by Gertrude Burford Rawlings
New York D.Appleton and Company 1901
when a large number of copies is required or frequent editions are expected, stereotype or electrotype
plates are made. By this means the types are released for further use and other advantages obtained.
Stereotype plates are cakes of white metal carrying merely the face of the types, and were formerly made
by taking from the types a mould of plaster of Paris. They are now formed by beating or pressing a
prepared pulp of paper-mâché into the face of the lettering. The mould thus obtained is dried and
hardened by heat then molten metal is run into it of requisite thickness. This plate after being properly
dressed is fitted on a block equal in height to the type stem, and takes the place in the frame or chase
that would have been occupied by the types.
The process of stereotyping is fairly quick and economical, but electrotypes are better suited for higher
class work and are much more durable. In this process an impression is taken from the type on a surface
of wax heated to the necessary degree of plasticity. When the wax mould has cooled and hardened it is
placed in a galvanic current, where a thin coat of copper is deposited on its face. This coat is then
detached from the mould and backed with white metal to give it the requisite body and stiffness and the
electrotype is now, like the stereotype, a metal plate which can be fixed on a block and secured in a frame
ready for the printing machine.
It is outside the scope of this work to describe minutely the marvelous machinery used in printing. It is
interesting to know that the first printers had no machine but a screw hand press by which they
laboriously worked off their books page by page, and that even so late as the middle of the nineteenth
century all books with scarcely an exception were printed at hand presses which enabled two men to
throw off about two hundred and fifty copies of a comparatively small-sized sheet in the hour. Now the
machines commonly in use, attended by only a man and a lad, throw off from a thousand to fifteen
hundred copies in an hour of a sheet four or even eight times the size.
Books are almost universally printed on what is called the flat-bed machine, so-called because the types
or plates are placed on an iron table which with them travels to and fro under a series of revolving rollers
constantly being fed with a supply of ink which they transfer to the types or plates. Immediately these
get beyond the inking rollers they pass under a revolving cylinder with a set of grippers attached, which
open and shut with each revolution.
These grippers receive the sheet of paper and carry it round with the cylinder. When it comes in contact
with the types or plates traveling underneath, the impression or print is made. Some machines complete
the printing of the sheet on both sides at one operation. In others the sheet is reversed and is printed
on the other side by passing through a second time. In either case the sheet forms only a section of a
book; the complete volume is made up of a number of these sections, folded and collated in proper order
in the binding. There they are sewn together and fixed in the case or cover.
For illustrated books the pictures were formerly produced by engraving on wood, but they are now chiefly
photographed from the artist's drawing on a light sensitive film spread on a metal plate, and etched in by
acids. In whatever way produced, when printed with the text they are always relief blocks which are
placed in proper position in the chase alongside the types or plates. Colored illustrations are produced by
successive printings. Special illustrations are frequently produced separately by other processes and
inserted in the volume by the binder.
Machines of a different construction, such as the rotary press, and capable of a very much higher rate of
production, are in use for printing newspapers and periodicals with a large circulation, but these do not
properly come into consideration when telling how a modern book is made.