Ready, Go, Set!

THEY CALLED GEORGE ARENS berg “The Boy” when the 19-year-old printing compositor arrived in New York in 1869. Within a year, though, his shopmates had renamed him “The Velocipede.” Arensberg had E. A. Donaldson, a composing-room foreman at The New York Times , to thank for his newfound fame. That winter, Donaldson had offered the young Arensberg an opportunity to prove that he was fast enough to set four stickfuls of type—maybe five pages of modern double-spaced typescript—in an hour. Then Donaldson spread the word. Scores of printers from New York’s newspapers and printing shops converged on the composing room of The New York Times to bet on the Velocipede. He did not disappoint. On the afternoon of February 19, 1870, Arensberg set 2,064 ems of type in a single hour, making him the world’s fastest typesetter.

Composition—the physical assembly of the letters being reproduced—had not progressed much since Gutenberg’s day. It would be the last part of traditional printing to be mechanized, lagging behind technological leaps in other stages of the process, from rotary steam-powered presses to curved-plate stereotyping. Even after the introduction in the 1860s of presses that could produce 15,000 newspapers an hour, printing still required battalions of hand compositors.

A hand compositor set type letter by letter. He faced a case subdivided into compartments, each filled with pieces of metal nearly an inch tall bearing a letter, punctuation symbol, or number cast in relief. The compartment for the letter e could hold a couple of hundred characters, while the compartment for the semicolon might contain only a dozen. The character on each piece of type was reversed, so that when it was inked and pressed onto a sheet of paper, the resulting text would read normally. The typesetter placed each letter upside down and face out into a hand-held metal typestick—a shallow tray about as tall as 20 lines of type—beginning in the bottom left-hand corner. As the letters formed a word, he placed a shallower piece of metal on its right to hold the space and started the next word; when the words formed a line, he inserted extra blanks between words to justify and then he started the next line right on top of it. Once the typestick was full, the typesetter transferred the matter (as composed type was called) onto a larger tray called a galley. From there, the finished block of text would be bound around all sides with a cord and inked to make a proof (a preliminary print for editors to check). Then a printer would transfer the type to a perfectly flat table, correct any mistakes found in the preliminary print, and add illustration and headline plates to make a complete page. After locking the whole compilation into a metal frame, the printer made an impression and then cast a plate of hot metal from it; this would then be used to print the newspaper.

Printers measured the amount of type they set in ems, a unit of measurement based on the width of the letter m , the widest in the alphabet. The average compositor could finish 700 ems an hour (including time spent ensuring the lines were spaced evenly and looking for typos). In doing so, the compositor’s hand reached into the typecase some 2,000 times. Two thousand ems an hour, the fastest racing pace, required 5,350 reaches: 85 to 100 letters picked up each minute, 7 or 8 every five seconds.

Such skill and speed commanded respect. There were no shortcuts beyond nimble fingers, great stamina, and total concentration. In the midnineteenth century, the compositor was an elite worker, a member of the International Typographical Union (ITU), one of the oldest and bestestablished labor unions in the country. Artisans at some big-city dailies even achieved a sort of gentility: The New York Tribune ’s ace compositor, Thomas Rooker, wore diamondstudded shirtfronts. (Male printers only grudgingly admitted that women might perform well in composing rooms. In fact, women had always worked on those printing shop floors where raffle tickets, books, and business cards were produced. Especially at large firms in big cities, however, women struggled for stature and, of course, wages. Women rarely worked in the composing rooms of large urban daily newspapers.) By the 1890s, Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype slugcaster would mechanize the composition process, but on the eve of that innovation, every American composing room and printshop had a local typesetting speed demon, a “swift” who claimed to be the fastest ever.

Fast typesetters almost invariably traveled from job to job. New England’s champion, George Graham, worked in nine different states between 1873 and 1884—“much as the average printer’s life is passed,” said the noted swift William Barnes, “roaming about the country.” Printing unions everywhere sponsored this kind of mobility as a means of keeping wages high by keeping demand for their services up. Typesetters with union cards were guaranteed employment, or at least hospitality, in any shop room in the country, so they could seek work wherever the pay was highest. Printing journeymen called jobs “situations,” or “sits.” Tramping was an honorable way of life.

Typesetting races contributed to the celebrity of the printing world. Compositors had raced from the first day there were two of them, usually for beer. Drinking was part of the life. “Exhausted after the tiresome night’s work,” the swift Joseph McCann once explained, journeyman compositors “sought the convivial cup to restore their shattered nerves.” Drinking and betting—saloon life —provided the essence of a bachelor subculture, a shop-floor alternative to union plenary sessions held in hotel banquet rooms. For every local typesetting hotshot, there was a composing room full of colleagues willing to bet money on him. After the Civil War, printers competed with increasing energy and in widening circles. Printshop composing rooms held contests, kept records, published challenges, and generally encouraged interest in the industry’s intramural sport. By the 1880s, names such as Thomas C. (“Bangs”) Levy and Clinton (“The Kid”) Dejarnatt dominated a newly emerging circuit of touring professionals.

Arensberg, like his colleagues, had begun his career on the move. Born in 1850, he grew up in Pittsburgh peddling the Dispatch . Eventually, he graduated to the composing room, and at age 16 he elbowed his way into Pittsburgh’s printing local. He thereupon hit the road—or, more accurately, the river—arriving at New Orleans by way of the Ohio and the Mississippi. Unable to find a “sit” there, Arensberg signed on as a cabin boy, worked his passage back upriver to Memphis, and held a job briefly at the local Bulletin . From there he went to Louisville, where he stayed a year and a half, learning typesetting from some respected compositors. By 1869 Arensberg was in New York applying for work at The New York Times .

