Regular readers may recall that I mentioned several months ago I had acquired a flong of Doonesbury comics from the 1970s. I have an article in preparation at a magazine about some of the interesting details associated with the particular strips, some of which never ran in print, but were preserved by someone who grabbed the sheet from a newspaper that received it before the syndicate sent out replacements. I don’t want to give too much away, as the article has a lot to say on the topic, including insight from a special source.

You can read my magnum opus on flong, a kind of paper mold also known as a “mat,” as in short for “matrix.” I find a lot of references to “ad mats” in particular, as flongs were used by advertisers in the same way that photostats and “slicks” were sent out in a later generation and PDFs are used today. You could really call a flong a kind of analog PDF: it was a way to re-create an original layout without any of the original materials.

I have had my eye on stereotypes, though, which are the metal plates cast from flongs, also known as “stereos” for short. I have bought a few plates that I were used for newspaper and merchandise printing, all of which are ad related. But I had an interest in getting a comics-related stereo, as they are infrequently available and often listed on eBay at prices that are way too high for the actual value of the thing. I believe sellers who acquire them think they have some worth as an original item, like artwork, when they are just a part of the mechanical reproduction sequence. The original cartoonist or artist never saw or touched them.

Recently, a few Doonesbury stereos went up for sale, again at a price I thought too high. The strips in question were fairly ordinary. There are some Doonesbury comics, including maybe weeks or months, that would have a historical value and might be worth more. The seller over some weeks lowered the price, and I purchased one of these recently. The strip is from a post-Vietnam sequence on March 18, 1978, in which a former Viet Cong fighter named Phred (who had befriend Doonesbury stalwart and college football player B.D.) is now a U.N. ambassador and talking with a friend who represents another country. Why someone saved this strip—and one from a similar era that the same seller had on offer—I don’t know.

You can read about the process in more depth in my flong article, but it involved several generations. The original artwork—in the case of comics, six strips at once, to represent an entire Monday to Saturday run of daily strips—was exposed to etch a plate. Flongs were made in large quantities from the plate and shipped to newspapers. Newspapers cast their own stereo from the flong (as above), then locked that stereo into the page layout with Linotype slugs, handset type, headlines, and graphical elements. A flong was then made from the entire page, which was then put into a semi-cylindrical stereo caster to produce the plate for the high-speed rotary newspaper presses.

Because these plates are rare enough and so expensive, I can’t include one in each Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule. I have been collecting from the beginning of the project a sort of Not So Tiny Type Museum that I had hoped to exhibit in public and potential travel with. Given the current pandemic, that’s not in the cards. Plan B is a virtual Not So Tiny tour, and I’ll be preparing that in the weeks and months to come, probably offering some via Instagram stories and Facebook Live.