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UTAH PRESS ASSOCIATION tence and page-by-page, all printed documents were created in this manner and laborious as it was, it still permitted relatively rapid production of copy once the type had been accumulated. Recalled the late Elisha Warner in A Country Printer, his autobiography, "Setting type by hand is one of the slowest and most tedious processes in the entire field of industry." The process was referred to as "hand-set" or "hand-stick" by those in the printing field. Mr. Warner, president of Utah Press Association in 1940, published both the Spanish Fork Press and the Pay son Chronicle during his 41 years of newspapering. Arthur Gaisford, a Hall of Fame publisher whose career centered principally in Utah County, remembered in his memoirs the impact of the Linotype on the printing labor force. "Each Linotype machine replaced five or more typesetters," he asserted. That, in fact, was the reason he and his brother, Lorenzo, purchased the Fillmore Progress - in order to provide work for themselves when the Salt Lake City dailies began to install Linotypes and thus eliminated a great deal of the hand-setting. When picturing all this, one should also consider that lighting was primitive at best through the early centuries of composing type. Indeed, until Thomas Edison's remarkable 1879 invention, the incandescent lamp, came into general use, compositors worked by the feeble and flickering light of candles and still-later, kerosene lanterns. Worse, they assembled copy from fonts as small as 6 to 8-point type, which beneath inadequate lighting could be extremely difficult to decipher. In a sense, however, it bore some similarity to the concept of touch typing. If the various characters had been redistributed into the correct compartments after the last use, the compositors' familiarity with the type case enabled him - or her ~ to maintain a high degree of accuracy without squinting too frequently at what was being set. Redistribution of type can readily be seen as another boring chore, for it was simply typesetting in reverse. Accuracy was just as important here as in assembling, for type put back into the wrong compartment produced errors when it was 210 |
