[GreenKeys] Typesetting Perforator, 6 Level Equipment, etc.

[Harold Hallikainen]

> Years ago I bought a documentary of the Linotype on DVD. The trailer is
> here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJBqekAMIaU
>

Thanks for pointing that out! Will probably watch it tonight. It's on
Amazon at
https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.c8a9f7b9-70c4-5dc8-33f4-edf63ffc35eb?ref_=imdbref_tt_wbr_pvt_aiv&tag=imdbtag_tt_wbr_pvt_aiv-20

My college newspaper had a Linotype when I got there in 1969. They also
had the 6 level Teletype and perforator on a wire service. One thing I
thought was amazingly clever was that each story had a line of overprinted
garbage at the top on the page printer. But on the paper tape, the garbage
was a story number perforated into the tape as dot matrix human readable
text. There was a length of unpunched tape between each story, so you'd
just scan through the punched tape looking for the story number, tear it
off, and send it to the Linotype.

The newspaper was printed on an offset web press. The columns of text
would be set on the Linotype, and a proof pulled. The resulting printed
block of text was then pasted onto the page. Once the page was complete,
it was photographed, then an offset plate burned from the negative
transparency. Quite a process!

In high school, I had a couple offset presses: A Multilith model 80 and a
Multilight model 1250. There's a video of a 1250 in operation at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9a5kKiQFrh0 . Note that this shows color
printing. The 1250 did just one color at a time, so this was possibly the
fourth pass through the press. A local print shop let me use their copy
camera. The guys that owned the shop worked for the Wall Street Journal
print plant in California. Anyway, I'd get my negatives there, tape them
to a masking sheet to make up the page, cutting out where the image was
with an Xacto knife. I'd put the masking sheet/film combination over a
plate and expose it to UV with a sun lamp, then develop the plate, put it
on the press and print! Another amazing machine!

Harold


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