The rise of competitive typesetting amid a period of intensifying labor conflict pointed to an uncomfortable truth facing the world’s printshops: while the rest of the printing process had become increasingly automated — with steam powered rotary presses, folding machines, telegraphs, stereotypes, and all manner of other industrial innovations — the final step of sticking type by hand remained stubbornly rooted in the fifteenth century. Human compositors were waging a valiant but ultimately doomed struggle to keep pace with the machines. As industrialization took hold, their work was undergoing a dramatic change. Whereas the printshops of old had relied on printers to function as jacks-of-all-trades — capable of damping the paper, proofreading, composing, treading the pelts, and, not infrequently, slipping their own writing into the pages of the papers they composed — the new breed of workers in the big city composing rooms was hired to perform a single task: setting type. As William C. Barnes, a noted Swift, observed in 1887, a printer had once been “able to perform all the different duties appertaining to the trade”. But now, “he has but to be proficient in one”.
