hot type

My first job as a lino operator was in a small shop, they had a font of Russian mats, and a special russian keyboard that you could remove the regular keyboard and put on the russian keyboard. I know Russia had linotypes late into the 1970’s for setting newspapers. Dick G.

The russian Linotypes were mostly Neotypes (check http://www.pfeffer.ch/typorama.htm for an image) which were also widely used in the GDR—letterpress was common there for printing books till the late 80ies.

Special matrices were available directly from Linotype, I have a catalogue in my bookshelf.

From a relatively early period, Mergenthaler Linotype produced matrices for many languages (even those set right-to-left such as Hebrew and Arabic, for which there was a special attachment). These are shown in the major specimen books (e.g. Linotype Faces, aka “Big Red). For some interesting examples online, go to the Advanced Search for Google Books:

http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search

and search on “Mergenthaler Linotype” in Author (tick the “Full View Only” box). See there, for example:

“Newspaper headings composed direct from the keyboard in sizes from 6 to 60 point”

which shows complete newspaper pages in German, Russian, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic.

Other notes…
The European languages, especially German, were quite important in Linotype/Intertype work in at least the upper midwest immigrant communities.

P. Driscoll’s “Square Text Press” has printed some marvelous examples of non-English type cast from Linotype, Intertype, and Ludlow matrices.

The new casting of the very beautiful Worrell Uncial from Skyline Type Foundry, with Coptic sorts, was cast from Linotype matrices. www.skylinetype.com

So the simple answer is, yes, quite a bit - I only wish I had some of them :-)

Regards
David M MacMillan
www.CircuitousRoot.com