LBP - Issue № 12 - New Stories Yet to Uncover
Diving deep into German Linotype history with the help of new technology and staying focused as I near the end of my research.
Hello from the year 2025. This update is coming before the second anniversary of the launch of this book project in late May. I will likely send a special newsletter around that time, but I wanted to share the steady progress made since November. Your interest in what I’m doing is never taken for granted, my friends!
Vielleicht verstehe ich jetzt die deutsche Firma?
After my interviews and visit to the Ottmar Mergenthaler museum in September I purchased nearly a dozen German-language books about the Linotype company. A couple of these books have amazing images that have not been seen in nearly a century and I cannot wait to share all of the interesting stories they contain.
I’ve been working with the generous help of Dan Reynolds, an American academic who has drawn and taught typography in Germany for over 10 years. Like me, he also has a son named Otto, so we are destined to be friends. Dan has helped translating phrases, understanding the printing culture of Germany, and educating this dumb American on the internal conflicts of Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries.
We created a shared Google Doc with a timeline and details of the founding and expansion of Mergenthaler Setzmaschinen-Fabrik (MSF) over its lifetime. Dan added so many comments and notes which gave clarity and color to the narrative. I now have a good understanding of the German side of the company and how it fits into the larger story of the Linotype.
Staying Focused
I have two major focuses (foci?) as I am wrapping up research: one is to fully understand the British Linotype company in the depth that I now understand the German and U.S. companies.
I plan to visit the St. Bride Library in London again in April where there is a large stash of Linotype publications from 1895 to the 1980s. Thankfully, they are in English, so I can skim through and read much faster than the German ones — whew!
The second focus is spending time digging through the 257 (!) boxes of Mergenthaler Linotype Company materials housed at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington D.C. I purposely left this monumental collection for last because I needed a broad understanding of the entire history of the Linotype in order to distill what is most important.
There is something else quite special in the Washington D.C. area, but I don’t want to jinx it by talking about it right now. Let’s just say that if I can make a little bit of magic happen, it would be a total blast.
Using Modern Revolutionary Technology to Study Older Revolutionary Technology
I thought I would share a bit of my process about how I’ve been using some pretty neat technology to “read” books about the German Linotype company even though I can’t read or speak German.
Basically the process is this:
Use the built-in translation app on my iPhone to take a picture, OCR the text, and translate from German to English
Save the photo with the overlaid English text and transfer it to my computer
Combine all of these images into a PDF of the whole book
Print the PDF and read the English translation, highlighting and making notes
For phrases that don’t make sense; type the German words into Google Translate which runs on a different dataset and gives a variation of the translation
Ask Dan Reynolds about specific German phrases or words that don’t make sense to get the full context
Maybe this is interesting to you? It is to me — because just two years ago I couldn’t use my personal phone to do on-the-fly, image OCR and translation. I don’t have a great deal of hope in the future of tech, but this is cool and made my research exponentially easier.
Preparing to Change Gears
It’s clear to me now that research on this project could go on indefinitely: every thread I pull has several more threads connected and I genuinely love the research process, discovering new things, and spending time with dusty, old books. But as I learned while making the film, at some point you have to find the confidence that you’ve done your due-diligence and it’s ready to make something from all your footage.
Right now, all of this “footage” lives in my brain and computer folders, but I feel myself wanting to tie these threads together. And I guess this is what I mean: I’m now at the point where as I continue to gather stories and new information, I am simultaneously editing out things that don’t seem to fit into what I envision for my book.
I remember my pal (and film cinematographer/editor) Brandon Goodwin answering a question at a film screening about how he found the film’s story in the editing process. He said, “Well, I’m not a sculptor, but I imagine it is like sculpting: You start with a giant block of stone and start chiseling away things that don’t feel like what you want it to be, and eventually you have something that feels right.”
And well, that feels right to me too.
As always, yours,
Doug
