While there still was type to set, there were those who did it swiftly

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THE SWIFTS: PRINTERS IN THE AGE OF TYPESETTING RACES

By Walker Rumble

University of Virginia Press, $30, 233 pages

REVIEWED BY LYN NOFZIGER

A few years after Tom Edison invented the electric light and a few years before Henry Ford's Model T ran the buggy whip manufacturers out of

business a man named Ottmar Merganthaler invented a type-setting machine that ended centuries of setting type by hand.

Now another man, Walker Rumble, has written a nostalgic book about printers and the printers trade in the post-Civil War l800s, before Merganthaler's Linotype machine changed the industry forever.

Sounds pretty dull, doesn't it? Surprisingly it isn't. And it isn't because it's not just a book about printers, it's a book about a special breed of printer, the swift. And it's also about the rise of the International Typographers Union, about the place of women in the trade and most of all about the long defunct sport of typesetting racing.