LBP - Issue № 13 - Two Years In; Research Continues
Celebrating two years of Linotype research with discoveries shared in Copenhagen and London archives!
LBP - Issue № 13 - Two Years In; Research Continues
Hello, friends! Arriving in your inbox is yet another newsletter written from a seat, on an airplane, over an ocean. This time, I’m headed back home on an Air Canada A330-300 from Copenhagen, Denmark after a truly wonderful ATypI conference.
I was lucky enough to continue my streak of presenting about the Linotype at ATypI after Brisbane, Australia last year. This time, I talked about the introduction of the Linotype in Germany by showing many pretty images (many of which you saw first in Issue № 12), telling many interesting stories, and hopefully, introducing many more people to this project.
London Calling! St. Bride Research
On my way to the conference in Copenhagen, I stopped over in London in order to pick up some vintage Monotype films (read more below) and to spend several hours researching at St. Bride Library. The librarian, Sophie, was generous enough to grant me access to their collection of early “Linotype Notes” from the English company.
As far as I know, these bound publications only exist in two places on earth and I’ve now been to both! An incomplete run is at the Newberry in Chicago (Issue № 9) and a full run is at St. Bride in the heart of London’s traditional printing center, Fleet Street.
Overall, they were very dry and focused clearly on the user of the machines in the field. This is not a criticism, just an observation and one which means that I’m getting close to a stopping point in my research.
The longer I look, the more it becomes difficult to find things I’ve not yet uncovered. But my discoveries were not all dull, and I am happy to have found some fantastic images, a good article on L&M’s factory building, and a greater understanding of how the company talked to their customers.
Three Recent Discoveries
I wrote a blog post — that is no surprise. But, you may be surprised to read about me tracking down Ottmar Mergenthaler’s death certificate and what I learned.
Ottmar Mergenthaler’s death certificate I visited the Museum of Printing yet again (I believe this is trip number four or five?) near Boston and interviewed Frank Romano. This time, I dug through two large boxes of loose Linotype specimens, advertisements, brochures, and promotional materials — many of them from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s which was a missing era in my collected images. So much color and so many strange, quickly-dead machines!
I’m in the middle of restoring 16mm films in higher-resolution for my side-project, printingfilms.com In fact, I have a very overweight suitcase in the baggage hold of this airplane full of films from Monotype and I’ve already shipped the Linotype films to be scanned. I’ll share once they are on the site.
Two years in…
I’ve never run a marathon.
It seems absolutely terrible, to be honest.
Running is not my thing — cycling is. Running is slow, exhausting after a mere mile, and makes me hurt all over. Give me a bike any time, any day. But I have often found myself grasping at analogies for the journey of writing this book and I keep coming back to this: writing a book is a marathon, not a sprint.
Research doesn’t come fast and I never expected it to. Books aren’t universally digitized. People need to be interviewed. I need to correct my incorrect assumptions. Bibliographies must be built over time. Obscure articles must be tracked down. Images must be scanned and retouched. And let’s say nothing of actually writing the darn thing.
For a while I have been thinking about what I would say to commemorate the second anniversary of starting this book project. Two years is both a very long and very short time.
The Question I Get Asked Quite Often…
I’ve never put any sort of official timeline on the release of my book — very much on purpose. “Good things take time” is something that I often tell my (wonderful but impatient) children and I believe it. Would I like this book to come out next year? Absolutely! Will we see that happen? I genuinely don’t know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So, here we are. Two years in. I’ve learned so much. I’m so grateful for the support of you who are reading this. I have a few more stories to track down. I have a whole lot of writing ahead of me. I’ll keep you up-to-date.
Thanks for following along,
Doug
