Type setter's toast; presses still roar

During a professional low tide I wearied of giving space on MotorCycling’s letter page to readers celebrating the Golden Age of British Bikes. Disapproving of many models cited I inserted a fake letter decrying this tendency, adding “nostalgia is a suspect emotion”. The foam-flecked response was gratifying. Yet here I am being just as nostalgic.

But not about badly engineered bikes with total-loss oil systems. Rather the mechanisms of publishing. This is a Linotype which set type in the hot-metal days. Press a keyboard key and a brass mould (for a letter, a number, a punctuation mark or a space) came tinkling out of the large box on top. Repeat this until sufficient moulds for a line of type assemble themselves in the machine’s bowels.

Work another control and molten type-metal from the Linotype’s small furnace – Just imagine it! – flows into the moulds to cast that one line of type. Start again. A newspaper might well own two dozen such machines, tinkling away and smelling like… well, over to Proust. Now my humdrum computer can do the same job and I haven’t seen a Linotype for thirty years.

One mechanism still remains. To print many newspapers in next to no time you need a press. And a Heidelberg, a Hoe or a Crabtree in full flight (and full throat) resembles open warfare. The power of the press indeed, all directed towards an ephemeral product with a life-span often measured in minutes. The newspapers I worked on were printed in a Bradford street called Hall Ings and the soles of my feet twitch sympathetically down the years as I remember the roar and vibration of those majestic machines.