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

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.

If you never heard of typesetting racing you are not alone. Neither has anyone else who is not interested in the esoteric history of printing or who hasn’t read Mr. Rumble’s “The Swifts.”

Typesetting racing came on the scene after the Civil War, hung around for 20 or so years and disappeared into the musty annals of sports history coincidental with the advent of Mr. Merganthaler’s Linotype. But for a little period it drew crowds of thousands and warranted serious newspaper coverage. Helping speed its demise was the belated discovery that in this male-dominated, woman-belittling sport women, when given a chance, were faster than men. The men couldn’t have that so, abetted by the arrival of the Linotype, they merely abandoned the sport.

Mr. Rumble’s book takes its title from the nickname given the printing industry’s fastest hand typesetters before the invention of the Linotype. The fact that it would become obsolete in little more than 75 years is a story that does not concern “The Swifts.” Although Mr. Rumble devotes a chapter to it and its effect on the industry he is concerned only briefly in an Afterward with its disappearance.

The last time I saw a working Linotype was in 1976 at the Manchester, N.H., Union Leader which had not yet completely switched to offset printing. This was just 90 years after Whitelaw Reid installed the first Linotypes at the New York Herald Tribune. In those days, by the way, a composing room smelled of men, sweat and hot metal. In contrast, the last composing room I was in had the acidy smell of a photographer’s dark room. Progress brings all sorts of changes, even changes in smell.

The Linotype is a tremendously complicated piece of machinery and at one time there was a story told in composing rooms, very likely apocryphal, that inventing it had driven its inventor mad. Regardless, Mr. Rumble takes care to note the tremendous impact it made on the printing industry. He writes: “Between l886 and l899 hot metal Linotypes rearranged a world of printing.”

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