Old School Moveable Type

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Old School Moveable Type (MGK)

Real moveable type. Ever since I investigated the meaning of the name of the character “Shurdlu” in Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine, I’ve had a longing to learn how to use an old-fashioned printing press — one that actually presses the paper. As much as I love the power of “push-button publishing for the masses,” there is still something to be said about the care that must go into getting it right when one uses a real printing press.

7 thoughts on “Old School Moveable Type

  1. Dennis,
      There’s an entire sci-fi story about a next-generation, computer driven “smart” printing press that actually reads the manuscripts that are scanned in and then makes printouts. Eventually it starts editing the manuscripts, and when someone feeds it a Marxist pamphlet, it revolts! The next day, when everyone comes back to the shop, the press has been fed a manuscript on Zen Buddism and is serently printing its mantra “ETAOIN SHRDLU” over and over…. :)
     Joshua Sasmor

  2. It’s because you linked directly to the image – IE and some other browsers like to resize the image to fit the window if you do that. In IE, if you pause the mouse pointer over the image for a few seconds, a little button will show up in the lower left corner that allows you to view the image full size.
     
     Of course if you don’t want it to happen at all, just use a smaller image, or put the image in an actual html page.

  3. But I just noticed that the picture first appears rather squashed then if I minimize then expand the browser window it appears normal. Strange.

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