Reply To: 1970s Typesetting

Ah yes, until about 8 or 9 years ago a printer friend of mine ran a hot metal Linotype in his shop. It was just faster for him to knock out small letterpress jobs than it was to do it digitally. It was great fun to see, but after a lifetime of using it, I believe he had significant lead poisoning, which was sad. He has retired now.

My first lintotype was the Linotype 100 imagesetter. It was pretty exciting, trying to pin register color separations by visually lining up the paper between two markers as it came off the roll. (To date myself, one of my first summer jobs during college — in 1986 or 1987 — was working at LaserWrite in Palo Alto, California, one of the first service bureaus in the world. That's where I started learning PostScript, QuarkXPress, PixelPaint, etc.)