Ink misting occurs on high-speed presses when the ink rollers, rotating too fast, spray out splashes of ink. Misting is more likely to occur when excessively long ink is used. PrintWiki tells us misting can also be called flying, spitting, spraying or throwing.
Here’s an example from a recent Times Literary Supplement. Of course one could imagine its having happened when someone dropped their screwdriver into the magenta ink fountain. Click on the photo if you’d like to read the review.
Kerry Mansfield’s book Expired looks at old library books. There are lots of photographic examples at The Guardian and an overlapping set at Hyperallergic.
Thanks Nathan for bringing this to my attention.
“Mr. William F. Hill one of the early employees of Mr White after his move from Hartford watch maker a superior workman and an ingenious mechanic, conceived a method of making copper type by what may be called ‘swedging’ or pressing by steel dies the face upon the body.” This convoluted sentence comes from History of Typefounding in the United States by David Bruce. Mr Bruce was not a writer: he was the inventor of the first effective typecasting machine in America.
Swedging is defined as shaping metal using a hammer or other force. (Colloquially it can also mean leaving a restaurant or shop without paying. The OED asserts this usage derives from U.S. nautical slang, which sense appears to have evolved from a meaning of doubling back and going around an object.)
The Oxford English Dictionary sends us to the noun “swage”, which it defines as “A tool for bending cold metal (or moulding potter’s clay) to the required shape; also a die or stamp for shaping metal on an anvil, in a press, etc.”. Swage also means “an ornamental grooving, moulding, border, or mount on a candlestick, basin, or other vessel”, or more remotely “the excrement of the otter”.
I suppose this means swedging copper type would involve just bashing a bit of metal till you’ve formed the shape of a character. I guess such a procedure wouldn’t seem too crazy in a world where the idea of melting the metal and pouring it into a mould was restricted to a one-off hand casting routine. However, hammering a bit of copper would seem to be a slower alternative. I wonder if what Mr Bruce is actually referring to is the making of a mould: swedging a bit of copper might well be a description of just such a punchcutting process.
One of the early problems with mechanized type founding was a tendency for title air bubbles to form in the metal. This made the types lighter, but lead to their collapsing when pressure was applied to them in the printing press. David Bruce’s typecasting machines No. 1 (1838) and especially No. 2 (1843) overcame this and many other problems. His machine and versions of it remained the workhorses of typecasting for a hundred and fifty years.
The Kraft process, the chemical procedure used to separate the cellulose in wood from the lignin which binds the cellulose fibers together and provides to structure of a tree, surprisingly (at least to me) was not invented by a German named Kraft. It was actually invented in 1884 by a German named Carl Ferdinand Dahl. The first pulp mill using the process came on line in Sweden in 1890-1. Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Uncle Tom Cobley and all maintain it is called Kraft (strength in German) because it makes strong paper. I wonder. The US Patent for the process makes no reference to Kraft or strength ( — if you do look at this you’ll find an extravagant illustration of the pitfalls of optical character recognition technology). The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the term kraft paper is derived from the Swedish kraftpapper (which no doubt does mean strong paper) so I suspect we’ve got the cart pulling the horse here, and Mr Dahl’s process picked up its name because it was first used in Sweden to make the strong brown stuff we now call kraft paper. The Kraft process doesn’t have to result in brown paper though: 80% of the pulp produced chemically in the USA uses the Kraft process.
The Kraft process tweaked the earlier soda process, and is sometimes referred to as the sulphate process, after the sodium sulphate it uses.
It certainly takes a deal of craft to follow this diagram, which can be enlarged by clicking on it.
Wood chips, steamed to expand the water cavities in them are mixed with a combination of black liquor and white liquor, and the mixture is then cooked in a digester. After a few hours the chips fall apart into cellulose and lignin plus other byproducts, including turpentine. The black liquor, which is actually produced during this process, was in the past mostly vented into the river which is always to be found next to a paper mill. Eventually we came to realize that this wasn’t exactly good for the fishes, who tended to turn up dead as a consequence.
