HOT METAL

In his later years, Benjamin Franklin, the American polymath, owned a number of properties in central Philadelphia. His main house stood a short distance from a main street in a garden shaded by a mulberry tree and accessed through a cobbled archway-cum-tunnel. The tunnel still pierces his terrace row of business premises, but Ben's house has gone, replaced by a 'ghost,' a metal-framed outline of the original. There is an underground Franklin museum, ingeniously inserted under the plot where his house once stood; but some of his other properties are still there, in that streetside terrace. One of them was a posting, or mail, office. Another was his printing works.
We're years away from hot metal printing here, the 18th century type being hand-set, but some of the techniques and tools are essentially the same, such as a 'stone,' where the pages are still laid out, inkers, piles of proofs, and a general organised untidiness which was the mark of a good print works. And the smell was there, too. I recognised it as soon as I went in. Ink and paper, presses and dust, all lovingly reconstructed and still used daily by staff dressed as in Franklin's day.
Actually, what they produce now are tourist copies of the Declaration of Independence. But by using a traditional typeface with hand-set qualities on a slightly coarse paper, the sheets appear from under the hand-press as though they were actually as old as the hills.
Print works can be exciting places, and newspaper print rooms - with hand-set type replaced by hot, smelly, tinkling Linotype machines - were the most exciting of all. As a sports sub-editor on a regional daily newspaper, working on two broadsheet pages a night, we spent a couple of hours each evening in Norwich's Redwell Street press room seeing pages made-up and locked into their forme, the metal page frame; and then seeing the corrected pages 'off stone.' It was deadlines and disasters all the way (metal type in a metal frame did not bend, reduce or expand, and you either got it right or you didn't) and by and large I loved it.
And here, in Philadelphia, after all those years, was that smell once again. Ink and paper and dust. Galley racks and columns of text. In Redwell Street, of course, there was also a foundry and a block department, a flong press and massive printing machines which caused the old building to shiver and hum when they ran at top speed. And added to that, the heat, smell and sound of banks of Linotype machines.
The company I worked for still hosts a pensioners' Christmas dinner, and in the early years after retirement we used to look around the room and think, never mind computers, we've still got enough people here who know how to produce a hot metal newspaper. But alas, possibly not any more. Hot metal print men are now becoming almost as rare as tobacconist shops and house-to-house milk deliveries. Which is a shame, in a way, because memories of an art forms are being eroded and lost.
For me, however, hot metal meant Bodoni and Garamond, NIBS and ragged right, indent right and a nut indent each end, busted headlines counts, wonky page layouts, Gloy and scissors, and the tension of a ever ticking clock.
Of course, the old NGA print union made absolutely sure non-members didn't touch anything within their domain, but inevitably you got your hands dirty. Pick up a pile of editorial proofs and you got ink smudges on your fingers. As for the smell, which is a smell as distinctive as a pile of old books, it never leaves you, even if the galleys and flongs have.