Ludlow Slugs

Just had a friend send me something that made me smile. It was a post by another (long lost) friend who showed something I had made for him 25 years ago

After I finished high school I completed another year at a vocational high school, which offered a “Graphic Communications” course. Great course, that taught the whole process start to finish. Typesetting, layout, paste-up, stripping, platemaking, running a press, bindery. Understanding the procedure in its entirety makes you much better in the long run than merely understanding only one aspect of it. Another thing they taught was setting type the old fashioned way. Moveable lead type that was put in a composing stick and then locked up in a galley. (This shows the process very nicely.) While some might argue that this is archaic and a useless skill to teach as it won’t ever really be used, I still think it was great they showed us this if for no other reason than to gain an appreciation for the history of printing. Know where you were to know where you’re going. While I found this historical interlude fascinating and edifying, what made the course a real winner was that they had Apple Macintoshes, long before even the local community college did. A community college you paid a lot of money to, compared to a free secondary school. They were very early Macs – one floppy disc held the program disc and another floppy disc served as your storage disc. But that exposure to them got me jobs when I finished. Companies were getting them new fangled fancy computational devices and no one could use them. Knowing what to do with them got my foot in the door and gave me a leg up on people coming out of a college course that hadn’t given any of its students any exposure to computers and wouldn’t for another year or two. One of those lucky breaks, right time, right place things.

Anyway, they had another machine there called a Ludlow, or the Ludlow Typograph as it is more correctly known. What I remember of it (and mind you, this is going back a quarter century now) was that there was a table with a slot in it for a stick of type that you had composited. The type was different because it was hollow type rather than raised type. The sizes available were large display sizes, 18 to 72 point. Underneath the table was a pot of molten lead and that was pushed up into the matrix of type. A completed slug of type was then removed, and the type was put back in the drawers for another use. When the job was printed, the lead slug could be thrown back in the pot to be remelted. I can’t remember exactly, but if you didn’t make sure to put some sort of a stopper or something like that in before you injected the molten lead, some of it would squirt out the end, causing potential injury.

As cool as that machine was, that potential for burn injuries from molten lead, and the paranoia about lead fumes and such, meant that the Ludlow didn’t last much beyond the year I was there. (Some of the students weren’t exactly the keener I was. Some of them were clearly there because they couldn’t get into the auto body program. Concerns for safety and paying attention weren’t high on their list of priorities.) Neat piece of technology that I’m glad I got to experience.

The ability to set those slugs of type meant that I did up a bunch of names and such, friends band names, etc. One I did was for my pal Len’s radio show on CHRW, called the London Underground. You can check out his post here that shows the lead slug I did for him.