The cellulose from the digester goes to the blow tank, so called because the cellulose is really blown in there. After that the cellulose fibers are screened, washed, and bleached. Various chemicals, including surfactants, defoamers, dispersing and fixing agents are added to help the pulp perform in production. The pulp delivers from the end of the machine and its driers as a continuous thick blanket. This is cut into sheets and baled for shipment. Most pulp is produced in specialized pulp mills, though there are still a few paper mills which produce their own pulp. Notable among these is Glatfelter — a much appreciated manufacturer of book papers. A visit to their Spring Grove plant in Pennsylvania starts with a visit to their forest! Here’s their video of the pulping process:
If you don’t see a video here, please click on the title of the post so as to view it in your browser.
Jeff Peachey’s blog tells about splitting paper. Taking a single sheet of paper and dividing it into two sheets each half as thin, sounds insanely difficult. The benefits, if you want to display on your wall both sides of a single printed leaf, are obvious. (One does perhaps have to repeat one’s disapproval of dealers who dismember old books in order to obtain pictures they can sell to intellectual punters.) I don’t imagine paper splitting is as easy as the description suggests though. The things book restorers have to get up to!
Here’s a video from the Morgan Library’s blog showing how it’s done. It all works well, but I think we can assume lots of attempts which don’t work out, resulting in the destruction of a leaf which takes with it whatever information it contained. In other words this is a high-risk activity.
As usual, if you don’t see a video here, please click on the title of the post in order to view it in your browser.
To the book manufacturing operative paper splitting sounds hair-splittingly close to paper slitting. Paper slitting is the cutting of a single roll of paper into two or more ribbons as it races through the rollers at the back end of the press, or in the mill where it has been made in a continuous roll as wide as the Fourdrinier machine it comes from.
Unsurprisingly, bad language is on the increase in books. After all it wasn’t that long ago that nobody would print the fruitier cuss words. In Britain printers could (can still in theory I think) be sued for doing so — this is one of the reasons the printer’s name has to appear on a book printed in the UK. I was a working adult when our printing house first printed the f-word — it was national news (on a slow news day, I dare say).
The Digital Reader brings a report of an academic study of the issue. He points out problems in the data which can be interpreted to show a decrease in swear words since 2005 — however I suspect that year-to-year fluctuations are pretty irrelevant. Just as back before the mid-twentieth century you’d take your hero and heroine up to the bedroom and then discretely close the door, you’d surely not have them damning and blasting — well that you might, but they’d never utter the stronger versions of cuss words which are omnipresent nowadays. Edwin Battistella tells us in Bad Language that the f-word appears over 4,000 times in James Kelman’s How Late It Was, How Late. (That’s averaging over nine per demy octavo page.) And I’d maintain that every one of them was justified — that’s just how (many) Scots (and of course non-Scots) speak and think!
I can’t say I mind the swearing — god knows I do enough of it myself — but I do find explicit sex scenes rather embarrassing. A lot of the time this is no doubt because the author found them embarrassing to write too. It used to be that this material was to be found behind plain covers in the world of the pornographic book, which mercifully for the rest of us was usually too expensive to enter. Now editors urge their authors to add sex scenes in order to make their novels sell. I wonder if this really works. I suppose it must, or are publisher’s editors just suffering from a collective delusion? I do still believe that the 1960s should be heralded for liberating us from stuffy political correctness and enabling us to throw off our inhibitions; inhibitions which had led to the prosecution of stuff as innocent as Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Ulysses. But still on this particular issue I have to go along with Evelyn Beatrice Hall in saying “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Mercifully of course one can always skip or just stop reading the book. I have a suspicion that the trend for adults to read YA (young adult) fiction results from a section of the public which shares my sensitivity.
In a comment on a blog post by Mike Shatzkin about relationships between publishing and large tech companies The Passive Voice (always a reliable basher of the publishing industry) claims “Publishers are simply too rigid in their business vision and very much focused on the short term (which is strange for organizations that license copyrights, which extend far into the future).”
