Hi, this in Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  Welcome back to another episode.  I’ve been working with Doug Wilson.  Who’s Doug Wilson?  Doug is the young, talented director and producer of a movie the Linotype.  It’s actually called Linotype: The Film.  

And he has traveled the world interviewing, taping, scanning imagery and talking to people involved with Linotype for the last year or so.  If you do anything to help him out, you get a free T-shirt.  

Oh, you also get a set of Linotype coasters.  In any case, he recently spent a few days with me at my house in Boston because, of course, I’ve collected almost everything the company, the Linotype company, ever did.  And Doug, I think spent two nights there, two days and nights, scanning almost a thousand images from various materials that I have. 

In any case, the movie is scheduled to come out in January or February.  I think the premiere is going to be in New York City somewhere.  Not only has he interviewed and put this movie together, but he has also found films that the company did and he has digitized them.  So I think he’s going to create a Web site that has a lot of these resources on it because there's just no way that this film of 75 minutes is going to give you everything you want to know.  

Although, I think it’ll be a good start.  But that's usually the 75 minutes is the amount of time in an hour and a half special with commercials, et cetera.  So I don't think he’s going to make it much bigger, but there’ll certainly be a DVD with all the additional material and a companion Web site as well. 

And, of course, my book on the history of the Linotype company will hopefully be out in the first quarter of next year.  And it has all the details of how the company started, how it ran and it has over 400 images in it of all their promotion material, training material, books, specimen materials, et cetera.  I’ve collected almost everything that was ever done by the company. 

Why do this for the Linotype?  Well, in 1886, Ottmar Mergenthaler demonstrated the machine that changed the world.  It allowed us to do typesetting in a more efficient way.  And for almost 100 years, it dominated the printing industry.  Of course, it was supplanted by photographic typesetting and, of course, then by desktop publishing.  So today, we all set type routinely with Microsoft Word or Quark or InDesign or whatever it may be.  But in the day, the Linotype revolutionized the prepress industry because of its ability to set type in a more mechanized and automated way. 

And, of course, as they go away, there are a few still operating around the United States and around the world, but many have been junked for the metal more than anything else, and so to preserve the history of it, the film and all the material that goes with it certainly would be a good idea.  Because within another 50 years, most people will say, “What is a Linotype?”  In fact, people today say, “What is a linotype?” 

So you can find Doug’s Web site at Lino - Lino - I’ll get it right - LinotypeFilm.com and there's a lot of information about what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.  There are trailers there and other information that you can look at.  In any case, you're going to try to remember the Linotype as best we can and that's my opinion.   

You're not going to replace this with electronic media and this, I believe, is going to be a growth area.