On a December day in 1885, Bill Barnes, a journeyman from the
New York World, and Joe McCann, representing the New York Herald,
faced off in a match race of Swifts, compositors who set type by
hand, individually, letter by letter, with incredible accuracy and
speed. McCann got off to a slow start, but at the end of the
four-hour race, he joined shopfloor legends Clinton "The Kid"
DeJarnatt and the "Velocipede" George Arensberg as a working-class
hero. It was not the last race of its kind between Swifts, but
already looming were changes both social and technological that
would cause these gifted tramp printers to disappear.
In "The Swifts, "Walker Rumble, himself a printer and printing
historian, follows the trail of these colorful compositors who
became famous by winning typesetting races. Tellingly, at the same
time that the most celebrated contests were taking place,
technological and cultural forces were threatening the Swifts' way
of life. First women printers vied for shopfloor legitimacy; then,
in the mid-1880s, typesetting machines such as Mergenthaler's
Linotype arrived, replacing the artisans forever.
With the spread of digital technologies at the beginning of the
twenty-first century, we are experiencing a revolution in printing
matched only by two previous events: Gutenberg's fifteenth-century
invention of movable type and the advent of typesetting machines
that replaced the Swifts. Joining narrative historians of
technology such as Robert Darnton, Henry Petroski, Dava Sobel, and
Ross King, Rumble tells a fascinating story that will entertain
aficionados of print culture while explaining the larger cultural
dislocations wrought by technological change.
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