In a hot lead operation, any fool could make up a page of straight matter but it takes someone with a certain flair to put together a big display ad. Take one of those supermarket ads. You’ve got maybe six different typefaces in as many sizes. They all have to be leaded right or the page wouldn’t lock. Throw in a bunch of little engravings of pork chops and nylon stockings plus the brand name logos, add a halftone block of a roast turkey and a fancy border around the coupons and you’ve got a hell of a job on your hands. But it’s work that shows what you can do.

In the small hours of Wednesday, April 20th, a supervisor walked into the Computer Operations room of the Los Angeles Times, carrying a cup of coffee. The supervisor was a very tall man — six foot six and, in the way that the tall have of putting things out of the reach of harm and the short, he parked his cup atop one of the computer banks of the main IBM 370/158, and went about his business.

The editor who has teenage children but who doesn’t like to think of himself as a relic of a bygone era had noticed the work going on in the Composing Room. He had even heard of the plans for a hot lead exhibit. But when he actually looked through the glass partition to see a linotype machine set up with all its associated paraphernalia under a sign proclaiming, "Los Angeles Times, A Corner of the Composing Room, 1881-1974," a feeling of horror came over him. Here, under glass, in a museum, was the workday world he had inhabited nearly all his adult life. Three years ago, linotypes were as common as pencils right where he was standing and now they had one under glass. He moved on, contemplating a dark paranoid theory that this was some enigmatic corporate message, that perhaps next week he might come back to see a stuffed reporter set up next to the linotype. It was a feeling not unlike being buried alive.

ANAHEIM — The elderly gentleman and the respectable lady looked more like chaperones than security guards. Dressed in red blazers that marked them as ushers at the Anaheim Convention Center, they stood to one side of the conference hall doors, nodding politely to the throngs of publishers, editors, production supervisors, equipment manufacturers, corporate financial officers, computer analysts and sales representatives flowing past them into the opening session of the 49th Annual American Newspaper Publishers Association Research Institute (ANPA/RI) Production Management Conference. Surveying the crowd, the respectable lady made the immediate and astute observation. White gloved hands folded before her, she whispered to her companion who stood with hands folded behind him, "There aren’t very many ladies here."

Being an account of a country weekly’s decision to go from hot type to cold

On a Wednesday afternoon last August. the beast of technology came slouching down Highway 68 through the heart of Yellow Springs, a small college town in southwest Ohio, and carried away a bit of what made Yellow Springs a little different from other places. There was no blood spilled, only ink. The Yellow Springs News went offset.

Yellow Springs is not your average country village and the Yellow Springs News is not your average country weekly. There are about 5,000 people in Yellow Springs but no one seems in any hurry to proclaim the place a town. The people of Yellow Springs feel they have something special in their village. They want to keep if that way. Growth is an unpopular word in village politics and the hottest battles rage over zoning changes and building permits. The sprawling tracts of Dayton and Fairborn are marching over the pastures and corn fields to the west but the village has an ambitious greenbelt program to halt the advance. It is a college town that draws a lot of its bohemian flavor and its high technology economic base from the generations of Antioch students who came to study and remained for the small town atmosphere.

Being an Account of a Brief Apprenticeship in an Obsolete Trade

On the cover-A Linotype assembly elevator with the gate closed. This is the center of an operator’s attention as the mats tumble down and are arranged automatically in lines. The spacer bands adjust themselves to fill out the line but only so many letters can fit in any measure, proving the old trade adage that "type is not rubber." Modern photocompositors have lenses that can distort the image of the letters to fit where they couldn’t .Today, type is rubber.