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Comment by fuckthemachine | Hacker News Reader

I did work experience when I was in highschool at an old-school printing press with 100yo german made printing machines and I got the opportunity to play with typesetting using real brass. It was pretty cool and massively time-consuming, I love the DIY nature of this I think it would be great for teaching school kids about traditional printing.

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When I played with a real printing press, I found the labor-intensive step of setting the type to be relaxing. Once you were proficient at locating the letters from the case, you almost didn't need to think. And no they weren't made of brass, but lead, and you weren't suppose to eat finger foods after typesetting.

You might like Farewell - 1978 https://vimeo.com/127605643

> A film created by Carl Schlesinger and David Loeb Weiss documenting the last day of hot metal typesetting at The New York Times. This film shows the entire newspaper production process from hot-metal typesetting to creating stereo moulds to high-speed press operation. At the end of the film, the new typesetting and photographic production process is shown in contrast to the old ways.

While typesetting is pretty time consuming (I guess?), it was still a massive improvement over copying things by hand; it set the stage for mass production, so setting was done once, but then they could make an infinite amount of copies of anything. Mostly bibles, but still.

Brass? Type has traditionally been made of lead.

You are probably thinking of hot metal typesetting (Linotype, etc). Before that sorts ("types") were made from all kinds of alloys, so "brass" does not sound wrong.

When I was a cold metal typesetter all our factory-bought fonts were lead. Brass was typically use as molds for hot (Linotype) machines.

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