Linotype

Went to an open day in the National Print Museum in Beggars Bush last weekend where they demonstrated various old printing presses & printing techniques.

I got them to do the letters of Tinderbox on the Linotype hot metal press, which was really interesting to watch all the intricate workings of it and amazingly fast as it takes a cast of a row of individual letters and injects molten metal into it to form the line of type, all in about 20 seconds!

Here's some photos of it that I took for a new banner for the Tinderbox blog. I was using a very tight macro lense to get a shallow depth of field as the letters are only about 4mm high.