Requiem Chanted for Hot-Type Era

The cavernous warehouse, a half-city block in size, echoed to the amplified voice of the auctioneer who was spieling away atop a large wheeled podium being pushed around by a pair of stalwart attendants.

It was an unlikely way to conduct a funeral service, but that, in effect, was what the auctioneer was doing. He was chanting a Requiem for the end of a 500-year-old era. It was an era that had gradually faded during the last half century, like the ink on 1930s newspaper. And all that was left of the vestiges of its greatness and the marvels of its mechanical ingenuity were stacked up in this East Los Angeles warehouse, awaiting the highest bidder.

E. H. (Jake) Richey was going out of the printing equipment business, disposing of the “hot type,” or metal foundry type, that had served printers and publishers since movable metal type was invented by Johann Gutenberg in 1456.

Richey, surveying the auction scene late last week, smiled wanly and said, “Never again will anybody ever see all this stuff in one room again.”

It was the largest collection ever assembled--1,741 items and odd lots--of old typesetting machines, matrices, brayers, composing sticks, galley trays, type cabinets, quoins, metal and wood type, turtles and letterpress printing presses.

Individual Type Foundries

In a shadowed recess were towering wood and metal cabinets and racks that contained brass matrices and magazines once owned by this newspaper and the Times Mirror Press. The matrices were used to cast lines of type in the typesetting machines. Twenty-nine of these machines, once manufactured by the leaders of the field--the Harris-Intertype Corp. and Merganthaler Linotype Co.--were spread along an outside wall.

These ingenious but bulky machines, sort of Rube Goldberg contraptions, each a type foundry in itself, not only set solid lines or slugs of type from hot metal, but then distributed the brass matrices (in which the type faces were cast) in proper order back into the magazine, a flat rectangular metal box at the top of the machine.

Instead of the quiet and barely audible whir of electronic typesetting in the clean-smelling environment of today’s composing rooms, aathe old rooms sang with the clatter and tinkle of matrices being distributed into the magazines skyward, robot-like, by a long metal arm. The old rooms were redolent of hot metal and grease.

The old compositors, as they called the keyboard operators of those days, delighted in weighing down the hand of an unwary visitor with a line of freshly cast type, in which their name had been set. The hot, heavy lead solidified quickly but it still burned the hand and the victim’s startled reaction was always good for a laugh.

Transitional Machine

In massive splendor sat the last of these typesetting giants--the Fotosetter, a product of the Intertype Co. In the 1950s, The Times used a number of these machines, which, in appearance, looked much like their hot-type predecessors. The brass matrices and distributing arm were still in use but had an important difference. A little circular window containing the clear image of a letter, surrounded by black, was inserted in the flat surface of a matrix. This matrix, or Fotomat, carried a photographic negative character. The machine produced justified composition on film.

It was the first successful and fast photo composition typesetter on the market. The advent of this transitional Fotosetter marked the doom of hot-type composition and printing. Small electronic photo typesetting devices soon followed and the era of mechanics was drawing to a close.

Jake Richey was on the phone with a post-mortem. The Fotosetter, a $30,000 machine in its day, went under the gavel to a buyer from a Northern California printing museum for a mere $50. It will be spared, but the bulk of Intertypes and Linotypes went to a scrap metal dealer for $25 each. A few were auctioned for a few dollars higher to some collectors who will set up the massive machines in their garages and endure lead fumes and the threat of hot metal squirts.

I can think of nothing more appropriate to say in memoriam than that which appeared on a slug when the operator ran his finger down the keyboard to test his machine or as a flourish at the end of a take or story. Many a galley proof carried this curious combination of letters: etaoin shrdlu.