Any way the wind blows. It doesn't really matter, to me

For us, or agin' us. 

It is how you say a thing.

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

Writers and linguists struggle with spelling, too, but in different ways. As Andrew Jackson noted, “It is a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word.”
But among my favorite struggles is the ancient study of human history and prehistory through the excavation of sites and the analysis of artifacts and other physical remains. It, as most things I run into, has to do with printing, and government, and maybe other stuff.
"Why are there two different spellings: archaeology and archeology? Both spellings are correct, but there are some twists and turns to the answer! If you look up the word in a dictionary, you’ll find it under “archaeology” with the variant “e” spelling also listed, but you probably won’t find it under 'archeology,'"says Barbara J. Little, writing in reference to American Anthropological Association’s ANTHROPOLOGY NEWSLETTER from June 1975.
Little offers this explanation.
"The “ae” is a diphthong, which is a gliding vowel sound normally represented by two adjacent vowels. However, typographically, some diphthongs are represented as single ligature characters (that is, joined letters), so “ae” becomes æ.If you have occasion, take a look at actual pieces of printers type -- those small lead alloy sticks with letters that are composed one-by-one into forms and then printed on a printing press (before linotype and way before digital). You’ll find not only a’s and e’s but also æ’s. Think Benjamin Franklin! You also can see such printing re-enacted at Colonial Williamsburg if you want to watch the painstaking process of publishing newspapers and books one letter at a time. I can imagine printers thinking that ligature characters were a terrific idea because they’d save a step: pick up one piece of type to place in your composing stick instead of two," Little says.
"Here’s the particularly odd part: in 1890 or 1891, the US Government Printing Office (GPO), decided to economize by eliminating the ligatured ae. This decision was probably also helped along by the trend in American English to simplify, so that the 'ae' diphthong was replaced by an “e” in pronunciation and spelling. The decision also came soon after the introduction of the linotype machine when the technology and practice of printing was changing: always a likely time for more changes to occur. The GPO adopted new spelling rules that called for a simple substitution of e for the ligatured ae in all cases in which its earlier rules had required the ligature. No allowances were made for the history of individual words or for common usage, hence the new spelling "archeology”.
The history of the word as it was derived from Latin would have argued for the 'ae'. In 1685 Jacob Spon of Lyon first used “archaeologia” to designate a discipline concerned with the study of ancient monuments in his Miscellanea eruditae antiquitatis. The British Archaeological Association began publication of The Archaeological Journal in 1844. Archaeology as a new word was by then fully established in English. In both these cases the word was spelled with the 'ae.'
Regardless of that long history, the GPO style influenced university presses and boards of editors, notably at Chicago, Columbia and Yale. In turn, their spelling styles influenced the archaeologists who published with them, some of whom began to teach their students that the 'e' spelling was preferable to the 'ae' one. And there have been rumors about what the different spellings mean! For some archaeologists, the two spellings symbolize competing aspects of the field. The supposedly antiquated spelling with the 'ae' is supposed to connote classical or a humanist-oriented archaeology, while the supposedly modern 'e”'is thought to suggest anthropological or a social science-oriented practice. There logically is no such significance to the spelling.
"You can see the spelling used by The Society for American Archaeology. Not surprisingly, the U.S. National Park Service has archeology programs. But, oddly enough, one of the most important national laws protecting our archaeological heritage is indeed the 'Archaeological Resources Protection Act' passed by the U.S. Congress in 1979. Go figure," Little suggests.
In the tradition of printers, and linguists, and printers, and editors — I am going to spell it whatever way, my wind blows at the the time I'm spelling it.

