Eye Magazine

Neil Winter operates the Monotype caster, manufactured in the late 1960s, at John Randle’s Whittington Press near Cheltenham in the UK. In the foreground an ingot hangs from the chain that lowers it into the caster’s melting pot.
Top: A matrix case for 8-point Bodoni. Each case has a fifteen by fifteen grid which holds up to 225 brass matrices for the characters to be cast. The case is inserted into the caster face down, and each piece of type is cast from a molten alloy.

Winter sets the type, reading from a marked-up manuscript.

The orange keys at the top of the QWERTY keyboard are used to set the justification at the end of each line. Behind the ‘button banks’ of the keyboard is a set of ‘key-bars’ corresponding to the typeface to be cast. Whittington’s keyboard dates from the mid-1960s.

Each keystroke is encoded as perforations in a four-inch wide paper spool.

Justification Drum, chosen according to the font’s width, and Justification Scale, set to the measure required. This enables the typesetter to calculate and key the justification settings at the end of each line. The computations are purely mechanical, like a slide rule. Winter says: ‘The technology for those drums is exactly what the Russians used when they went into space.’

Winter guides the machine as it casts type. ‘The keyboard is more science than art whereas casting is more art than science – it’s as reliable as the operator.’

A slowly descending ingot, suspended over the melting pot, maintains the supply of hot metal. Neil Winter: ‘You’ve got to listen to the caster as you run it, to keep an eye on it. You’ve got the heat of the pot, the speed of the machine and the flow of the water. You have to balance all of those to make sure that it casts correctly. You have to bring it up just enough so that it solidifies on the outside but it’s still molten in the middle, so it’s quite a delicate balancing act.’

The perforations encode a series of coordinates that controls the caster and matrix mechanism, like the perforated paper spool in a player piano.

Winter replaces some of the characters with special type characters (such as accented type or particular ligatures) not available in the matrix.

A line of freshly cast single types and spaces emerges to join the galley.

Winter makes final adjustments to the completed galley of freshly cast type at Whittington Press.
‘I’m doing three jobs at once. Ultimately I’m the keyboard operator, caster and compositor,’ says Winter.

Winter: ‘Using the Monotype is more hands on, and much more of a craft than using a computer to set type.
‘There is a rigour to hot metal. There are certain things that you can and can’t do, and it’s what you can’t do that defines it.’