The Mechanization of Typesetting

If you owned a print shop in the middle of the nineteenth century, especially a newspaper, your bottle-neck problem was not printing — the steam-powered rotary press had been introduced in 1843 — your problem was getting the type set to fill the pages. Up till then printing had mostly been done in small print shops: the factory system was still a relatively recent introduction, and typesetting was carried out by hand, just as it had been in Gutenberg’s day.
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