Letterpress Printing
“The old case room was dirty, smelly and hot. The floor was littered with metal chippings and discarded lines of type; the noise from rows of composing machines was almost indescribable as was the heat from the melting pots. Above all was the unmistakable smell of combinations of oil, fumes, naphtha and printing ink.
The staff – operators, compositors and proof readers – who brought the paper to life, jealously guarded the skills taught during a long apprenticeship, but were ever willing to pass on their knowledge to new apprentices. Specialists all, these men were experts in their craft.
Compositors, who made up the pages to a given design, poured metal type into the space available, on a horizontal metal bed comprising the page, called the stone. They did so with speed and skill, and had the ability all compositors had of reading the type in the ‘mirror image’ of all the material on the stone – upside down and back to front. They did this effortlessly and as quickly as the layman could read the printed page."
from The Scotsman 1987
Letterpress Journeymen, often simply referred to as Printers, had two major divisions within that generic term. There was the composing room staff, Compositors and the print room staff Pressmen or Machinemen, along with the associated trades dealing with binding, paper and casting etc.
In the Advertiser just the terms Compositors (Comps) and Printers were used.
Compositor
courtesy of Letterpress Commons
courtesy of Letterpress Commons
courtesy of Letterpress Commons
"Each compositor has his own Frame where he stands and does most of the operations neccessary for the job - it can almost be regarded as the compositor's home within the composing room."
Cyril Cannon
“The era of hand composition lasted from Gutenberg’s time (1476) until well into the twentieth century for some types of printing, notably jobbing work.”
The Scottish Printing Archival Trust
Mechanical Typesetting
Original 1966 Fifeshire Advertiser Linotype Slug - single column
Linotype Machine
Linotype Keyboard
Now how did that happen? 'RIO'
Compositor's Daily Tools - used by Advertiser staff
“When I trained as a journalist in the early 1970s, one of the most memorable aspects was to go onto the hectic and noisy printing floor of the newspaper office where I worked and watch the compositors typeset a story I had written. This was the pre-computerised, hot-metal kingdom of the highly skilled and highly literate craftsmen who made the words fit the spaces on the page.”
Lorna Unwin
Photograph - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press
Printing Chase or Forme ready for the press
Imposition or imposing is the process by which the assemblages of type are moved into a form (or forme) ready to use on the press. The Compositor does this work on a large, flat imposition stone (though later ones were instead made of iron).
The black frame surround is the chase, and the two objects each on the bottom and left side are the wooden quoins to lock the type in place – more modern were metal with a screw adjustment.
The chase, which may hold a number of pages, is then moved to the printing machine.
Machinemen - Printers
photograph - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Flatbed Press - used in the earlier days of the Fifeshire Advertiser
The working of the printing process depends on the type of press used, as well as any of its associated technologies (which varied by time period). Mechanized jobbing presses, like the one in the photo, require a single operator to feed and remove the paper, as the inking and pressing are done automatically.
The completed sheets are then taken to dry and for finishing, depending on the variety of printed matter being produced.
photograph - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Early Rotary Press - faster and introduced as the Fifeshire Advertiser expanded.
Rotary letterpress printing uses type metal plates molded in the form of a cylinders. The plates, called stereotypes, are coated with ink, then pressed against a continuous roll of paper. Rotary letterpress printing was used in the mid-twentieth century to print most major newspapers.
Some text - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press
