Ran across an edition of “The American Printer” from August, 1919, which featured a series of short blurbs informative of what was going on with printers and publishers in New York State that summer. Among them:
- The Schenectady Union-Star has changed its mechanical equipment to print an eight column, 12½ em page, instead of a seven column, 13 em page.
- Fire in the composing room of the Albany Times-Union did several hundred dollars’ damage recently. The blaze started at 5 o’clock in the morning, but was soon under control.
- George Edward Rines, editor of the “Encyclopedia Americana,” which is printed by the J.B. Lyon Printing Company, of Albany, told at a dinner of the Rotary Club of Albany recently how the big work is printed.
- Leon M. Burt, of the job department of the Schenectady Union-Star, recently joined the benedicts. The bride was Miss Gertrude Bangs, of Springfield, Mass. Fellow workers presented Burt with a kitchen set.
- Beginning September 1, the Schenectady Division of The Capital District Typothetae will meet every Monday night. Estimating classes will be formed, under direction of H.C. Alvord, secretary-treasurer of the Capital District Typothetae.
- The Schenectady newspaper publishers and the International Typographical Union have agreed to a raise for the Schenectady printers amounting to four dollars a week. The scale is now $29 for day work and $32.50 for the night shifts. The contract runs to Dec. 15, 1920.
- The plant of the Schenectady Gazette Press is being enlarged, and it is expected the job department will be twice its present size when the work is completed. The newspaper composing room is also being enlarged. Fred Frost, chairman of the Schenectady section of the Capital District Typothetae, is superintendent of the job department.
- Albany printers are watching with interest the development of a Junior Printers’ Association, which was devised by youngsters interested in the “art preservative.” Many of the youngsters have their own small presses, and they plan get-together meetings to learn the game, hoping eventually to land with some of the printshops in Albany or vicinity. Raymond Warshaw is president and John H. Bielman secretary. Both are sons of employing printers in Albany.
- Several thousand dollars’ damage was done by a fire in the plant of the Budget, which conducts a job printing plant as well as prints a weekly newspaper, at Troy, July 21. The fire damaged the main press, consumed twenty rolls of paper and two barrels of ink, and threatened at one time to spread to other departments of the paper. The Budget was recently purchased by Thomas H. Curry and Albert A. McNaughton, after being controlled for more than a century by the family of Major Charles A. MacArthur.
So, for you young’uns who never slung hot lead across a Ludlow (and, in all honesty, neither did I, at least not in real production), here are a few things you may not know:
- A “typothetae” was a common name for a master printers’ association.
- “Estimating” was a critical skill, not only in the days of lead type, but in photo-typesetting as well. When you laid out a page, you didn’t know how long an article was going to be; you had to estimate how long it was going to come out. The only thing that was guaranteed was that you’d be wrong. Now if you’re wrong, you just push a virtual button and change everything; then that was simply impossible.
- Narrow columns (eight, rather than seven, for the Union-Star) were all the rage into the ’60s and ’70s. It was big news when The New York Times finally abandoned its rigidly gray, intensely vertical format, and, to my mind, even bigger news when The Schenectady Gazette did the same.
- An em is a printing measure. It’s equal to the height of the type size being used; so if you’re using 8-point type, an em space is 8 points. But when the size isn’t specified, it’s 12 points.
- A “benedict” was a newly married man who had long been a bachelor, taken from Benedick of “Much Ado About Nothing.” A kitchen set is a perfectly good thing to give a benedict.