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  1. I finished the mixtape I was going to send to you some time ago, but alas your address isn’t posted on TypePals. Should you’d like the tape, send me your address (It’s in TypePals) and I’ll dispatch it to you posthaste — along with another letter from California.

      1. Thanks. Looking forward to it.

  2. Hi, Ted:
    The picture of the linotype machine reminded me of being invited to visit the pressroom of the Corwith,IA ‘Herald’ back in 1987. The proprietor of this small town newspaper had what he called a “hot lead” machine with a typewriter keyboard. He showed me how it generated a line of type. He and his wife wrote and published the newspaper themselves. He was perhaps the last in Iowa to create the paper this way. By the way, the pressroom of the Corwith Herald was the basement of the guys house.
    By the way, I’m back to catching up to the blogs I’ve missed. Thanks for the post.
    Jeremy

    1. Ahh, yeah – I’ve never seen a Linotype working except in film, but I worked as an offset printer in the 80’s/90’s, (that’s a photolithographic rather than a hot lead process) but I remember going to an *old* print shop that was going out of business and selling equipment one time, and they were pushing Linotypes out of a hole cut in the 2nd-story wall, sending them crashing into the lot below. They were just going to sell them as scrap metal because nobody wanted them then.

      Towards the end, most print shops that had letterpresses regulated them to just doing stuff like embossing, die cutting & scoring. We had one, an old Chandler & Price, at the shop and in 1997 I made a recording of someone running the machine for 45 minutes. I just made a Tape Pals cassette with that recording on it. Very ASMR. :D

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