminded how "analogue" the process was. It was all raw materials reshaped by sophisticated machinery and lots of manual labor. Nary a computer chip to be seen. Amazing.

Link to the book: Your Trip to Newspaperland