This is Frank Romano at the Museum of Printing, continuing with our little series on how metal type-setting.  This is one of the most interesting machines ever built.  It’s the Ludlow.  It was used for display type. 

Now it’s sort of a hybrid, it was a cross between hand-type and casting, so you would pick your letters as matrices from the tray, and here you can see, you have a mold for every one of them. 

These are all color-coded, by the way, so you have each font, you then know what the letter is on the outside of it here.  You pick them up and they now go into a composing stick. 

And now you’re looking at the back end here, where it says The Museum of Printing, but if we turn it over, you can see, now, all the molds that are in it.  And you can double-check what you’re doing, and now you insert it into this device.

Now, once again, there’s a pot with molten led.  This is the pig, by the way.  It is melted, again 500 and something degrees.  Ray has locked it into the Ludlow.  Now he has put it into position.  Next, he’s going to press a button.  You can see that a plunger has gone down.  It has forced molten metal into the line of the matrices and there’s our slug, and you can see it is in relief. 

Now, why was there a Ludlow, why did you have a Ludlow and liner type machine?  And the reason is that the liner type machine could reach 18-point in some cases, if you had the right device.  But if you need a display type, you either used hand type or you came over to the Ludlow.  Washington Ludlow invented the machine. 

Here’s a whole rack, by the way, of different slugs, and you could do very large type with the Ludlow and then you would mix it with your text type when you were putting your page together. 

In addition to doing the slug itself, it also cast the leading material, so you had not only the slug, but you then had these blank lines that went with it, that covered the overhang, so that when you put it, then, with your handset type and the liner type material, everything would be locked up in the proper way.  

This is the Ludlow Specimen Book and once again, this is the day when they did absolutely gorgeous work, not only showing you samples of all the type, but also showing you how it would look in different arrangements.  You really don’t see this anymore. 

This is absolutely, this is Umbra, a three-dimensional typeface, not very popular today, but in its day it was phenomenal, and as you can see, here’s (Usibis), which is based on Garamond and here are some beautiful samples of that.  Here’s Coronet, a semi-script type face, and here you have different samples of that.

So here’s a long shot of the Ludlow.  You can see it’s a relatively small machine.  It has to have the pot to heat up the lead.  Now, what usually happens is you wind up with a very large number of these racks and these racks have all of the type that you would need, so you’d need one for every point size.  So if you’d look over here, we’ve got 18 point Cheltenham Old Style Condensed, we’ve got 24 in Chelt, 30 in Chelt, 36 in Chelt, so you would keep the fonts together in some way, and you could see they’re starting at 18. 

I think they may have made some smaller fonts, but I doubt it.  Again, here are some beautiful borders that have been done, so they’ve taken and cast these and you now put these in order and you now have your border around your type. 

This is the spacing material.  By the way, if you take a little steel wool to it, they look like gold ingots’, but these are the blank spaces that would go between words, and there’s no mold in each one of these.  What you have is the absolute spacing material.  For the italics, they were at an angle.  And they came in different sizes, depending on how you were going to space the line.  Again, if you had a very long line length, you might need this very long one in order to position everything properly.

When you were done, you had to put all the type back into the tray, so you would take it out of the composing stick, put it back into the tray and then the next person would be able to do the next job after that.

The competition, of course, was display type from hand typed material, so you still had hand type being used, so there’s some large point sizes, there were trays of type where they would pick it out and do it by hand because certain fonts were not available on the Ludlow so you would have to go to an ATF typeface which was hand set typesetting and use a composing stick to put all of this together. 

And again, you can see all the type in the tray.  This particular case has both lower case and caps, and in the very early days, you had one tray for lower case and one tray for upper case and by the way, that’s where we get the terms from, because in the typesetting days, we put one tray at the top with the big letters and one at the bottom for the small letters, and that’s how we get upper case and lower case.  So this is a rack of display type from hand set type and of course, for machine typesetting, there was the Ludlow.

Thank you very much!

Next time: 

Well, now Grandma does have a digital camera and she has a computer and she wants to see the pictures instantly.  In fact, she wants to talk with the grandkids over Skype.