I'd give it a home in an instant... However, the cost of shipping a beast like that to Canada would cause my wife to question my sanity.

Yeah, I told him nearly the same thing. :-) I'm a little closer. He's in Springfield, Ill. and I'm in St. Paul, Minn. He's only looking to cover the costs of shipping.

Here's a page that describes how they worked and has a diagram:

http://bellsouthpwp2.net/b/c/bcarberry/tp.html

I have seen one in person. It's bigger than a bread box.

Well it looks like an expensive and inneficient toy: 30 minutes to set a line of type, 5 minutes for each of the subsequent lines, kerning depends on hand sliding, what else can you ask?

I was sort of hoping that someone would know of a printing or typography museum that might be interested. I'm worried that this beast will end up either in this guy's dumpster or my basement.

Mark,

I had a large PMT camera a few years back that I could not give away. I ended up chopping it up and hauling down to a scrap metal dealer.

It's old technology that no one wants.

I saved the lens as a memento, it's gathering dust somewhere around here.

Sorry

kosmo

Mark, would you be willing to donate your lego version - http://www.marksimonson.com/article/105/lego-the-type-designers-friend - to go alongside the museum exhibit?

Sure, but probably not at the same time as the Typositor. :-)

It's old technology that no one wants.

Same old story. Every technology seems to go through a period when it becomes obsolete and nobody wants it. And then, some years later, after most of it has been discarded, destroyed or recycled, the few remaining examples end up in museums. I have a feeling that the Typositor hasn't quite reached the museum stage. I wonder how many still exist?

Are these the machines with the drum and the film strips at each point size? I used to set on one of these and the display was out so you had to remember your strokes and not make a mistake.

No, you're thinking of the kind of phototypesetting machine that was primarily used for setting text.

A Typositor was designed for setting display type (from 18- to 144-point). There was no keyboard or display. It had a 2"-wide strip of negative film with 72-point character images and worked sort of like a photographic enlarger, so you would crank it up or down to get the desired point size. To set type on it, you had to peer into a narrow slot where the characters would be projected in red light onto a strip of photographic paper. When the character was positioned properly, the red filter would be removed briefly to expose the paper. Since the paper was actually sitting in the developing solution, the exposed character would immediately turn black. You then moved the strip to the left to get ready for the next character. Characters were selected by cranking the film font reel back and forth.

Spacing was entirely dependent on the skill of the operator. Typositor film fonts had no spacing indications at all, although baseline alignment was very acurate. A skilled operator could produce very high quality results with the machine, especially compared to other techniques available at the time. Digital type is the only thing that has surpassed it in terms of image quality for display type.

I have fond (or not so fond) memories of working with a Typositor at my first job in a NYC type shop. You had to be quick and consistent with your setting otherwise the individual characters would develop to different levels of black.

The problem with using these now is the supplies. Process photo devleoper is easy to come by, but those two inch rolls of photo-sensitive paper are hard to find.

Peter Bain has done a lot of research into Typositor. He has one, with a large library of film fonts. He has popped in here from time-to-time. He is the one to ask.

> I saved the lens as a memento

I did that with my '76 BMW 2002 when I totalled it - the carburator and the wheels.

hhp