s, and is plainly marked with the title of the book
and the numbers of the signatures contained therein.

The longevity of good electrotype plates is dependent upon the care
with which they are handled and the quality of paper printed from
them; but with smooth book paper and good treatment it is entirely
possible to print from them a half million impressions without their
showing any great or material wear.

COMPOSITION BY THE LINOTYPE MACHINE

By Frederick J. Warburton.

The Linotype, pronounced by _London Engineering_ "the most wonderful
machine of the century," was not the product of a day. Its creator,
whose early training had never touched the printer's art, was
fortunately led to the study of that art, through the efforts of
others, whose education had prepared them to look for a better method
of producing print than that which had been in use since the days of
Gutenberg; but his invention abolished at one stroke composition and
distribution; introduced for the first time the line, instead of the
letter, as the unit of composition; brought into the art the idea of
automatically and instantly producing by a keyboard solid lines of
composed and justified type, to be once used and then melted down;
rendered it possible to secure for each issue new and sharp faces;
abolished the usual investment for type; cheapened the cost of
standing matter; removed all danger of "pieing," and at the same time
reduced greatly the cost of composition. The story is an interesting
one.

In the autumn of 1876, Charles T. Moore, a native of Virginia,
exhibited to a company of Washington reporters a printing machine upon
which he had been working for many years, and which he believed to be
then substantially complete. It was a machine of very moderate
dimensions, requiring a small motive power, and which bore upon a
cylinder in successive rows the characters required for printed
matter. By the manipulation of finger keys, while the cylinder was
kept in continuous forward motion, the characters were printed in
lithographic ink upon a paper ribbon, in proper relation to each
other; this ribbon was afterwards cut into lengths, arranged in the
form of a page, "justified," to a certain extent, by cutting between
and separating the words, and then transferred to a lithographic
stone, from which the print was made. Such print was not, of course,
of the highest character, but it was a beginning; and the machines
were used in Washi