John Dawson, the editor of the Railway Herald, resigned, “For if I had stayed near a Linotype machine I should not now be alive. The effects on working practices weren’t always popular either. The price was one penny each with the proceeds to go to the Caxton Convalescent home. If you only can get on the Lino machine but ne’er tell the truth I implore you… …My yarns of the speed that I show when I try, they “take in” as a matter of courseįor while in America wasn’t it I with Mergenthaler held friendly discourse.Īnd “Mergy” he’d often say “Billy my boy, you‘ve a glorious future before you. The tales that I tell to each wondering swell makes them think I wink the off eye when a mug I espy, and – I’m known as the Linotype Liar – I kid all the jossers when they come down the Linotype mangle to see I’m Linotype Billy, of London Town, and a “swank” operator I be To be sung to the tune of the Longshoreman here is some of it: This circular is preserved in a box at the library and claims to be by Hugh Khan Avem. There were attacks on the Linotype on mechanical, economical and sanitary grounds and then there was Linotype Billy. The compositors who prided themselves on their skills and speed clearly disliked the promotion of something claiming not only to cut times and costs and, which, worse, might be operated by untrained boys and women! Not unreasonably they feared for their jobs and status and their setting speed competitions were under threat. It would almost ruin a journal to print it in this style.” After a lengthy discussion at the Royal Society of Arts about the ease or ability to correct a whole line slug, one speaker thought that at least it looked better than the text produced by typewriters. But the invention has not yet been brought to the stage of ordinarily respectable work. The Printers’ Register in 1889 described a circular as “simply execrable.” They continue, “The Linotype principle is ingenious, undoubtedly, and there may be something in it. Clip from Southward’s ‘Progress in Printing and the Graphic Arts during the Victorian Era’ 1897

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