The reason publishers look like they are focussed on the present is that the vast majority of their copyright licenses become pretty much valueless after about one year. Sure you can say “Look at all the sales Random House are still making on William Faulkner’s books” and this is of course valid. But for every William Faulkner there are hundreds and hundreds of A. N. Others who’s books never really catch on, and after a year or two are deservedly forgotten. Publishers may well be as stupid as the anti-publisher gang assumes, but they are not stupid enough to fail to realize that a book that sells is a book that sells. I guess the gang’s response to that is that these books are not selling because the publishers lose focus on them and allow/force them to die. Surely as these words are coming out of your mouth you have to be thinking “Come on, this is nonsense”. There is not a business executive in the world who decides for no reason at all not to sell something which they can sell. All publishers love their backlist: most of the costs are amortized already and almost all of the revenue goes straight to the bottom line. But you don’t create backlist: backlist is chosen by the public who keep on buying this title, not that title. The problem, dear gang member, is that dead is dead. If the public has moved on to the next season’s books, there’s not much point in belaboring them about buying the wares they turned their noses up at a year ago. Only the very best of books will survive. (Actually some of these may not: what will survive is books that people continue to buy — not always “the best” except in revenue terms.) How many great books do you imagine are published each year? I’d start the bidding at one, and wouldn’t be amazed to see it go down below that. Maybe we could sharpen the focus and define a “great” book as one which continues to sell after it falls into the public domain (now least 70 years after publication).
The US fiction bestsellers of 1947 were
Need I say more? While there are a few names we’d recognize, I’d be surprised if many people were still reading these particular examples of their oeuvre. The Wayward Bus does make it into the Library of America volume of Later Novels. Maybe I should read it. The non-fiction list is even more variable; most are totally obscure though there are a couple of definite survivors there: One still hears of Inside U.S.A., we just bought The Egg and I not long ago, and at OUP I ordered several reprints of the Toynbee, now broken up into paperback subsidiary volumes. The list:
I suspect nobody would want to argue for the status of any of these books as great, though Toynbee may still have his boosters. My point is that any publisher spending any resources trying to push Roger Butterfield’s The American Past, a compilation of drawings, political cartoons, pictures and photographs with connecting text by Mr. Butterfield, after say 1949 would be wasting money. Everyone who’d want to buy it would have bought it already. Thus Simon & Schuster would be behaving completely rationally in ignoring this one and looking for the bestsellers for the 1950s. That’s not short-termism: we’d all love for our books to continue to sell for ever. But they don’t.
University Press Week’s mission statement reads “In today’s political climate — where ‘fake news’ and ‘alternate facts’ are believed by so many people — valuing expertise and knowledge can feel like a radical act. University presses not only believe in facts and knowledge, but traffic in them daily, publishing approximately 14,000 books and more than 1,100 journals each year, read by people around the globe.” The Week ends today. Here are five short videos from Ingram celebrating the event.
And here, just for fun, is one of their videos from last year.
As in all walks of life, it seems academe contains some less than good apples. Gina Kolata tells us at The New York Times how some scholars, under pressure to publish or perish, have resorted to paying to get slipshod work published in “predatory journals” — legitimate-sounding journals which for a hefty fee will “publish” anything. Apparently there are over 10,000 such journals! These journals carefully craft their titles: for instance while Springer puts out a well-established journal called Journal of Economics and Finance, there’s another publication called Journal of Finance and Economics* which apparently exists for those unable to get in on the real thing and willing to pay the entry fee.
There’s no copyright in titles — and many a citation to the second journal will casually be assumed to refer to the first. Ms Kolata points out that the name “predatory journal” carries the assumption that the academics are being duped into submitting their work to these outlets. She suggests that it’s actually all “a classic case of supply meeting demand” and that many of the authors are quite aware of what they are doing. If you have to “publish or perish” maybe it’s not too amazing that some clever people would figure out that “publishing” can in effect amount to little more than having a citation which looks respectable. Nobody making hiring decisions has time actually to read the stuff: if it’s there it’s there, and on we go to the next stage in the decision-making process!
The Times piece doesn’t mention the other end of the pipeline: libraries who may be duped into buying subscriptions. Maybe selling subscriptions isn’t a priority: after all costs have been more than covered by the author fees. The article does say that they publish only online. I did post on Predatory publishing a couple of years ago, focussing more on that consumer aspect of the problem.
