Glenn Fleishman Interrogates the Past

I keep coming across interesting side topics that inform the whole of what I’m writing about in Six Centuries of Type & Printing, the book that will accompany the Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule, and available for separate purchase in letterpress and ebook editions.

Two recent ones related to “bogus copy” and how type foundries handled baselines. I wound up writing quite a few words about both topics.

Bogus! When Typesetters Were Paid To Set Copy That Was Thrown Away: “Bogus” or “bogus copy” was effectively the result of a mid-1800s conflict between typesetters and management about how to pay for time standing around. Typesetters were paid piecework (by the “em,” as I explain in the article) for well into the 20th century, when hourly and other wages were routine.

But for compositors who were effectively employees, they rejected not being paid when there was no copy to

I’ve been working on this for a while, and finally assembled all the primary sources and material I needed to write it. I explain in some great detail about flongs and stereotypes, a method of effectively duplicating typeset material and engraved images and halftones photographs that was required for rotary presses to make any sense.

A flong is a paper mold made from something that would otherwise be printed on a letterpress (in relief printing). The stereotype is the solid metal cast plate (flat or curved) cast from it. For newspapers and high-volume printing, the curved plate paired with the rotary press, allowing super-fast continuous printing fed from large rolls of continuously made paper.

Making paper in rolls, rotary presses, the Linotype, and the largely forgotten flong/stereotype process together allowed periodicals to expand in size (number of pages) and volume (number of copies per volume). Newspapers benefitted most,

As I pursue all artifacts I’ll need to assemble in quantity for tiny type museums, I’m also gathering unique ones that I can document and use to better understand through first-hand experience and research how they fit into printing history.

In the previous post, I posted pictures of flong sheets I’d acquired for the museums. These paper molds were made from metal, wood, and etchings, and then themselves would be cast into metal for printing.

But sometimes people did odder things, like insulate the side of a house with them or use them to bind a book. While I haven’t been able to find out more about that house, I did purchase an affordable copy of the 1904 book, Fairy Tales Up To Now by Wallace Irwin. To my knowledge, it’s unique in having a binding made of dry flong, which had only been introduced

Every Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule will have a piece of flong, a kind of letterpress-era mimeograph transfer sheet, only for metal. I haven’t written about flong comprehensively yet, but I’m preparing to, both as a freestanding article and as part of Six Centuries of Type & Printing, the book I’m writing that will be part of the museum project and available separately.

In brief, flong was a paper mold. Perfected in France in the late 1700s and then used increasingly extensively through the 19th century, flong allowed printers to set a portion of page of type and engravings, and press (or beat) a kind of paste-infused paper into the surface. Flong originally was a form of papier-mâché. When dried, the flong could be lifted off and then be used as a mold to create a metal printing plate, known as a stereotype (or, in France,