Donaldson had high hopes for him on the afternoon of February 19, 1870, as did the large numbers of New York journeymen who gathered in the composing rooms of The New York Times . The affair nonetheless attracted plenty of doubting out-of-towners, most of whom, according to the New York Sun , “backed time.” At 3:00 P.M. Arensberg picked up his typestick. A Mr. Stanley, called “the shortest and best compositor in the business” by a Sun reporter, was on hand to referee. Arensberg started fast—too fast, some said. He completed his first stickful in only 13 minutes, 55 seconds. He was bound to wear himself out. “Backers of ‘time’ felt quite jubilant,” reported the Sun. But when he finished his second stickful even faster, by 5 seconds, his doubters began to hedge their bets. He came in with a time of 14 minutes flat for his third stickful, and the issue was settled. Barring collapse, he could reach his goal of four stickfuls in the next 18 minutes or so. A losing bettor frantically accepted a side bet against his setting 2,000 ems in the hour. But Arensberg carried the day. Not only did he finish his fourth stickful in 14 minutes and 10 seconds, he worked on the fifth stick for the balance of the hour. He had set four stickfuls in 55 minutes and 55 seconds, winning the bet, and he covered all sides by hitting 2,064 ems within the hour. Shopmates mobbed him at the finish. His backers challenged the entire world. This was the fastest typesetter in creation.

A half-dozen years and several races later, Arensberg had become legendary. He could work when and where he wanted, and by his late twenties he had held jobs in most of the major cities in the eastern United States. In 1877 he arrived for work at the Cincinnati Enquirer . Soon after, John Bell, the foreman of the Enquirer ’s composing room, had offered what Printers’ Circular called “a bold challenge from the West.” For stakes beginning at $500, the Enquirer was prepared to back its fastest swift against any other shop’s challenger, its fastest pair against any other shopmate pair, and so on, up to any 10-man typesetting staff. And with good reason. With Arensberg’s arrival, the paper had a ringer in a composing room full of first-rate swifts.

Soon, however, Arensberg would face fresh competition. He had made his name and won $50 at the New York Times wager, a prize guaranteed to turn heads when printers working at the top of their profession earned $30 a week. Quickly, racing enthusiasts upped the ante, attracting an assortment of new performers, any of whom might eclipse Arensberg’s legend. As early as 1881, Bangs Levy won $1,000 competing in Winnipeg. By 1885 typesetting races had become a well-attended public amusement, breaking out of the prosaic local printing shops: Dime museums would equip their halls to look like composing rooms and hold weeklong speed tests. Bigger races became events nearly as popular as billiards, bicycle racing, and boxing. Printers in many Eastern cities promoted organized typesetting races. George Graham beat a gathering of Boston’s best printers; William C. Clarke won in Pittsburgh, Joseph Farquhar in Rochester. In the South, W. H. Van Bibber triumphed in Memphis. Challenges circulated widely, increasingly farther from the confines of individual shop floors. The International Typographical Union even published a standardized set of racing rules.

Union leadership supported type racing, at least for a while, but there was no question that the strongest interest in typesetting matches remained on the shop floor among printing’s rank and file. As the ITU held its 1885 meeting in New York City and Henry George, the author of Progress and Poverty , addressed labor officials from a stage he shared with Mayor W. R. Grace, printers of a different stripe arrived at the composing rooms of the New York Sunday Star for faster action. Joseph McCann defeated Ira Somers that day as 300 noisy printers put their money down.

Among the spectators was William Barnes, a Canadian working at the New York World with ambitions of his own. That September, he challenged McCann to a midDecember match race: four hours for $500 a side, winner take all. On race day, McCann got off to a sluggish start, and the crowd, betting on the fly, was tempted to write him off. Observers knew little about Barnes, but his motion was “free and graceful,” according to a reporter from the New York Herald , while McCann, a six-month sensation following his match with Somers, seemed “stiff.” McCann grabbed type, snatching it “in about the same way that an unsuspecting child would touch a red hot stove.” But he soon found his rhythm and, driving, pulled abreast of Barnes. The minutes passed, and they “were heard clicking together at the end of each line.” Excitement gathered. Spectators were so uncertain of the outcome that betting slowed to almost a halt. “Oh, boys!” cried the typographer Jimmy Hart at the end of every stickful. “Oh, boys!”

Almost 16 years had passed since Arensberg’s epochal 1870 wager. Men such as McCann and Barnes had always chafed under the burden of Arensberg’s reputation. But now he was sick. A Philadelphia newspaper reported that he was “broken down in health, although still working occasionally in the composing room of the New York Times .” A New York Herald reporter, on the scene for the McCann-Barnes match, spied Arensberg, quiet in the background. The Velocipede was there to watch, “glad,” it seemed, “to be out of the trouble.” In any case, the printing fraternity was about to crown his successor. Joseph McCann, the winner, was now the man of the hour.

Half a year later, in the midsummer of 1886, Arensberg entered New York’s Bellevue Hospital. He died on July 28 at the age of 36. According to The New York Times , he succumbed to “a complication of disorders.” Friends called it an early death, but he had been a printing legend since he was 19 and seemed an elder statesman. The swiftest of all had not raced in nearly a decade. As Arensberg was dying, technological innovation promised the demise of them all. During his final weeks, coincidentally and with melancholy timing, Whitelaw Reid, the editor of the New York Tribune , installed Mergenthaler’s new Linotype machine in the Tribune ’s composing room. Human hands, no matter how swift, could not outpace this machine. The Velocipede and his colleagues were suddenly also-rans.