Putting Words on Paper

By Marie Wells Coutu

The words we conjure in our heads get translated through either our fingers or our voice to a computer, and automagically spurt out of an inkjet or laser printer.

I have no idea how letters get turned into a number code, sent over a cable or through the air, then back to letters printed on paper. I’m dating myself, but when I started my career, the IBM Selectric typewriter was a fabulous invention, especially its ability to backspace and delete words, then retype over them.

As a former journalist and now author,

I’m attached to this antique letterpress

type case that hangs in my home.

(Author photo)

As a college journalism major, I was required to take a course on the foundations of printing. We got hands-on experience—from building a box camera to setting type by hand to operating a flatbed platen printing press. And one summer, I worked at a small weekly newspaper where the advertisements were still produced on a Linotype.

So when I visit a museum today and see a form of handset type or a platen press or a Linotype machine, I can tell my husband, “I’ve used that.”

If you didn’t have those opportunities, you may be interested to learn how words historically went from the mind of the author to the printed page, and some terms from the early days that continue in use, but with slightly different meanings.

Fast-forward past the Chinese man who gets credit for inventing paper and the many civilizations that used woodcuts to print text and images on papyrus and cloth. Zoom into 1440, when Johannes Gutenberg developed the first printing press using metal movable type. One of the first publications he produced was the Bible. His invention eventually led to making the scriptures available to the common man.

This hand-operated platen press is like the one I operated to print party invitations to fulfill a requirement for my college class.

Gutenberg’s press was built of wood, and it wasn’t until 1800 that an Englishman built a printing press with a metal frame, making it lighter, more durable, and capable of handling larger sheets of paper. These early presses were flatbeds, meaning paper was pressed against the type one sheet at a time.

About the mid-1800s, an American printer developed a rotary press, speeding up the process by mounting the type on a revolving cylinder and printing on a continuous roll of paper.

Initially, type was created with individual letters and kept in a wooden tray, called a case. Each case contained multiple pieces of all characters that might be needed in a particular font and size. Including every lower case and capital letter, number, and various symbols resulted in 89 or more compartments in each case. The cases, still found occasionally in antique stores, were essentially shallow drawers that fit into a cabinet containing several fonts in various sizes.

If you’re familiar with designing publications, you are aware of the need for spacing between lines of text. Traditionally, this spacing was called leading, because a slim bar of lead, the soft metal used to make type, was inserted between lines. Different thicknesses could be used to provide the desired amount of space.

Mergenthaler’s second Linotype machine (photo from Library of Congress collection)

Whether set by hand or by Linotype, the slugs of type would be lined up in a form. Multiple forms were then assembled in a galley, creating a full page or multiple pages for printing. A galley would be used to print a single copy, or proof, to be used to check for errors. Even today when composition is done by computer, proofs sent to authors to review and approve before printing are sometimes called galleys.

The next major step forward came with the introduction of the offset printing press for paper in 1903. This process transfers the image from a metal plate onto a rubber cylinder, which then imprints the text or photos onto paper. Offset printing had been in use for printing on metal and other substances, but its use on paper allowed for large-scale printing of newspapers and magazines.

Around 1970, the transition began from the hot metal type produced by a Linotype machine to “cold type” based on photographic processes. Chunks of text would be printed and “pasted up” into the final page design. This led to a rapid adoption of offset printing, because the paste-up could be photographed and easily etched into a thin metal plate for use on rollers. The combination of cold type set by computers and huge web, offset presses is still used by most newspapers and larger book publishers today.

Beginning in 1985, desktop printing and digital presses changed the production of newspapers, magazines, and books, and the tools of hand typesetting and Linotypes are now relics found primarily in antique stores and museums. However, many of the terms used by the earliest printers have been adapted to current technology.

Hand setting type letter-by-letter forced

me to learn to read upside-down and backwards.

How many of the words in this form can you read?

Hint: do not try to make a cohesive paragraph.

(Author photo taken at the Hannibal, Missouri, History Museum)

Sources/For more information:

The history of printing | The evolution of print from Gutenberg to now
Printing Museums
Newspaper Production | HowStuffWorks
Printing press | Invention, Definition, History, Gutenberg, & Facts | Britannica
Compositor's Tools - Letterpress Commons
Printer's jargon: hot type
The Museum of Printing, Haverhill, Massachusetts

Multi-award-winning author Marie Wells Coutu finds beauty in surprising places, like undiscovered treasures, old houses, and gnarly trees. All three books in her Mended Vessels series, contemporary stories based on the lives of biblical women, have won awards in multiple contests.

She is currently working on historical romances set in her native western Kentucky in the 1930s and 1940s. Her historical short story, “All That Glistens,” won honorable mention in the 2023 Saturday Evening Post Great American Fiction Contest. In her newsletter, she shares about her writing, historical tidbits, recommended books, and sometimes recipes.

Another historical short story tells of a cafe waitress who waits for the love of her life to come back to her after the war. “A Song for Annie,” is available free when you sign up for Marie's newsletter here.

Newspapers

Extra! Extra! Read All About It!

My grandfather worked as a typesetter for a Dallas newspaper for many years. Because of my interest in writing and taking journalism in high school and college, we shared time talking about newspapers and how they were published. One of his first jobs as a young boy was delivering newspapers in Victoria, Texas where his father was a doctor. In writing a novel loosely based on his life, I did research about newspapers which I found to be interesting.

