The Linotype Font Library
These hand drawn “Letters” are part of the font library salvaged from the Lynotype Factory on Broadheath, Altrincham, Cheshire, just on the outskirts of Manchester.
These drawings of individual letters in every different font imaginable were the starting point of manufacturing matrices for the Linotype Printing Machine. The matrices are brass moulds of the letter forms, the machine puts these brass moulds in a line, and they are filled with molten metal and cast in a single piece.
The name of the machine comes from the fact that it produces an entire line of metal type at once, hence a line-o-type, a significant improvement over the previous industry standard, i.e. manual letter by letter type setting using a composing stick and drawers of letters.
