FOTOTYPE
[NOT DONE] It's entirely an accident that I have anything at all on FOTOTYPE. I was given some FOTOTYPE-ette booklets and a FOTOTYPE stick. I gave these, in turn, to a friend who who has a much deeper interest in the phototypesetting era. [First, though, I photographed and scanned them. Here are some of these photographs and scans.] [Also, see 1950 Inland Printer use of Varityper, "phototype," and Graphotype to produce Chicago newspapers in emergency conditions (reprinted here in Graphotype Notebooks).] [Also, see ad, Graphic Arts Monthly Vol. 25, No. 9 (Sept., 1953): 124.]
The Intertype Fotosetter
This is a fascinating example of a transitional technology: the composing apparatus of a standard Intertype with the casting apparatus replaced by a photographic unit. The matrices were standard Intertype matrices in form, with a photographic image of the type inset into them.
Monotype Monophoto
I don't really have anything on this. It is, however, mentioned in CircuitousRoot Typefoundry and Press -> Composing Typecasters -> General Monotype Literature -> The Monotype[:] How it Works [etc.] .
Varityper Headliner Model 840
[NOT DONE] The Varityper as more commonly known was a proportionally spacing typewriter. The Varityper "Headliner Model 840" was different - it was a non-keyboard based hand-operated phototypesetting machine intended, as its name suggests, for generating short headlines. By 1961, The Varityper Corp. was a subsidiary of the Addressograph-Multigraph Corp. Here are the Operating Instructions for this model. Also a Varityper type disk and instructions.
I'm not really doing anything with phototypesetting. Someone should; it's likely to become (or perhaps already is) a brief technological interlude not sufficiently documented. I have, randomly, run into a few phototypesetting-related items that ought to be documented/reprinted, however; this Notebook collects some of them.
As a technology, phototypesetting took longer to arrive than one might have thought. My guess as to why is that it was harder to do layout and, especially, editing. Metal type survived longer than it might have because it was easy to change. It wasn't until the advent of digital systems driving phototypesetting machines that phototypesetting became easy to edit - and of course it was digital that killed both phototypesetting and metal type.
As a historical technology, phototypesetting is apt to disappear for several reasons. First, it is not really maintainable. It depends on other technologies which themselves require large capital investments but which are disappearing (film, and its chemistry). It also coexisted with early electronic technology, and electronics are notoriously difficult to maintain over even short periods of time. By way of contrast, hot metal machinery can be maintained by machine shop technologies which have been established since about 1800 and which continue today as the basis for technical culture.
Moreover, there is nothing that can be achieved with phototypesetting that cannot be achieved with digital typesetting. (This is not true of metal type and letterpress printing.)
More importantly, though, phototypesetting only existed for a single generation (vs. the nine decades of hot metal from 1890 to 1980), and didn't, it seems to me, capture the heart of that generation the way that hot metal became a way of life.
None of this means that phototypesetting was unimportant, of course - just that it will be lost.
To a metal type enthusiast such as myself it is interesting because it was woven into the last years of commercial metal type. Advertising typography shops, in particular, would often work simultaneously in hot metal type, handset metal type, phototypeset type, and wood type. The position of phototypesetting also led to some interesting transitional technologies, some of which may now seem quaint, but others of which were important for the (metal) typefounding industry.
On the (apparently) quaint side, there is the Intertype Fotosetter, a machine which might be the textbook example of a transitional technology.
On the industrially significant side, the ability to make easy changes to metal type and the existence in metal type of faces not available in phototypeset type led to interesting combinations. These were typically uses of previous relief type technologies to "feed into" the same photographic platemaking technologies for offset printing that phototypesetting also fed into.
The Ludlow "Brighttype" system, for example, used hot metal type for composition but then did not print it but instead photographed it, producing as output a photographic image for offset printing just as phototypesetting would. Similarly, both typefoundries and advertising typographers would furnish "Reproduction Proofs" of metal (or wood) type set and printed, carefully, just once. The Reproduction Proof, then, would be photographed and used in the same "workflow" (a more modern term) as phototypesetting. (As an aside, the need for "super precision" proof presses for Reproduction Proofs led to the Vandercook SP series, and these in turn have been repurposed as production presses by the now much smaller art letterpress printing community.)
Several Phototypesetting systems were driven by Teletypesetter-compatible 6-Level tape. Here, then, are pointers to places where I discuss Teletype and Teletypesetter equipment:
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