I suppose this is “a bad thing”, isn’t it? Human beings will always manage to figure out artful dodges, but I have a lurking suspicion that the problem lies more in the “publish or perish”, tenure-vetting area. Totting up citations is surely a lazy way to decide on hiring and promotions, and while I’m sure there are all sorts of exceptions, maybe even a majority of institutions which are not so gullible, it does seem that such deception about publication is effective. The Times article instances several cases where such citations appear to have helped in promotions.
Of course the online world is still new to us. But really there’s no reason to think that everything you’d find in response to a Google search, however respectable it may sound, has to be good. I dare say many a printed journal has published articles which are less than great. It’s down to the reader to make distinctions, isn’t it? Let us hope that in time we’ll be able to work out ways of assessing what’s real and what’s fake in the flood of online material. In this post-truth era aren’t we right now undergoing rigorous training on this very skill set with our leading politicians insisting that all the real news is fake, so that they can gull a few people into believing that their fake version is actually true?
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* Just to keep us on our toes there’s at least one other journal entitled Journal of Finance and Economics. This one is published in Canada by Science and Education Center of North America.
Ever since linen and cotton rags became too hard to find in sufficient quantities we have been making paper from wood. Lots of other plants have been tried, but wood wins out over all of them. In 1719 René de Réaumur hypothesized that the way wasps chewed up wood to make paper for their binks might be adapted for our stationery purposes. But it wasn’t till 1800 that Matthias Koops, an English papermaker, made a book of which part was printed on “paper made from wood alone”. Friedrich Gottlob Keller’s 1844 patenting of the first practical wood-grinding machine is what made possible the industrial-scale manufacture of paper from trees. But what is it about wood than makes it suitable for making paper, whether by wasps or men?
Wood is 50% cellulose, 30% lignin, 16% carbohydrates, and 4% proteins, resins and fats. Paper is made from cellulose and that’s what papermakers need, not the rest. Paper makers used to be able to satisfy demand by getting their cellulose from rags, but waste collection limits your supply to the amount of rags people are throwing away, or what you can collect from textile mills as off-cuts and waste. The specialized making of paper from linen rags still goes on however. Cellulose is composed of tiny thin fibers. The fibers in different bits of a tree differ, as do fibers from different types of tree and from trees grown in different climates. Softwood trees (conifers) produce longer fibers than hardwoods, whose fibers are denser. The cellulose fibers are held together in a tree by lignin, a complex organic polymer which also provides the structural support. To make good lasting paper you need to be get rid of lignin.
The structure of wood is illustrated in this video:
Wood burns, it floats in water, and it’s hard enough to bend a nail. The chemical structure of wood is not reproducible by one formula: it consists of too many different constituent parts. It is, however, made up mostly (about 98%) of carbon (c.50%), oxygen (c.42%), and hydrogen (c.6%): Cellulose’s chemical formula is (C6H10O5)n and lignin’s C9H10O2,C10H12O3,C11H14O4. Wood also contains small amounts of nitrogen, calcium, potassium, sodium, magnesium, iron, and manganese.
I was interested to discover from the second video that the cellulose chains in the middle of a tree are aligned in spirals while on the outer layers they are vertically aligned. This allows a young tree to bend, and an older one to stand up against the wind.
Finally, as a lagniappe*, here’s a sort of wood-structure ballet from an Open Culture tweet.
If you don’t see any videos here, please open the post in your browser by clicking on its title.
Just as I’m finishing this off, here comes a post suggesting we may one day, Dr Doolittle-like, learn to speak to the trees. Maybe once we learn what the trees have to say about us we’ll have to stop making paper books. Is sympathy for plants more of a risk than the ebook?
For the indefatigable, that link includes a link to a TED Talk by Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard about communication between trees.
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* I had assumed this was a word coming from southern Europe, but no. Apparently it was a Louisiana French word derived from Creole which had picked it up from Quecha. For non-Americans therefore I should perhaps explain that it means a small gift given by a merchant at the time of a purchase; what in Britain we’d call the baker’s dozen.
Making Book 