The craft: Passed on from one generation to another

Bound to be musical because he was brought up around a piano

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

Fifty or sixty years ago, you could wander into a newspaper office and take up a craft that was pretty much same as it had been for 150 years.
Now, as noted in a recent CBS Sunday Morning story, there is really only one Saguache Crescent, run by Dean Coombs, last of the hot-type publishers.
"The press itself dates to about 1915 -- about as long as the Coombs family has been publishing the Crescent, every week, since 1917. The same intricate choreography -- perfected and passed on, one generation to the next," according to CBS.
"They hooked my baby carriage to the back of that press," Coombs said. "The carriage would go back and forth," rocking him to sleep.
"To put it another way, Benjamin Franklin or Mark Twain could walk into the Crescent office and go right to work. The Linotype machine might be a novelty to Franklin (And Twain lost heavily with an investment in a competing machine which, he claimed, “could do everything a human printer can do except get drunk on Saturday night,”) but the cases of hand-set type would be familiar, as would the mutton quads, rules, dingbats, platen pins, chases, quoins, galley trays, and proof press," wrote the late Ed Quillen, way back in 1995.
"I don't actually think there might even be another newspaper in the world using Linotype," Coombs said. "There are none on the United States."
Another paper I am familiar with, of course, The Courier, had a hot type history. The Courier, which is a direct descendant of several papers from Teller County, was started by one Ernest Chapin Gard, who also founded The Palmer Lake Herald, and the Monument Register, as well as about 20 other papers around the country, 11 of them in Colorado.
Gold’s discovery in the Cripple Creek District precipitated Gard and his partner’s race to become the first newspaper in Cripple Creek. He pulled out all the stops to beat William McRea by four days, publishing the first edition of the Cripple Creek Crusher on Dec. 4, 1891.  Descendant of the Crusher and other consolidations, The Cripple Creek Gold Rush still published until 2007 when it became incorporated into Pikes Peak Courier View, of Woodland Park. It is now simply the Pikes Peak Courier.
Gard, and partner W.S. Neal, celebrated the feat by printing in gilded ink — a layer of gold over the regular ink — for the inaugural edition. McRea, four days late and perhaps more than a dollar short, sported vermilion headlines that said “New Gold Field.”

To confuse matters a bit more, the Geddes family armed with a loan from the Golden Cycle Corporation,  Kenneth and Margaret, bought the daily Times-Record of the district on 

April 1, 1941. Descendant of the Crusher and the product of consolidations of the Victor Record and the Cripple Creek Times, the Geddes closed on the deal, and then had to turn around and get an eight-page paper out that afternoon.

"We went to the office the morning after we settled the deal and realized we have to fill up eight pages in time to distribute by 5 p.m.," wrote Margaret Geddes in "Gold Camp Indian Summer."

"We discovered how our lives would be changed on the first day. We met the force, which included a foreman, two Linotype operators, two men for general shop work — and then there was Freddie., who admitted he had a difficult time with second grade," Geddes wrote.

"Freddie had a little boy, Eugene, who also had trouble with second grade. Eugene was bound to be musical, his daddy said, 'since he was brought up around a piano.'"

My own history is reflected similarly. Having grown up watching the hot-type Dolores Star being put to bed every week, I was bound to be inked-stained, as I was brought up around a Linotype. The craft, it seems, is passed on from one generation to the next.
And then there is the Dolores Star.

But that is the world of the first newspaper I came in contact with.

The first time I set foot in the Dolores Star, I might have been all of three years old. My next-door neighbors, Larry and Marilyn Pleasant owned “The Star” at that time and their son Andy, was a few months younger than I.

Andy and I played in the attic balcony office, somewhat out of danger of running our tiny fingers through the machinery in busy office below. The Star then, was in between John Lambert’s (the one-legged blacksmith) and Mary Akin’s little shop, but with growing job printing and the tendency for the Pleasants to collect stuff, things were pretty tightly crammed in there. A huge, white, clapboard cabinet contained a few toys in the overhead office but the real entertainment was below.

As the business grew, (and the amount of stuff collected), it became increasingly necessary to find a bigger home for Dolores Star.

 

 

The Exon Mercantile Building, built by old man Exon shortly after the town moved up from Big Bend in 1891, was just across what we called Main Street then, and on the corner.

It was a typical turn-of-century, brick building, with decorative cornice work and wood floors, an office up front that looked out on the sidewalk though large windows, and a massive open room with wooden shelves that ran up the walls all the way to the 12-foot pressed tin ceilings. There was another long room extending the length of the building on the side behind the office; and wooden locker-like storage rooms near the back of the open room. Behind them was my favorite ‘old building’ feature of all time — the rope and pulley-powered platform elevator to the basement. Out the back door on the downriver side, was another room that had been the old smoke house. A barn and assorted sheds filled out the property toward the back.

The move of “The Star” building to what formerly constituted Exon Mercantile was quite a deal, as I remember it. Linotype machines, and presses, and other heavy printing equipment rolled across the street on iron pipe, that was moved from the back of the machines, up to the front. Tons of iron inched forward across the street, pushed and pulled by straining men and a few women. Amazingly, I think moving the big stuff took less than a week. But for years afterward, additional items (some involving the newspaper or printing business, but much of it, local historic arcana) continued to collect in the sprawling buildings at the corner of Fourth and Main.

Today, a rusted Linotype parked on the sidewalk, still calls attention to a craft, almost forgotten.

 

 

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Blast in to the past

“Language is the archives of history”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

People in the newspaper industry may be predisposed to care more about language and usage than the average Joe or Jane.

I consider myself one of those people — particularly as it pertains to obscure language.

Some of our ink-stained terminology of yesteryear and historic industry jargon is in danger of being lost forever because we have abandoned many of the processes from which it spawned.

