a long shot, but do any book historians here know of scholarship quantifying the labor impacts of the Linotype in the late 19th century? I know the compositors unions protested & then passed rules about who could maintain Linotype machines—but I’m curious just how many compositors actually lost jobs
Comments
Wallace and Kalleberg: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2094988?seq=1
Corban Goble: "The Obituary of a Machine" (PhD diss)
Ellen Mazur Thomson: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300068351/the-origins-of-graphic-design-in-america-1870-1920
Do you know the Thomson? She highlights the gendered fault line among compositors: men set "phat" lines while women (what few there were) typed "straight" on Linotype. If you're paid by the inch, phat is more $ for less effort...