Let me be controversial. This is a very pleasent film to watch. The process of printing using metal letters is interesting.
But, it then starts down the "We must never let old techniques die" road. And I'm not convinced.
There are good reasons that no one does this commerically any more. For a start, the process takes a huge amount of time, newspapers used to employ vast numbers of people to set out thier pages. When your USP is selling current news, that's an overhead you don't need as the more up-to-date you want to be, the more people are required to process the printing bits.
Bang on about how lovely the print is all you like, it changes nothing. If you want to publish, you go digital nowadays, because most people don't care about the impressed marks. They want to read the text.
Maybe it's jut me being grumpy, but the UK is full of people obsessed by the idea that the past was always wonderful, and everything modern is bad. Presumably they don't have any of those pesky anesthetics in hospital, or at the dentist. Indeed, they demand that the art of boring holes in people's heads is kept alive, because it is "traditional".
I recently had a discussion with someone on a forum along these lines. He claimed everything was better in 1963. Everything. Apparenlty he is quite the student of history, or so he claimed. Handily, he could ignore the increase in life expectancy of 10 years, and that part of the reason the NHS was "functioning" back then (apprently) was that an awful lot of illness equalled death back then. Still, it was better.
Going back to the film, why is a university paying for someone to do this full time? Real type is a nice hobby, but of little more than passing interest to students, who won't be making use of it when they graduate, and those who will, can go and learn the stuff from (horror) books...
3 comments:
I too was surprised to see that a UK university is supporting this — but what other organisation would? Perhaps it is used to show students how things used to be done, and to understand some of the nuances of proper type-setting? I find it is useful to see how things have progressed.
But sometimes the old ways are discarded for the new without properly understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the old and new. (Probably all the time!) For example, lime as a building material up to around 1920, replaced by Portland cement. Older buildings originally constructed with lime products often suffer when the lime is replaced with cement during repairs…
Speaking of obsolescent technology, I could mention steam locomotives, but I won’t. Oops!
I learnt my typesetting skills back in the 70s by which time the manual selection of individual metal or wood letters had been replaced by the Linotype machine which individually cast each letter and placed it into position when a relevant key was pressed. In subsequent years I progressed through early phototypesetting, IBM (a modern but primitive system), better photo setting and eventually to computer setting. Looking back on it, I think that modern computer setting is not as flexible and does not produce such attractive results. Computer setting is undeniably faster and more efficient though.
I think that my aesthetic taste has been informed and polished through my knowledge of the earlier systems.
I can see the pleasure in the slow process of typesetting, but it can't be as flexible as the computer version. Happy to agree that there is an aesthetic appeal though.
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