As a personal contribution to historic preservation efforts, I feel it is my duty as an aging veteran of hot type production and photochemical typesetting to pass on some of my favorite slang and jargon.

To that end, the following obscure terms and definitions offer a glimpse into the strange, twisted world of mid-20th century backshops and printer dens of my misspent youth.


From the hot type pressroom:

Form — Type matter of a page or several pages ready for the press.

Chase or Turtle — Steel frame in which a form is made up.

Printers furniture — Any piece of metal or wood used to make up a form.

Wrong-face — Type of a different font than is desired.

Dirty case — Type matter in which wrong-face letters appear.

Pi — Tangled mess of type.

Hell box — Receptacle for type and furniture that is to be melted up.

Quoin — Metal wedge used to lock up type in a form.

Stickful — Amount of type, about 2 inches, that can be set in a composing stick used in hand composition.

Leads — Metal strips, 2 points thick, used for spacing between lines of type.

Heel nick — “Feet” attached to the base of handset type that allows a typesetter, by feeling, to find the type’s bottom.


From the newsroom:

Boiled story — A rewrite of a longer story condensed to fit later editions.

Local room — The part of the newsroom devoted to gathering and writing news of the city in which the paper is published (now often called the city room).

Telegraph room — The part of the newsroom devoted to gathering and writing news from other areas of the state, nation or world (now called the wire room).

Fudge edition or plate — A printing method that uses a different roller on the press to print extra editions that contain late-breaking news, final scores or stock market statistics.

Ready prints or patent insides — A cost-savings method in which publishers or editors acquired from syndicates newsprint that already had one side of each sheet filled with feature articles and general material. Local news was printed on the blank side.

Widows and orphans — A widow is when a paragraph ends on the first line at the top of a page or column, leaving perhaps only a single word or syllable. An orphan refers to a paragraph beginning at the last line of a page or column.

Butcher — A copy editor lacking skill.

Bulldog — The early edition of the newspaper.


From headline writers:

Decks — The several parts or layers of a headline.

Banks — Less prominent decks between display decks.

Crossline — One-line headline across a column.

Dropline — Deck of several lines, italicized.

From graphics and photo desk:

Wood cuts — Pictures laboriously carved by hand in hardwood blocks; until the 1880s these were the only illustrations available for newspaper use.

Half-tone — Blackness of an impression, broken into contrasting tones by use of fine dots created through a screening in the photo process.

Ben Day process — Named after a New York printer, this is a printing method that imitates half-tone work in the background of line etchings by means of a special film that creates a stippled effect.

Mortises — Holes cut through plates for inserting type or smaller cuts.


Names for various type sizes:

Microscopique — 2.5-point type

Excelsior — 3-point type

Agate — 5.5-point type

Brevier — 8-point type

Bourgeois — 9-point type

Long Primer — 10-point type

Small Pica — 11-point type

Pica — 12-point type

English — 14-point type

Paragon — 20-point type

Canon — 48-point type


Phototypesetting composing rooms:

Hot board — Used to dry photo paper.

Ticker tape — Pulled off the wire feed and fed into a phototypesetter for Associated Press and United Press International stories.

Wheel — A typesetting device upon which flexible film-like strips of type were placed. The wheel would spin into position to highlight a selected letter. Light beamed through the film-like material to burn the letter on photosensitive paper.

Multirule — A slide rule-like tool used to measure type used in copy and headlines.

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Taking printing for granted

Printer struggled financially right from the start

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

Printing is one of those things you just take for granted. Yes, there are others — like being careful who you borrow money from, and waiting to adopt cutting edge technology instead of jumping on the bleeding-edge.
Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg is credited with invention of printing in the 1440s.
Drawing on earlier vocations of metalwork, gem-cutting and part-time teaching, he combined operations and equipment such as a wine press, wood engraving, brass molds and matrices to create lead type. He pulled these multiple processes together enabling completion of the first print job in 1455, in Mainz, Germany.
Delivery of that job comprised 200 copies of a 42-line Bible (number of lines per page) but because of debt incurred to get to that point, ownership of his press was transferred very shortly afterward to the man who loaned him the money.
Johann Fust, a lawyer and businessman, who had financed the last five years of Gutenberg’s work to the tune of two separate loans of 800 guilders each, won a court judgment against him. Fust then forced Gutenberg out of the business and engaged his foreman Peter Schoeffer as his partner. The partners went on to produce fine printing and created a regional recognition for Mainz as the cradle of the printing industry.
“Documented evidence of Johannes Gutenberg (1406-1468) is scant and little is known of his equipment and methods of printing. But it may be assumed that he employed some sort of compartmented trays in which to store his type,” says Fred Williams, publisher of Type & Press in 1992 article. “Possibly the boxes were arranged alphabetically, but undoubtedly their lay underwent modification as some letters were used more than others, requiring larger boxes to hold more characters. These oft-used letters were placed nearer to the type-plucking hand.”
His type was cast from lead, antimony and tin and reportedly had 290 different symbols. Among the substances he used for ink included a concoction made from soot and boiled linseed oil.
It is not real clear what happen to Gutenberg after losing his press to satisfy his debt but records indicate that the archbishop of Mainz in 1465, provided him a pension involving food and clothing and tax exempt status until his death three years later.

