the following way: When the form is brought into the
stereotyping room, it is placed, face up, on the flat bed of a strongly
built press. Over the face of the columns of type are spread several
layers of tissue paper pasted together. Upon the paper is laid a damp
blanket, and a heavy revolving steel drum subjects the whole to hundreds
of pounds of pressure, thus squeezing the face of the type into the
texture of the moist paper. Intense heat is then applied by a steam
drier, so that within a few seconds the moisture has been baked entirely
from the paper, which emerges a stiff flat matrix of the type in the
form.

=25. The Autoplate.=--This matrix in turn is bent to the shape of the
impressing cylinder that later stamps the page, and is put into an
autoplate, or casting machine, which presses molten metal upon the paper
matrix, cools the metal, and turns out in a few moments the finished,
cylindrical plates ready to be put on the press for printing. Duplicates
follow at intervals of from fifteen to twenty seconds, so that several
impressions of the same page may be made at once in the press room and
the whole paper printed more quickly than if a single impression of a
page were made at one time.

=26. The Press Room.=--The press room, the third and final stage in the
mechanical composition of the paper, is where the printing is done on
highly complicated machines. The larger the number of pages of the paper
printed, the more complicated the presses, the marvel of them being
their adaptability to running full, or half, or third capacity,
according to the needed output, or to printing a double or triple number
of small sized papers in a third or half the usually required time. The
large presses of the great dailies print, fold, cut, paste, and count,
according to the size of the sheet, 50,000 to 125,000 papers an hour. A
double sextuple press has a limit of 144,000 twelve-page papers an hour.

=27. The Printing Press.=--It is on the cylinders of these presses that
the circular stereotyped plates are fitted, two plates filling nicely
the round of the cylinder. All the plates for the inside pages of the
paper are stereotyped and screwed on their cylinders a half-hour or more
before press time, the pages with the latest news being held until the
last possible moment. Usually the last page to come is the title page,
and as soon as the last locking lever has been clamped, the wheels of
the big press begin to turn. As the cy