TYPESETTING

The earliest known printed books were produced using wooden blocks with the text carved on them. The blocks were then used as a printing plate.These "plates" were produced in much the same manner as those for wood engravings - except instead of a "picture" carved into them, the actual text of a page of a book was carved into them.

Hot Metal Composition

Johann Gutenberg, first demonstrated his movable type in 1448. By 1462 Gutenberg's invention became accepted and the use of it spread throughout Europe.. The raised image that was inked for printing was called the face -- from this we get the term "typeface". The type was inked and copies made directly from the type.

This advance in technology made possible printing multiple copies of books including The Holy Bible in languages which all people everywhere could read.

Mechanical Composition

The first practical mechanized type casting machine was invented in 1884 by Ottmar Mergenthaler. His invention was called the "Linotype". It produced solid lines of text. The line-composing operation was done by means of a keyboard similar to a typewriter. A “line o type” was created.

Mergenthaler at his line-o-type

Cameras, Darkrooms, Negatives, and Offset Metal Plates

How did typeset copy get to the offset printing press?

In the 1950s Eveready was an early adopter of offset printing. We bought our first offset presses but had no capacity to shoot film. Taylor Impressions took our final paste-up and shot developed, opaqued and delivered negatives. At Eveready our pressman Loyd and also later Zollie, his brother, stripped the negatives on orange masking sheets and made metal plates for our offset presses.

In the late 1950s Charlie Stevens built a camera for Eveready in our new 1817 Broadway location. Imagine a room within a room. The darkroom box was a wallboard two-by-four room about 6’ X 10’ with its own door. The “camera” was a lens in one wall of the constructed room.  Metal rails allowed the copy board to be moved for reducing or enlarging.  A set of photo lights was aimed at the copy board outside the darkroom. Inside the darkroom there was a negative board coated with a sticky substance upon which a sheet of negative film was placed. Then the lights were turned on and a 30 second countdown began. After the 30 second exposure the lights were turned off and the film went into a developer solution. Red lights did not expose the film so the negative was developed in red light. When the negative looked sharp when held up in front of the red lights it was put in the fix tray. The film was rinsed in water in a sink in the corner of the darkroom, and dried on clothslines streached across the room.  “Holes” or little spots were opaqued out using a thick black opaqueing ink.

Later in the 1960s, Eveready purchased a Brown 2000 camera and improved our darkroom.

Brown 2000

Photo-Mechanical Composition

Eveready used the Varityper to produce neat, camera-ready copy for offset printing. It looked like an oversized typewriter.

Varityper

The Varityper Headliner was used at Eveready
to set headlines and invitations in the 1960s.

In 1966, IBM released the Selectric Composer.  The Composer produced camera-ready justified copy. Characters were proportionally-spaced. It could hold 8,000 characters in its memory.

IBM Selectric Composer

Cathode Ray Tube Composition was used by our service bureaus. Service bureaus did typesetting and output either film or typeset on paper for pasteup and shooting negatives. Trudy at  Sisk, one of our service bureaus, used a Compugraphic. In the late 1960s, Prepared by a computer, a tape would be fed into a phototypesetter, which would imprint type from a strip of film onto paper, which would then be used for paste-up.

Compugraphic

Eveready also used D&T Typesetting and eventually Bailey Typesetting and Wolfestone. Along with several independent sorts.

Eveready has always had in in-house typesetter. Miss Evelyn held that position for many years. She used the Varityper and IBM typewriters. She was followed by Mary Ann who used the IBM Composer.

Laser Technology

In the late 1980s Eveready entered the computer typesetting world in a big way with our first Mac. We had a series of typesetters and Macs.

early Mac desktop

We purchased a series of complete Mac desktop systems … and had a series of Mac desktop typesetters, Cary “just slap it on the press” Woo, and later Lynn Phillips and my childhood friend Laurence Ralston.

Eveready Press Today

Typesetting, book design and production are our focus and our passion at Eveready Press. We love fonts, layout, and what we call the architecture of books.

We use state of the art Macs, a digital press, and computer-to-press offset printing.

In the evolving world of typesetting, we utilize Quark, PageMaker, and InDesign as well as Adobe Creative Suite and Acrobat.

We appreciate it when authors give us files in Word which they have edited, especially the spelling of proper names, and checking dates and facts. However, we have received book copy in all forms, from handwritten, to ancient typewriting.

Some data for this piece came from…

A Capsule History of Typesetting

By R. J. Brown

Editor-in-Chief

HistoryBuff.com