from the uva english newsletter: the last linotype book by professor van der meulen.

"In 1978 the project was transferred to the venerable Heritage Printers of Charlotte, North Carolina. This firm had bought up the equipment of other printers as the world moved to phototypesetting in the 1960s and 1970s, and it amassed a collection of 1800 different fonts of type.

For some time the staff of Studies has been pondering our own possible move away from Linotype. It hasn’t been that we are adverse to new technology. In the 1990s we were in fact the first scholarly journal to make its extensive back run available, through U.Va.’s E-Text Center, in searchable form and without charge on the Web. But the cost of Linotype production remained competitive, we weren’t eager to face the additional work required by any transition, and we liked the appearance of the books. (The pages show the impressions from the metal used to print them.)

Heritage Printers has been sold twice in the last few years, most recently to a firm that had little experience in Linotype and had never produced a full book. The proprietors inherited our half-completed volume and had to track down old-timers who still knew how to use the equipment. They have now decided to abandon book production and to sell their cache of Linotype materials, some of it at scrap-metal prices. (Listings on eBay suggest that the metal is widely used for casting bullets and for fishing-line sinkers.)"