Sunday, January 24, 2010

The Lintotype Comet

We had a successful letterboxing adventure in Clearfield yesterday, after which Terri surprised me with a sweet little cafe and coffeeshop she found that had vegetarian selections. I heard that the local newspaper had an old Linotype machine in their front window, and we discovered from our waitress that it was located just around the corner from where we were eating. Seeing the machine brought back memories of the early 1980’s and watching a similar one in operation next door to where I worked in Lewistown. A 50ish year old pressman sitting in a darkened dusty room, his fingers flying on the keyboard, creating shiny lead slugs of text. He’d ink them up and pull a paper proof off of the metal text for me to look ever. One approved, he’d make a few very clean paper copies for me to take back to my office and paste-up along with the paper-dolled artwork. That was about a decade ago; my time flies.
The Progress’ front window

A very blurry ampersand taken through the window.
It is the first blue key on the left in the third row from the top.

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