United States or Grenada ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Think of getting out the Sunday Pioneer Press with the material in use fifty years ago. It would take 600 hand presses, 600 hand pressmen and 600 boys three hours to print the edition, and as there were no means of stereotyping in those days the forms would have to be set up 600 times, requiring the services of 5,000 compositors.

Recent improvements for increasing the capacity of the press, and often the quality of its productions, are quite comparable to those which our own time has seen in other departments of industry, as in the applications of electricity and the like. In addition to the further development of stereotyping, there has been marvellous improvement in nearly all the machinery and processes of printing.

In 1880 the different offices introduced stereotyping, and in 1892 linotype type-setting machines were installed. The next great advance will probably be some system of photography that will entirely dispense with the work of the printer and proofreader. Who knows? "Right this way for the Fuller house!" "Right this way for the Winslow house!" "Right this way for the American house!"

Then the stickful is emptied upon a galley. The page is made up on a portable slab of iron, upon which it is sent to the stereotyping room.

There wet stereotyping paper, several sheets in thickness, is laid over the page, and this almost pulpy paper is rapidly and dexterously beaten evenly all over with stiff hair brushes until the soft paper is pressed down into all the interstices between the type; then this is covered with blankets and the whole is placed upon a steam chest, where it is subjected to heat and pressure until the wet paper becomes perfectly dry.

Photographing in colors, a French invention, is one of the newer and more attractive arts. Printing one's own books has become almost too easy, by using the type-writer, with sheets of celluloid, warmed to 300°, instead of paper. The celluloid hardens at once sufficiently for stereotyping; so that any number of thousands of copies can be taken from such off-hand plates.

He was an only child, educated at home, and therefore free to form his own opinions at an age when most boys are subject to the stereotyping forces of a Public School and a University. Almost before his arrival at man's estate, he had clearly marked out his line of political action, and to that line he adhered with undeviating consistency.

Wilson, sold the secret to both universities and to most of the leading printers. To the art of stereotyping the public is mainly indebted for cheap literature, for when the plates are once produced the chief expense is disposed of.

The relation of the prophets to the political life of the Jewish people is brought out in a striking way by John Stuart Mill in his book on "Representative Government." In that chapter in which he discusses the criterion of a good government, he shows how the Egyptian hierarchy and the Chinese paternal despotism destroyed those countries by stereotyping their institutions. Then he goes on:

It was their original intention to do the composition themselves, and have the stereotyping done at one of the large establishments of the city; but upon a closer investigation they found that this would cost them more than they had agreed to do the work for.