Hi, this is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  A little trip down memory lane today.  I found this old program in a pile of stuff that I was sorting through.  And it’s the program for the 50^th Annual Convention of the ITCA.  Some of you remember the International Typographical Composition Association.  Later they just changed their name to International Typographic Association, ITA.  But this was the last major even that they ran.  They continued in business for a number of years, but the 50^th Anniversary event was in October, 1969 and it was held at the Sheraton Boston in Boston, Massachusetts.  And I was there…

I started trade show hopping before it was cool. 

And many of the people signed for me, many of the Presidents that had been in office over the years, I think the earliest President I have that was still alive was from 1948, the previous ones were not available, as you would expect…

I will outlive you ALL. 

It was an interesting event.  And some of you will remember the Typographic industry.  At one time, there was a category in the industry called the typesetter, or the typographer.  The trade typesetter.  They set type for advertising agencies, book publishers and others, and delivered that type to the printer to print from.  Later as we moved into offset lithography, they delivered repro proofs.  They would proof their type from hot metal on a Vandergott[ph] Press or whatever, and they would deliver the repros to the advertising agency, book publisher, or whomever who would have them assembled into pages. 

They had made that transition to photographic typesetting, probably 68-69 is when most of them started to think about it and started to act on it.  That’s why this program was rather interesting; because the 50^th Anniversary in 1969 was the last time they were predominately hot metal.  After that, they started to move into photographic typesetting. 

Rapid typographers in New York City went to **** Film in ’67, others were using the phototypesetter for headlines, but they were still setting all their text on linotype machines, but as photographic type machines started to mature, to do a better job, to have more fonts, you started to see the typographic industry move in that way.  And that’s how I got to know a lot of these people because I was the consultant at that time who helped a lot of people convert from hot metal into photographic typesetting.  That was my schtick because I had grown up in hot metal linotype as they were moving into photographic typesetting and had worked for Visual Graphics and Compu Graphic and hopefully had enough experience in what the equipment could do to help these companies. 

Everybody’s gotta have a schtick. 

To look at some of the names of some of the people who signed this, it just brings back a phenomenal number of memories.  For instance, Fred Hock.  Fred Hock wrote most of the books on estimating in the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 1950’s and was trying to figure out ways to estimate typesetting.  That was a significant problem of how you sort of put a price on what you were doing. 

Dwight Yeager, from Ohio.  He and his brother I did work with them as they converted into photographic typesetting.  Bob Leeth up at Monotype in Toronto.  He was, again, a monotype operation and then moved into photographic typesetting. 

The names in here, of course, Chuck Mulligan, who was the Executive Director of the ITCA for many years, I think he had just gotten the job a few years before, here is it, 1966, in that particular position. 

And really, one of the great guys in the industry, Murray Franklin, who ran a typesetting operation in Boston, was very instrumental in helping to form the Museum of Printing, died two years ago, or so.  A wonderful man and made great, great contributions to the printing industry over the years. 

Eli Canter, who later went to run the Composing Room and his father, Saul Canter, it was at the Composing Room where I saw – listened to a talk by Beatrice Ward, one of the last that she ever made. 

So, they had some statistics in her that were rather interesting, but in ’67, the typesetting industry was worth $342 million according to the federal government, and there was another statistic from 1965 that said, the value of all fringe benefits was 41.6 cents per hour.  I wonder if that’s still true.  Probably not with medical care the way it’s going.  But so, there it was in one little booklet sort of a memory of an industry that is gone because when desktop publishing came in and art directors and graphic designers starting to do their own typesetting and putting the pages together themselves, there was no longer a need for the trade typesetter.  And within a few years, the trade typesetter went away, although there are a few of them left.  I still meet with people.  Ken **** was telling me the other day that he’s involved with a company, Circle Graphics, which is his first company that still does typesetting for companies and they do XML encoding, make the file into one that can be converted into an eBook, so there are still vestiges of the typesetting industry around, but almost nothing like it was in its heyday when these companies were setting type for just about everybody. 

But then photographic typesetting came in and then desktop publishing and the world changed. 

Thank you very much. 

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