This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

The Public Domain Review is one of those places where you can find the most intriguing things from a by-gone era. By the nature of copyright law, the stuff they publish is on a rolling delay of 50 - 100 years.

Today’s find is a new essay on typesetting races - Twilight of the Velocipide. Before the total mechanisation of printing shops, one had to layout the type for the machine by hand. This is exactly what it sounds like - you’d layout the characters line by line until the page was ready. Naturally, this was turned into a competition - first as an informal bit of fun in the composing rooms of print shops, and then in 1870 as a public entertainment.

It is not just a story of skill, but also of a fight for equality, and of dealing with technological change. The popularity of the typesetting races brought new interest from women interested in joining this industry. They would fight, best, and fight again to gain something approaching equality in the composing rooms of print shops.

The world of printing was also in flux - to quote the essay, “this was the age of Morse, Bell, and Edison”. The printers who had once been overseers of a vast domain of skills required were rapidly seeing that diminish. The hold out was the last bastion that the steam powered machines could not do: setting the type for the machines. In an echo of the rapid change we face in the 21st century, they too faced the dissolution of their professions. Typesetting races rose in popularity in 1870, and saw their inevitable end at the hands of the Linotype machine in 1886 (When the New York Tribune installed the first one in their printing rooms). The Linotype machine and the clones it inspired would go on to power almost 100 years of typesetting for newspapers around the world.