From Gutenberg to the middle of the Nineteenth Century, the Composing Room must have been a relatively quiet place. The dominant sound would have been that of type being set by hand into composing sticks. With the introduction of stereotype plates in the middle and late Nineteenth Century, and later the Linotype and its slugs, the Composing Room evolved into a sort of a machine shop for typemetal, full of power saws, routers, planers, and the like. (I would guess that with the advent of photocomposition the composing room became quieter again. In our present digital age, the composing room is simply gone.) For the most part, the Notebooks here will cover this machine shop aspect.
All of the areas covered here are covered (or should be covered) in the Introduction II - Surveys of the Equipment . In general, the treatment there is intended to be of the nature of a survey or history, while the treatment here is intended to be hands-on and technical. Yet there are technical aspects to the material there, and historical aspects to the material here (especially for the machines I don't have, but for which I'm reprinting literature). There is no perfect subdivision of a field as full as this one.
The Ludlow Supersurfacer might have been used in a composing room, but it is really pretty tightly tied to the Ludlow itself and is covered in ../ Noncomposing Linecasters -> Ludlow Notebooks.
Other suppliers whose catalogs seem to fit best elsewhere also supplied composing room equipment. See in particular:
General Suppliers
Here I'll put catalogs of general manufacturers and suppliers who provided primarily composing room equipment (Rouse, for example).
For literature specific to individual machines, see that particular machine (for example, a general Rouse catalog would be in this section, but for the Rouse Rotary Vertical Miterer see below, and for the Rouse Type Mortiser see Mortising Type up-and-over in the Making Printing Matrices & Types set of Notebooks). It all makes some sense; it just doesn't necessarily make the sense you think it should.
The Printer's Saw
Literature for the C&G/Morrison, Hill-Curtis/Hammond TrimOsaw, Miller Saw-Trimmer, and Nelson Cost-Cutter.
Of course, you can also cut slugs on a saw (see above) and route them on routers generally intended for plate use (see below).
Miterers (Powered)
Operation of the Rouse Vertical Rotary Miterer, and suggestions for its use in making ornamental rule.
Often people conflate the Rouse Vertical Miterer with the Rouse Type Mortiser (especially as the Mortiser was re-engineered to share the layout and many of the components of the Miterer). They are different. For the Rouse Type Mortiser, see the section on it , which is within the Type Mortiser set of Notebooks which, in turn, is within Typemaking
Slug Strippers & Shears
These are machines for cutting the top off of a linecaster slug so that it could be used on a base. Morrison Slug Stripper (just a catalog reference). [Ludlow Shell-Hi Slug Shear]
Machines in this category tended often to be combined (many of them simply consisted of variations on a spindle). This complicates categorization. Since the router was the most basic and versatile of these machines, it tended to be the one with which other machine were combined.
Routers & Combination Machines
Routers and combination machines which include a router. [JUST CROSS-REFERENCES AT PRESENT]
Type-High
[NONE YET] Type-High machines when marketed as such and not combined with routers or planers.
Jigsaws
[NONE YET] Jigsaws when not combined with routers (but sometimes combined with other machines, such as broaching machines).
Broaching Machines
[NONE YET] Broaching Machines when not combined with jigsaws.
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