 Even though daily newspapers are dwindling today, they were once the main source of news for those who were literate and could afford the price. Printing in colonial America was expensive with small circulations. No editor could afford to put more than one or two issues a week. Because of the expense of printing and distributing the paper, many of the common folks in town were excluded. Even though Americans tended to be literate, they simply didn’t have the money to buy newspapers. Thus, the circulation remained small.

One of the early "newspaper" sheets circa 1690.

In spite of the expense, early newspapers had a profound influence on the early years of our federal government. Articles, essays, and editorials were in abundance and the organs for political faction. Many politicians became connected to specific newspapers.

Noah Webster, before publishing the first American dictionary, started the first daily newspaper in 1783 in New York City named the American Minerva. Essentially, it was an organ of the Federalist Party. Although in operation for only a few years, it influenced and inspired the establishment of later newspapers.

Eight years later, Alexander Hamilton founded the Post, and it also had some political affiliation. At the time, the newspaper became the means for politicians to communicate with their constituents. The papers carried accounts of newsworthy events as well as letters from the people who voiced their opinions concerning political matters.

John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and Andrew Jackson all had political campaigns which played out on the pages of newspapers. This type of political action continued well into the 1820’s.

As newspapers began a transformation in the 1830’s, they turned to publishing news of current events, local happenings, and non-partisan editorials and essays. The price also went down which allowed for the working class and even new immigrants to buy them. Now everyone could afford the paper and reading the news every morning became a routine in many households across the country.

Some of the great names in the industry as it grew included Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune and James Gordon Bennett, pictured above, of the New York Herald. They both possessed strong personalities and controversial opinions as expressed in their respective newspapers.

Another editor, William Cullen Bryant, edited the New York Evening Post even though people knew him better as a poet. The New York Times began publishing in 1851 with Henry J. Raymond at the helm. Raymond worked under Greeley, and the newspaper was considered an upstart without any strong political connection.

Newspaper Press Circa 1865

As the nation grew, underwent wars, and invented new technologies, the newspapers grew as well. With the invention of the linotype by Ottmar Mergenthaler, the papers could publish larger editions with more pages and more news of interest to more people such as news about sporting events.

In the late 1880s Joseph Pulitzer, a successful publisher from St. Louis, bought a paper in New York City. Pulitzer transformed the business of print news by focusing on events that would appeal to common people. He focused on crime stories and other sensational subjects in New York World. The vivid headlines, produced by a staff of specialized editors, pulled in readers.

Pulitzer met with great success in New York, but in the mid 1890’s, a competitor came into the picture. William Randolph Hearst, already the publisher of a San Francisco newspaper, moved to New York City and purchased the New York Journal.

From the competition between the two men came a circulation war, the likes of which had not been seen before. There had been competitive publishers before, of course, but nothing like this. The sensationalism of the competition became known as Yellow Journalism.

In the 19^th and early to late 20^th Century, our nation witnessed a rise in newspaper circulation. Newspapers were delivered to the home, sold at newsstands or hawked by newsboys on city streets. 

Now, in the 21^st century, we see its decline. People now depend on electronic media to give them up-to-date news about events around the world. With the news flashes available on cell phones and computers, even the news on TV may seem old.

Most Americans today are in a rush for everything, and getting the news as soon as it happens is more appealing than reading through various sections in a daily newspaper. With rising costs and smaller editions, the newspapers of today are becoming less and less a necessity of our daily lives.

How much of a part does a newspaper play in your daily life? Do you prefer a printed version or electronic?

It's getting to be rodeo time here in Houston, and my newest release features a barrel-racing heroine. 

Kylee is the youngest of the Danner clan and drops out of college to barrel race full-time and spend more time with her rodeo sweetheart, Jesse Martin. Connor Morris, known as Jesse Martin on the rodeo circuit, is in love with Kylee, but he is keeping his true identity from her for now. When her brothers discover Jesse Martin is an ex-con on parole, they jump in and decide Kylee must break off the relationship. Kylee can’t believe Jesse is what they say, but when he doesn’t show up at the rodeo where they’re both competing, she grows suspicious. When the truth of his identity as Connor Morris is revealed in a news item on television, it is even more shocking to Kylee. His retired movie queen mother has had a heart attack and is at a hospital in Denver. He is shown there with a woman claiming to be his fiancée, and she calls him Connor Morris, son of Hal Morris, who was running for U.S. Senator from Colorado. Jesse must now not only gain back Kylee’s love and trust, he must also convince her father and brothers that he loves Kylee and the TV story was a big mix-up. 

Martha Rogers is a multi-published author and writes a weekly devotional for ACFW. Martha and her husband Rex live in Houston, Texas where they are active members of First Baptist Church. They are the parents of three sons and grandparents to eleven grandchildren and great-grandparents to four, soon to be five. Martha is a retired teacher with twenty-eight years teaching Home Economics and English at the secondary level and eight years at the college level supervising student teachers and teaching freshman English. She is the Director of the Texas Christian Writers Conference held in Houston in August each year, a member of ACFW, ACFW WOTS chapter in Houston, and a member of the writers’ group, Inspirational Writers Alive.

Find Martha at:  www.marthawrogers.com, Twitter:  @martharogers2                Facebook: Martha Rogers Author