1911 Machinist Hand Book
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This book was obtained from a 1920 era. type shop located on Walnut Street in Milwaukee, Wi.
The owner became ill in 1961. His shop was auctioned by Col. Gronik — 2 Linotypes, 3 presses, 1 broach, 1 Monotype strip caster, 2 ton re-melt furnace, 1 Flat Casting box, 2 metal saws, 1 round corner paper cutter, 1 folder, paper cutter plus real stone makeup tables.

The Col. gave me the Linotype 1 line specimen book (Large Red Bound Book with 100’s of type faces) which I still have. Type face names you’ll never hear of again.

Along with the above auction items were 150+ fonts of Linotype Matrixes stored on 8x10 galley trays. (No doubt purchased many years before for $.08 to $.18 cents per matrix.

The Auctioneer, Col. Gronik & Company, had no idea what they were dealing with and showed up at the Milwaukee Vocational School, 1019 N. Sixth St., Milwaukee, WI. Linotype Dept. seeking help.

Emery Schnieder and myself, both students in the Linotype Machinist class, got the project of organizing the shop for auction which included casting the matrices of all fonts, a most time consuming job. We would run the lower case, some upper case, all figures, points, etc. into a magazine and cast them on a 30 pica slug.

At the spaceband transfer position we would stop the machine, lift the second elevator bar that contained the matrices, remove them and place them back onto the type galley.

Galley proofs of the cast slugs were pulled and identified with font size, triangle number and name of font.

This way the buyers could immediately see if or how badly the matrices were hairlined. It saved the day for the Col. No questions about how many lower case “e’s” in the font or is the font hairlined?


Project took the two of us most of three weeks.

We were amazed at the amount of $$’s the Col. paid us.

We would have done it for 1/3 the price.
We learned a lot about type shops that was not part of the school’s curriculum.