A trip to see Baltimore’s ‘Eighth Wonder of the World’

Here’s the short version of the story for those of you in white rabbit mode:

Went to Baltimore to see the Eighth Wonder of the World. No, it’s not the new Guinness brewery, although that’s a seriously awesome place. Older, cooler and way more important; it’s the Linotype machine at the Baltimore Museum of Industry.

I’m a big fan of old-school letterpress/hot metal printing. And I’m a bit obsessed with that era’s state-of-the-art automated typesetting machine, the Linotype.

If you are even half as stoked as I am about hot metal printing, you will love the documentary Linotype, the Film, created by Doug Wilson. As a lifelong Linotype nut, as soon as I learned of its existence, I grabbed my copy.

That’s how I found Ray Loomis, one of the operators featured in the movie. Ray got into the print game as soon as he was old enough to work, back in the mid-1940s – smack dab in the Linotype’s heyday. He cut his eye teeth on the clinking, whirring, clanking gizmo and continues to run one of the world’s few surviving operating machines, at the museum.

Since Baltimore is within striking distance of the Jersey shore,  I was down there in a flash. I not only got to meet Ray and spend an afternoon with him, I actually got a Linotype lesson from him. Cross one off the bucket list!

Here’s a little video I put together of Ray making that old machine sing. And if your curiosity gets the best of you, read the whole sordid tale, below.

A lifelong love affair with print

My infatuation with hot metal printing goes way, way back. Even before I knew I would be spending a career in and around words – the actual process of getting those words on paper fascinated me. Plus, despite endless Catholic school penmanship drills, I always had crappy handwriting. That probably had something to do with my early adoption of typewriters. I was one of the few boys who took typing class in high school. It was that kind of world.

But years before that, I had taken possession of my sister, Karen’s portable Smith-Corona, which she let me tinker with between term papers. She didn’t mind since she knew I would take care of it and it was always available when she actually needed it. I just loved the thing – all those tiny, moving parts, levers, belts and springs putting crisp letters on paper. When she graduated to the IBM Selectric, she had no use for the old manual job and she gave it to me, for keeps. I still have it and treasure its unique look, feel, sound and even its aroma. It smells exactly the way it did when it was new and I have no clue what makes it smell that way. Probably some combination of ink, machine oil and plastic. It’s a nice smell and one that takes me back 30 years every time I open the case. New car smell for a word freak.

My neighbor and bestie, Rich, was afflicted with similar eclectic obsessions. At his house, we had access to his mom’s big old Royal, in brown wrinkle paint. It had a completely different personality than mine, with its own bells and whistles. It seemed so much bigger than Karen’s little portable, the thing was like a car with a keyboard. Neither of us knew how to type but we used our typewriters to created fliers, ads, newsletters and whatever else we could think of. We even set up phony companies that corresponded with one another in ‘to whom it may concern’ business letters. We were such nerds.

Rich was also an only child who got every toy he asked for. It was really fun hanging out at his house, exploring whatever shiny new thing he’d recently unwrapped. One time, it was a tiny printing press, a Superior Cub, I’m almost sure, based on a quick web search. It was really just a rubber stamp with a hand crank. It wasn’t very good and we didn’t stick with it. Way too much work. The tiny rubber characters took forever to set up. It seemed like it took half a day to set what amounted to a headline. So, we set headlines – running them off by the dozen. Important, breaking news, like “Attention: Duane and Mike are all wet.” We were quite the Woodward and Bernstein.

Smitten, from first sight

So, when a print fanatic like me first laid eyes on a running Linotype machine, it was a life-changing moment. It was on a Cub Scouts trip, to see how the Trenton Times daily newspaper got made. Around 1970, when the Linotype still reigned supreme in the printing racket.

I’m sure we saw lots of things and met lots of people that night. I remember none of it, except that Linotype battery. It was a sight to behold – machine after machine, lined up like cannons on a sailing warship. Not unlike this setup, I expect. On each machine, an operator hammered away, surrounded by others. All men, in white shirts and ties, running, yelling and smoking. Even though we were peering in through big windows, the glass was no match for the sound – a crazy cacophony of clattering, clinking, clunking against the backdrop of men, bellowing orders. It was chaos, with purpose. Something damned important seemed to be going on in that room. I had no idea what a Linotype machine was or what it did but I fell in love with it, that minute.

An accidental reunion

I didn’t see another one for years. Nobody knew it at the time, but in 1970, the Linotype was near extinction – “cold type” and computers would overtake the print industry only a decade later. I found one at the Smithsonian one day. Quite a disappointment – a cold Linotype, gleaming and spit polished, sitting under a spotlight. A real nice gallery display, but without the sound, motion and cigarette smoke, something seemed missing.