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On type lice and pouring pigs

"Madame, we are the press. You know our power. We fix all values. We set all standards. Your entire future depends on us." — Jean Giraudoux, The Mad Woman of Chaillot (1945)

I enjoyed recent discussions with another "ink-stained wretch" on the "old days" of hot type. The weathered newspaper veteran seemed to enjoy it as well.
"It was refreshing to hear words like "Elrod, Ludlow, type lice and one of my favorites, pouring pigs," noted Rich Leinbach, Director of Publishing Systems for the Goshen News in Goshen, Indiana. For the uninitiated, a "pig" was a lead casting used in Linotype typesetting machines. And, on hearing of our common reference points, he told the following story.
"This brings me to a fond memory of pig pouring, back in the late 70s. I was fresh out of high school and although our newspaper had already converted to offset, we still used a decent amount of hot type in our commercial printing department.
"It was late one day and I had the job of firing up the lead furnace to pour a fresh batch of pigs. I had the pot filled with molten lead, had skimmed off the dross and was just beginning to pour the pigs when the valve broke, in the open position.
"Needless to say, gravity took over and the entire pot of lead became one giant pig on the floor, in a matter of a few minutes.
"To make matters even worse, just after my masterpiece had cooled into a solid mass, the entire staff of "Big Wigs" came parading through, after a late meeting. There I stood, pry bar in hand, trying to get rid of the evidence before anyone could find out. Ah . . . those WERE the good old days."

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Recalling hot type

Talking with someone that lived this history

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

In talking with Ken Geddes about hot type newspapers and history years ago, I suddenly felt twinge of familiarity, a sense that I had been here before —“déjà vu all over again,” to paraphrase Yogi Berra.
I also realized at the same time that I was talking with someone that lived this history.
Maybe he was seeing if my story held up as well.
When I told him that I grew up in the “hot type environment” of the old Dolores Star, he asked a question about the form that held the type together for a page.
“What’s that called?
I mumbled something about a “turtle” or several pages being on a form, and switched gears to the linotype. It has been 30 years at least since my “printer’s furniture” and “hell box” days, and many of those years confused and immersed in a “cold type” soup. Mentioning that an old linotype from the forerunner of Gold Rush newspaper still resides in the town hall, I think, effectively deflected suspicion.
Geddes knew the Gold Rush newspaper— before it was the Gold Rush. His mother and father owned and ran the Cripple Creek Times-Record (which later became the Gold Rush) for about ten years starting on April 1, 1941. They purchased the paper from Bill Kyner and it was still a daily at that time.
“We went to the office the morning after we had settled the deal and realized we had to fill up eight pages in time to distribute by 5 p.m.,” wrote his mother Margaret Whitehill Geddes in her book “Gold Camp Indian Summer.”
“We discovered how our lives would be changed on the first day,” noted Margaret Geddes. Ken’s dad (also Kenneth) had been superintendent of schools for the Cripple Creek and Victor school district for a number of years prior to buying the paper.
“We met with the force, which included a foreman, two linotype operators, two men for general shop work — and then there was Freddie. The years go by we still fondly remember and quote Freddie, who admitted he had a difficult time with second grade.
“Freddie had a little boy, Eugene, who also had trouble with second grade. Eugene was bound to be musical, his daddy said, since he was ‘brought up around a piano,’” wrote Margaret Geddes.
When they shifted from a daily to a weekly, in the early part of World War II, they naturally faced complaints about the change.
“I remember Charley Searles, an old friend who had been an early mayor of Cripple Creek saying, ‘Well, a fellow has to die by Wednesday to make the news!’ Soon, however, people got used to having things ‘rationed’ for the war effort, accepted this as just another ‘sacrifice.’”
Ken himself, who for a time between his freshman and sophomore year at Colorado College, helped in the back shop. So chances are that he knew the answer to the question I mentioned earlier.
After reading his mother’s account of running the paper, I was tempted to give him a quick call with the answer.
“I believe it was a CHASE,” I would say identifying the steel frame in which a hot type printer form is made up. It is all coming back to me.
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