Yellow Pages
When the Skagit Valley Herald moved to a new location near the Second Street Viaduct in 1966, it left behind a piece of equipment that had once revolutionized newspaper production.
With that move, the company acquired offset presses, and the Linotype machines were left behind and eventually scrapped. The days of the letterpress and lead type were over. Offset printing, utilizing a photograph plate-making process, would render the old sturdy and reliable Linotypes obsolete.
It may not have looked it, but it was a device that had been the mainstay of newspaper composing rooms for more than 8 decades. The Linotype, a bulky machine with about 5,000 moving parts, was operated by a keyboard similar to that of a typewriter.
For many journalists who began their newspaper careers in the period before the 1960s, the Linotype was more than a clanking relic. It was the soul of the production process. It was a magical device that could convert one journalist’s scribblings into a form that, after the presses rolled, could be distributed to thousands of readers.
Innovation
Although there were several efforts late in the 19th century to produce a typesetting machine, it was Ottmar Mergenthaler, a German immigrant to the United States, who built the first one that worked really well.
Mergenthaler’s memories of his stepmother’s Christmas cookie molds are said to have helped his conceptual approach to creating his typesetting machine.
He figured if you could mold cookies, why not type for books and newspapers? It sounds simple, but then that was the beauty of it. His molds of brass produced a recessed image of a letter and, in line with other letters, would produce a single column width of lead type.
Once the columns of type were set, the printer would assemble them on a flat rectangular surface called the “stone” or “turtle” and tighten a page-sized device called the “chase.” The next step was to lay a mat over the type, roll it under pressure and send the mat for final processing to cast a half cylinder for the presses.
In 1892, Mergenthaler introduced the Simplex Linotype Model 1, a much improved version that would be the prototype for more than 100,000 machines that were sold in decades to come. It was the sensation of the Chicago World’s Fair.
Thomas Edison, himself a peerless inventor, was so enthralled that he called Mergenthaler’s ingenious machine “the Eighth Wonder of the World.”
The Linotype enabled newspapers to set type four to five times faster than the handset process — one letter at a time — that had prevailed for centuries before. It also made it possible for newspapers to increase the number of pages that could be produced daily.
It was an idea that was a long time coming.
The printing trade had not advanced significantly since another German, Johannes Gutenberg, created movable type in the mid-15th century. There were incremental refinements over time, but the basic process of setting type by hand, one letter at a time, survived for about four centuries.
Still, Gutenberg’s invention ignited an explosion of learning in which the Renaissance would blossom. As more printed material became more widely available because of the Gutenberg press, knowledge became more accessible to the common folk.
Where information became more broadly available through books and newspapers, democracy tended to follow. Today, whatever the medium of transmission, be it on paper or disseminated by radio, television, Internet or Twitter, the message begins with the printed word.
The Linotype had an amazingly long run in the newspaper industry, about eight decades. There were some refinements, such as the punch tape system that automated the Linotype keyboard, further enhancing speed and productivity.
Offset press
But a change loomed that would finally render the reliable old machine obsolete — offset printing.
The old letterpress system relied upon pressure applied to a mat that captured impressions from the page of lead type and engraved photo plates.
Offset works because oil and water refuse to mix. An American named Ira Rubel stumbled across the key to the process in 1903. While operating his lithographic press, hand-feeding one page at a time, he failed to get one of the sheets of paper on the “stone” (the flat plate that transfers ink to the paper), and the image was transferred directly to the rubber roller that makes the impressions.
He then inserted another sheet and found that the ink that had transferred to the roller had made an impression on the opposite side of the paper, creating an impression on both sides of the paper.
Rubel was amazed to see that the image that had been transferred from the roller to the paper was much sharper than the one created by the pressure of the roller on the stone. The image had been “offset” to the roller and then to the paper.
The mistake led to improvements of the offset printing process and many refinements in the decades to come.
The offset press installed by the Skagit Valley Herald in its downtown building was produced by Goss, one of the country’s leading manufacturer of printing equipment.
That press, with later improvements, served the newspaper for the next 40 years.
The Linotype was replaced with a photoingraving process that could turn out newspaper pages with greater speed and clarity of image.
Computers further enhanced the process, sending digital images to the photo processing units, which produced copy that could be cut on light tables for the “paste up” of news pages.
Then came pagination, using computers that could assemble whole pages on a terminal screen and output them to the “prepress” operators who would produce the mats for installation to the cylinders of the printing press.
Today’s press
Skagit Publishing’s move to its new building on Anderson Road brought many changes, including a new, $4.5 million press that nearly doubled the capacity and speed of its old presses in the College Way building.
The publishing company’s production manager, Tom Blumenshine, was like a proud father on March 16 when the presses started to roll out its first edition of the Skagit Valley Herald.
The new DGM 440 press manufactured by Manugraph is more efficient than the roughly 35-year-old Goss Community press, which was intended to print only one color and had to be adapted to print the full spectrum. With the new press, full color can appear on more pages.
To adjust the color on the older press, pressmen turned keys that controlled the amount of ink, Blumenshine said. With the new press, a pressman stands at a computer that resembles a console from a Star Trek set and presses buttons to tell the press what to do.
Improvements to Skagit Publishing go beyond the press. Besides using more efficient and greener technology to prepare pages for printing, the equipment used to insert advertisers’ circulars into the newspaper after it comes off the press is new and has greater capacity and more efficiency, Blumenshine said.
The new equipment gives Skagit Publishing the ability to insert up to 16 advertising circulars at a time into each copy of the paper and process up to 25,000 copies of the newspaper per hour, Blumenshine said.
With the speed of the new press and inserting equipment, it’s possible on most days to print the entire daily newspaper in about 45 minutes, Blumenshine said. For products such as the Skagit Valley Herald Sunday edition, which has several sections, the newspaper may have to be printed in two runs.
The speed and efficiency means that Skagit Publishing will expand the capacity of its commercial printing. Later this year, the new press will begin printing the McClatchy-owned Bellingham Herald, a 22,000-circulation daily, and Blumenshine said Skagit Publishing will be looking for more print jobs.
“I hope that we have to go to a second shift,” he said.
Staff writer Marta Murvosh contributed to this report.
* This report is part of a special section celebrating 125 years of news coverage by the Skagit Valley Herald. To see others, click on the headlines below:
Newspapers have become a multiplatform business
Family’s newspaper lineage dates back to E.W. Scripps in 1878
Longtime carrier learned about dependability
Back in time, A look at some notable businesses of yesteryear
Company ‘lifer’ never planned to stay long
Readers share opinions of the newspaper, positive and otherwise
Newspapers provide link to past, present and future for local woman
