July Metal Type News

I had no difficulty understanding the Scot in the story of the printing shop, although I have a hearing problem and do not follow many voices on the audio part of Internet; my mother’s parents came from Scotland.
A.

re the description of the Italian Linotype machine.

Some of the ideas seem very good, but it is a case of choosing between a basic machine and a deluxe version. [Better seatbelts are in Australian cars now, and several other safety measures, which are not in the same model as sold in some third-world countries.]

At high school, the language master tried to teach me the rudiments of Latin, and spent non-productive time pointing out my incompetence. At the weekly newspaper where I worked for a year, we ran a trial newspaper [of 4 pages?] in the Italian language as a service to the many Italians in the area, but found it was outside our ability to handle some of the process. [We produced two other weeklies, smaller than the paper which was our main product, for other towns.]

When, at the daily to which I returned, we acquired a Nebitype [headline caster, something like a Ludlow], I translated a book which came with it, found that the thermostat for the pot worked in a manner which I had not been aware of, and never came across anywhere else; it was the only thermostat I have ever seen or heard of which had a kind of motor driving the closing and opening of the contact(s) which controlled the electric current for the pot heater.

In the translation above, I am puzzled by the word < salt > although it is easy to understand what we would call the part of the machine which is translated as store or warehouse for the matrices. A couple of other words also puzzle me, but I do not have my Italian/English/Italian dictionary in my hand. Fortunately the order of construction of sentences is fairly easily untangled, especially for those who tried to read Latin. Teacher asked what was one of the great accomplishments of the ancient Romans? Schoolboy answered: Speaking Latin.

Alan.