I almost hit pay dirt one rainy day on North Carolina’s outer banks. It wasn’t a good beach day so my eldest son and I were looking for other diversions. We stumbled on the Croatan Bookery, a used book store in Kill Devil Hills. I had no idea what lay in store for us. Turns out it was both a used book store and a museum of printing. Sort of.

By museum, they meant practically the entire hot metal print shop of some local newspaper, stuffed into the back room. There was no curator, best I could tell, or educational plan. They just let you wander around back there – in a treasure trove of typesetter’s boxes, lead type, presses, composing equipment, make-up gear, the whole works. And in the center of it all, not one, but two Linotypes. One day, churning out type for tomorrow’s paper. The next, unplugged and trucked to the book store, warts and all. One had an ashtray, built in, complete with the long-gone operator’s cigarette ashes, liberally dusted into every nook and cranny, along with a jumble of parts, tools and even scraps of copy from their last jobs. It was cold, silent and magnificent. So much better than the Smithsonian’s. Thank God I took photos of it. That shop is long gone, with its obsolete old print curiosities ending up who knows where.

I was near to hog heaven. I still didn’t know what it was or what it did, but I loved it anyway. But, how cool would it be to see one in action again? That was decades off. But a day I’d live to see.

The World Wide Web helped. There’s a ton of Linotype stuff online, including some halfway decent YouTube videos. But a tiny video doesn’t do it justice. If you’ve never seen one up close, imagine the love child of a typewriter and a steam locomotive. A baffling contraption of black steel: cams, gears, belts, levers and pulleys – all exposed. OSHA was nowhere to be seen when Linotype came of age.

I ate up what the Web had to offer. I even bought some Linotype ‘matrix’ letter molds on ebay. And I discovered I’m not the only one enamored with this Victorian Rube Goldberg contrivance. Folks around the world have preserved films, books, maintenance manuals and sales material online.

But some have gone further. Some are keeping actual, real-life Linotype machines running and casting type from hot metal. People Ray Loomis at the Baltimore Museum of Industry.

A brief history of printing

But before I get to my epic afternoon spent with Ray Loomis, a bit of history. The printing industry ran on hot metal type for centuries. “Moveable” type was the thing. Each letter, character and punctuation mark molded in wood or metal, a tiny stamp that gets inked and pressed to paper. Gutenberg invented neither moveable type nor the printing press, but his innovations vastly improved them in the mid-1400s. And for 500 years, printing was done the same basic way – printers grabbing each character, one at a time and lining them up, one by one, to form the lines and columns. Almost every vestige of that system is gone. Today, computers make the letters and images and they’re processed photographically to get from idea to paper. We still have printing presses, of course, but hot metal type is a relic of the past.

Before Gutenberg, printing was done by hand – every book, handwritten, expensive and years in the making. After Gutenberg, printing exploded. Literacy rates soared. Information was democratized.

Although the tools and machinery were refined – the process itself didn’t change. And setting type one character at a time can only go so fast. If you wanted to print more books or a bigger newspaper, you had only one choice: hire more compositors, the guys who set the type. Big-city newspapers had armies of them.

There had to be a better way. There was. Linotype.

Born in Baltimore

With the industrial revolution in full swing, mechanizing typesetting was inevitable. Many people tried many ways to do it. Nobody could make a machine that was any faster than a deft compositor. That is until  Ottmar Mergenthaler put his mind to it.

A young immigrant German watchmaker in Baltimore, Mergenthaler figured out the matrix, a small, carefully machined slice of brass, not much bigger than a quarter. The ‘mat’ molds each individual letter, character or punctuation mark. The ironic thing about the Linotype is that this gigantic machine – two tons and bigger than a refrigerator – was designed solely to move these little mats around.

Instead of lining up individual characters, by hand, the Linotype operator taps a keyboard and the machine lines up the mats, one for each character. Between the mats, wedges of steel make spaces and automatically justify the line. Then the whole line of mats is sent to the caster, where hot, molten metal is pumped in – molding, at one fell swoop, a whole line of type. (Get it?)

Perfected in the 1880s, Mergenthaler’s crazy machine worked so well that it completely changed the game. A Linotype operator could do the work of six men setting type by hand. At its peak, there were some 100,000 in operation around the world. So, you’d think for every Linotype machine installed, five guys would get pink slips. Not exactly. Many of them ended up Linotype operators. And everything got more and bigger.

It empowered a massive expansion of print. Newspapers ran two editions a day in some towns. And they grew from a dozen pages to scores, virtually creating the display advertising industry. This is the reason, for years, I’ve had a picture of a Linotype near my desk. If not for the Linotype, I’d probably be in some other line of work, since my line of work would not exist, as we know it. The Linotype fueled more magazines, books, printed material of all kinds – and made the lot less expensive to produce.

