What's New?

Updates have been coming at a slower pace these past few years. There are several reasons for this, but one reason which bears directly on the material is a shift toward long-form content - that is, more substantial essays or (dare I say?) books. Here are some of these:

2026-04-19: The Typographical Pantograph to 1900: Correcting the Received Narrative (Rev. 2). This is the first public release of a draft of a book-length document that I've been working on for some time. It is far from complete, but the parts which are finished (or nearly so) might be useful. At its core it consists of two things: Firstly, it presents evidence in support of Dr. Dan Reynold's important discovery (in 2021) of the earliest known instance of the use of a pantograph as a cutting machine in the process of making typographical matrices (by Ludwig and Hofer, in Germany, in 1877). Reynolds was spot-on, as I hope this additional evidence shows. Secondly, it presents evidence that I discovered a few years ago of the first use of a pantograph as a cutting machine in matrix making in the United States (by Schraubstadter at the Central Type Foundry in 1882). However, the point of this study overall is not simply to show that Linn Boyd Benton wasn't the first to use a pantograph in this way (though he was, at best, third - circa 1884). Rather, it is to show through a wide range of examples that the pantograph was the high-tech information technology of its time and that the introduction of pantographic methods into type-making was not a case of lone invention but rather a rich and complex interplay of technological and historical developments internationally.

2026-04-24 [2024]: A Census of Barth Type Casters (Rev. 4). I have the honor of owning a Barth Automatic Type Casting Machine, "Machine Number" 112 (the "60 point machine" formerly owned by the late Gregory Jackson Walters). The documents linked here are surveys of all surviving Barth casters together with information on their history and partial information on machines which do not survive. This is presented in two forms: a brief article which appeared in issue No. 46 of the American Typecasting Fellowship Newsletter (2024) and a very much longer "Extended Edition" of the same (last updated in 2024). For various reasons not worth going into, I didn't get these online until 2026.

2022, 2023: A Census of Benton & Related Pantographic Engraving Machines (Rev. 12). It is my privilege to own one of the eight surviving Benton Engraving Machines, "Machine Number" 53 (formerly owned by the late Gregory Jackson Walters). This Census surveys all of the surviving Benton pantographs, the history of the Benton, and derivative machines such as those by Tsugami.

A note about missing pages and dead links:

First, by way of background, this website is designed as an online subset of my personal notebooks. This means that many of the links on it have always been no more than good intentions - things I need someday to address.

But in 2022 the servers of the company that was then my ISP were compromised by a malicious attacker. As collateral damage, this entire website was deleted. The version online now was reconstructed from the latest online version that had been archived by The Wayback Machine of The Internet Archive - but this archive was incomplete.

I restored the site from a public archive because I wanted to make sure that only pages which had been published went back online. Gradually, since then, I have been restoring some of the lost pages from my own files.

In itself, this wouldn't have taken that long, even though there are (still) hundreds of missing pages. But I encountered a different problem: each time I went to restore a missing page from my own files, I was not satisfied with it. My own knowledge and understanding have changed, and the resources available to me have increased. These are good things, of course, but they mean that every time I go to restore a missing page I feel compelled to rewrite it.

This means that fully restoring the site will, in the phrase of an old colleague of mine, take "forty forevers." In the meantime, if there is something that you are sure was once here but is now missing, please feel free to contact me and I'll check on it.