I’ve been reading Hot Type by Jeff Jarvis. It’s great. It has also exposed a fairly substantial hole in my knowledge of the industry I work in.
I knew about Gutenberg. Working in WordPress, you encounter his name quite regularly, usually shortly before someone expresses a strong opinion about an editor.
But Ottmar Mergenthaler? I knew nothing about him.
Which is quite an omission, given that he invented the Linotype, a machine that helped transform publishing and fuel the growth of mass media. Newspapers, books, magazines. A significant contribution from a man whose name I’m still checking how to spell.
Before Linotype, setting text meant arranging individual metal letters by hand. Every word. Every sentence. Every lengthy opinion from somebody convinced the country was going to the dogs.
Mergenthaler’s machine let an operator use a keyboard to cast an entire line of metal type at once. It went into commercial use at the New York Tribune in 1886. “Linotype” comes from “line o’ type”, which suggests the engineering department was also handling the branding.
What I hadn’t understood was the scale of its impact. Making text faster to produce helped newspapers, books and magazines expand enormously. This was a machine that changed what millions of people could read, learn and argue about.
Then I discovered the Cheltenham connection.
In 1978, Linotype-Paul acquired a factory lease at Kingsditch, Cheltenham. The following year, it moved its UK headquarters to Chelham House on Bath Road.
I used to live on Bath Road.
So I’d been reading about a machine that transformed publishing, followed the story from New York to Cheltenham, and ended up on my old street. You’d hope this sort of local knowledge would come with the council tax bill.
By then, Linotype was helping develop the next generation of publishing technology. Its electronic phototypesetters produced text on photographic paper, replacing the need to cast it in molten metal. Engineers in Cheltenham, including technical director Derek Kyte, were working on that transition.
The company famous for one way of publishing was helping build what came next. And some of that work was happening in my hometown.
There’s a harder side to the story, too. In 1983, plans for 500 redundancies prompted Cheltenham MP Charles Irving to raise the issue in Parliament. He criticised the transfer of production to West Germany. Technological change looks rather tidier in a history book than it does when it involves your job.
Some of the expertise continued through Chelgraph, which Kyte and other developers established in 1985. Chelham House itself was demolished for housing in 1999.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how AI will change the way we create and publish. Reading Hot Type has made me want to understand more about the changes that came before it: who built the tools, who got to use them, and what happened when publishing became faster and more accessible.
I’m off to New York on the 9th to run a training course for the Fashion Institute of Technology, so I might do a little more digging while I’m there.
Some people go to New York for the shopping. Apparently, I’m now the sort of person who goes looking for nineteenth-century typesetting machinery.
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