26-02-2025
A Man and his Linotype machine
City officials unearthed a piece of history Monday when they discovered an old 1,100-pound Linotype machine in the vacant Higginbotham Printing building that was demolished by city crews on Moore Avenue.
Like a rusting steam engine in a rail yard, the old Linotype machine—coated in dust and rust—stood as a relic of an era when hot lead was used to set type for printing presses. Before the wrecking ball sent the old machine to its final resting place photos were taken to document the retired behemoth.
The Anniston Star visited Higginbotham Printing in March 2001 for a feature article on Eugene Burnham, the business's Linotype machine operator at the time. Burnham, 71 then, passed away at age 72 in June 2002.
The machine was a Mergenthaler Linotype NY, Model 31.
The Linotype is named after its inventor, a German immigrant named Ottmar Mergenthaler. In 1884, he patented a machine that allowed printers to set an entire line of type at once—hence the name Linotype. Before then, type was set by hand, one character at a time, much as it had been when Gutenberg invented the printing press 400 years earlier. The Linotype quickly became the standard for newspapers and printing shops, remaining in widespread use into the 1960s.
'When I go, it'll go,' Burnham said in 2001.
The Linotype had been at Higginbotham since 1957, and Burnham was probably its last operator.
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This is a photo from 2001 of Eugene Burnham operating the Linotype machine for the business. Photo by Bill Wilson, The Anniston Star
When Burnham turned on the massive machine, the steady, smooth spinning of rubber belts made the Linotype sound a bit like an old sewing machine.
Burnham had 54 years of experience with the Linotype in 2001. He learned the craft at The Jacksonville News in the 1940s and took a job at Higginbotham in 1960. He sat in a battered chair that was surely as old as the machine itself.
A built-in lamp illuminated the keyboard. Lowercase letters were on black keys to the left, numerals and punctuation in blue in the middle, and capital letters in white on the right.
Each keystroke moved a small brass matrix, or mat, into position; the mats contained the mold for the required letter. A magazine above Burnham's head held upwards of 1,500 mats.
'That T is doubling,' he said. 'I heard it that time.'
He was ever-vigilant against typos.
'We don't have spell-check on this machine,' he said.
Years of focusing on individual letters, numbers, and punctuation marks had ruined him for reading normally.
'I've set the type so long, I read everything in a line,' he said.
At full speed, the machine came to life like one of those contraptions in a Dr. Seuss book.
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This is a photo from 2001 of Eugene Burnham operating the Linotype machine for the business. Photo by Bill Wilson, The Anniston Star
Elevators, cranks, mold discs, levers, dogs, pins, clutches, and pots worked in speedy synchronicity—all to produce a single metal slug.
All that for a slender strip of metal a few inches long, with tiny, perfectly formed letters rising from its surface.
'It's an amazing machine,' Burnham said.
As a classic Linotype operator's gag, Burnham made a slug for The Anniston Star reporter and handed it to him while it was still warm—just seconds before it cooled from its 550-degree molten state.
White scars on Burnham's forearm marked his own encounters with the hot metal. Globs of metal on the ceiling above the machine served as evidence of near misses.
Such encounters explained why many Linotype operators weren't sad to see the machines go. In 2001, Phillip Sanguinetti, president of Consolidated Publishing, which owned The Star, recalled the day in 1970 when the paper shipped off the last of its 13 Linotypes.
One of the operators gave the departing machine a swift kick, Sanguinetti remembered.
'You S.O.B., you won't spit on me anymore,' the worker said.
Paper and print shop owners weren't sorry, either. The Linotype's immediate replacement, cold-type offset printing, was far faster and cleaner.
Higginbotham once had four Linotypes and four operators. By 2001, demand for Linotype printing was rare, but the machine was still useful for jobs on pre-printed paper or paper with multiple thicknesses.
When the Linotype was needed at Higginbotham, they called Burnham. He was the only one left who could run it.
Burnham said in 2001 that he and the Linotype would leave together.
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An old Linotype machine was discovered by city officials that had been in place since the 1950s. Photo by Bill Wilson, The Anniston Star
Now, as city crews prepare to haul away the rusting Linotype to an unknown fate, it marks the final end to Burnham's long kinship with the old letterpress machine.