Like the Gutenberg press before it, literacy rates jumped after the Linotype hit the scene. It’s not an understatement to say that the development of the Linotype was the printing industry’s second leap forward – after Gutenberg’s press itself. It literally changed everything, setting the stage for the modern information age.

Of course, there’s no free lunch. The Linotype also spawned muckraking and sensationalism. With more pages to fill – some publishers courted the lowest common denominator. With that history, you could argue that the Linotype also set the stage for the sad state of media we suffer today and all the monsters it created. But that’s life. Nothing is all bad or all good. And I maintain its legacy is more good than bad.

Meet Ray Loomis

One of my fellow Linotype maniacs – and a personal hero – is a guy called Doug Wilson. He created a tight little movie about the Linotype, featuring a few of the existing machines still running; Linotype, the Film. If you care a whit for hot metal type, get this movie as soon as you can. It’s that good.

Of course, when I heard a Linotype movie existed, I was all in, no questions asked. And that’s how I discovered Ray Loomis, one of the experts and operators featured in the film.

Ray is a national treasure. Born in 1929, he’s not only a native of Baltimore, Linotype’s ancestral home, he attended “Mervo,” Mergenthaler Vocational Technical School, named in honor of the  inventor. There, Ray learned the basics of printing. He got into printing as soon as he was old enough to work, back in the mid-1940s. He spent a career immersed in the finer points of hot metal type. He’s racked up a lot of Linotype time.

Today, he’s still behind the keyboard, most Saturdays at the Baltimore Museum of Industry.

As soon as I learned about Ray and the museum’s running Linotype, I planned a trip. Real nice place – they have a full overhead belt drive machine shop, old boats and trains, a drug store, a bakery, a canning line, a diner, gas pumps, cars, a textile mill – all kinds of relics of Baltimore’s analog industrial past. It’s a steampunk paradise.

Unfortunately, I didn’t know print shop demonstrations are a Saturday-only thing and I got there midweek. Still enjoyed it thoroughly. I get real stoked being near a Linotype, under any circumstances. And since it was idle, I had plenty of opportunities to photograph it. I started plotting a Saturday return trip as soon as I left the building.

It’s alive!

It took nearly a year, but I finally made it back in spring of 2019. I walked into that print shop like a kid in a candy store. There was the Linotype, switched on, hot and whirring away. And, a few feet away, Ray Loomis, tucking into a McDonald’s hamburger.

I introduced myself to Ray and his colleague, Steve Cole. They were both delighted and a probably a little bit puzzled by my enthusiasm. I guess there just aren’t too many Linotype groupies who come to visit. (Imagine that.)

Ray finished his lunch and walked me over to the machine. I marveled at the sight and sound.

“What are you waiting for?” he asked. “Sit down.”

I was bowled over. “What? You’re gonna let me run it?”

“Sit,” Ray insisted.

And there I was. Not only in the same room with a running Linotype, about to lay my hands on it. I was almost as nervous as I get playing piano in public.

Ray’s machine was owned by the federal government in Washington. Unfortunately, when the museum acquired it, they weren’t quite ready for it and it was stored for years in a trolley barn, exposed to the elements. When Ray and his crew got hold of it, it was rusty and covered with pigeon poop. But this is a massively overbuilt, intrepid device designed for industrial service, not planned obsolescence. After many hours of cleaning, oiling and adjusting – she was brought back to running order and she continues to run, every week – the way she was designed to do when she was built back in 1936.

Completely clueless, I just stared at the keyboard. It’s nothing like the QWERTY layout we’re all familiar with. Like he’s done with thousands before me, Ray walked me through it. I clanked out a line of mats, slower than molasses. “You know, a good operator can do six lines a minute,” Ray said.

“I don’t think I’ll be doing that,” came my reply.

“Maybe an hour,” Ray quipped back.

“OK, pull this handle,” Ray said. I pulled. The elevator lifted my line of mats to the caster. I watched in awe as the cams and gears turned, hot lead pumped in and molds spun. The sounds are almost as hypnotic as the motion. Each step, a unique voice in a Victorian metal-on-metal chorus. My slug – a line of type – dropped into the galley to my left. There it was. It was real. I’d done it. Cross one off the bucket list.

I spent a good part of the afternoon with Ray and the rest of the crew, absorbing as much as I could. They are patient teachers and spent lots of time with me and with the young families coming in to see what hot metal printing was all about. They’re good people and they’re good at what they do.

To me, they’re rock stars – anybody keeping a Linotype machine running is preserving one of the most important and significant technologies ever conceived – and one that most have never even heard of.

I can’t wait to go back.

=S

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