In printing, a stereotype, stereoplate or simply a stereo, is a solid plate of type metal, cast from a papier-mâché or plaster mould taken from the surface of a forme of type. The mould was known as a flong.
In the days of set movable type, printing involved placing individual letters (called type) plus other elements (including leading and furniture) into a block called a chase. Cumulatively, this full setup for printing a single page was called a forme. Ink was then applied to the forme, pressed against paper and a printed page was made. This process of creating formes was labour-intensive, costly and prevented printers from using their type, leading, furniture and chases for other work. Furthermore, printers who underestimated demand would be forced to reset the type for subsequent print runs.
... while Nathaniel Hawthorne's publishers assumed that The Scarlet Letter (1850) would do well, printing an uncharacteristically large edition of 2,500 copies, popular demand for Hawthorne's controversial "Custom House" introduction outstripped supply, prompting Ticknor & Fields to reset the type and to reprint another 2,500 copies within two months of the first publication. Still unaware that they had an incipient classic on their hands, Ticknor & Fields neglected at this time to invest in stereotype plates, and thus were forced to pay to reset the type for a third time just four months later when they finally stereotyped the book.
While stereotypes were useful in book publishing, it was in newspaper publishing that they came into their own. Books were normally printed not as single pages, but as set of multiple pages at a time. Thus a single volume 320 page book needed 40 stereos for an eight-page imposition, or twenty stereos for a 16-page imposition. This contrasts with newspapers, where a Sunday edition of a major newspaper could require as many as 6,000 stereos.
Stereotype offered the following advantages:
English sources often describe the process as having been invented in 1725 by William Ged, who apparently stereotyped plates for the Bible at Cambridge University before abandoning the business. However, Count Canstein had been publishing stereotyped Bibles in Germany since 1712 and an earlier form of stereotyping from flong was described in Germany in 1702. It is even possible that the process was used as early as the fifteenth century by Johannes Gutenberg or his heirs for the Mainz Catholicon. Wide application of the technique, with improvements, is attributed to Charles Stanhope in the early 1800s. Printing plates for the Bible were stereotyped in the US in 1814.
The following have been used for moulding type to create stereos:
The process for making moulds for electrotypes was similar, except that these were made with soft materials such as beeswax or the naturally occurring mineral wax ozokerite. The thin electrotype shells had to be backed with type metal to a depth of 8mm to make them robust enough for use.
After moulding the stereotype it is carefully removed from the mould. If locking the flong into a moulding box, the box was pivoted so that the flong was in the vertical plane, and liquid type metal was poured into the mould. For newspapers these moulds were cylindrical in shape. This quickly cooled, and the mould was opened to remove the stereo. The stereo might be cooled further. The back of the stereo was then shaved, to reduce it to the required thickness for the press. The stereo was also trimmed and had the edges bevelled (to enable the stereo to be clamped into place). The stereos were then clamped into place on the printing cylinder, and the print run began.
Type metal is an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony. Lead on its own makes type too soft to be of use. Tin was added to lead to make it harder, but the results were unsatisfactory. It was found that adding both tin and antimony led to type that was hard, resistant to wear and to distortion under pressure, and gave sharp reproductions.
The lowest solidification point for a liquid lead, antimony, and tin alloy occurs when the antimony content is twelve percent, known as the eutectic alloy. Keeping the antimony content close to twelve percent ensured the lowest possible melting point, important for slug-casting machines which melted an alloy ingot for casting the slugs. Low melting point is also important for the metal used for stereos as very high temperatures would damage the flongs. The type metal used for stereos was slightly different from the type metal used for foundry type, slug casting machines like the Linotype machine, individual letter casting machines as in the Monotype machine, or the metal used for backing electrotypes. While increasing the antimony content increases hardness, the tin content must be increased in proportion to achieve this.
Fry's offered the following guide to type metal for different uses.
| Backing for electrotypes | 2–4 | 2–4 | 92–96 | |
| 3.5–4 | 11.5–12 | 84–85 | ||
| Stereotype plates | 5-10 | 15 | 75–80 | |
| 6–13 | 15–19 | 68–81 | ||
| Foundry type metal for manual type-casting | 13–22 | 20–28 | 50–67 | |
The golden rule for stereotyping was to have cool metal and a hot box to avoid problems with shrinkage cavities or sinks. Sometimes a casting board was used to slow the cooling at the back of the casting, as this could help to avoid problems due to the flong being a poor conductor.
In 1946, Dalgin stated that the New York Times had one hundred slug-casting machines They consumed eight tons of type metal a night. However the stereotype department was casting seven times as much metal with a consumption of 45 tons of type metal every night and 150 tons on Saturday (for the large Sunday edition). They cast as many as 6,000 plates for the Sunday edition.
Not only that, but the time limit for composition to press-printing time was only 15 minutes. The last pages (typically the front page and pages with stories running on from the front page) were locked-up in their formes, and then the team had fifteen minutes to mould the matrices, the stereos cast, shaved, trimmed, cooled, and placed on the presses all in that fifteen minutes. Kjaer reported that the time from delivery of a forme to the stereotype foundry to onward delivery of a plate to the press room had fallen from eight minutes in 1916 to four minutes in 1926.
Initially syndicated news took the form of distributing printed sheets. In December 1841 the owner of the New York Sun had the then US president's address to congress couriered to him. He then printed it on a single sheet, and sold the sheets to newspapers in the surrounding regions, keeping the body, but changing the title head to suit the newspapers. The next effort was to have sheets printed with the president's address on one side and local news on the other. However, matters improved with improvements in stereotyping and the table summarised Kubel's relation of the growth of stereotyping for syndication.
| Period | Method of distribution of syndicated materials | |
|---|---|---|
| Up to 1850 | Via printed sheets, with either one or both sides printed | |
| 1850–1883 | Via printed sheets and stereotype plates | |
| From 1883 | Largely via stereotype plates | |
| From 1895 | Flongs began to replace plates | |
| By 1941 | Flongs had almost completely replaced plates |
The flongs distributed were not just syndicated articles or comic strips, but also advertisements. This had a huge advantage in that newspapers avoided the costs of setting these up in type. In some cases flongs were distributed with sections that could be cut out where a local store name could be inserted, so that an illustrated advertisement for a particular product could include the name of the local dealer. Newspapers combined a set of flongs to cast the stereotype plate for a page. In some cases, newspapers would cast a flong, combine that plate with other elements on a page, and then cast a second flong of the whole page, so the process went: Typeset-Flong of section-cast plate of section-combine plates to make a full page -> flong of full page -> plate of full page.
Stereotyping was first challenged by electrotyping, which was more expensive and time-consuming, but was capable of higher quality printing. It was initially reserved for making copper facsimiles of illustrations. With time, Weedon states that in book publishing, it became more important than stereotyping. However, Kubler stated, in 1941, that in contrast to the United States, which made greater use of electrotyping, European plants used stereotype plates of 75% of all letterpress reproduction work, and that the best stereotype work was equal to the best electrotype work. However, stereotyping retained its primacy in newspaper publishing. Kubler states that alternatives to stereotyping either involved significant additional capital costs or were unsuited for newspapers as they did not allow corrections and the insertion of late news and local materials or were both expensive and unsuitable. The first computer-aided typeset book in the UK was Dylan Thomas' Collected Poems in 1966, but the process really took off in the 1970s, creating enormous disruption in the newspaper industry.
The introduction of Offset printing meant that hot-metal type was no longer needed, and phototypesetting replaced the hot-metal type machines. This meant that there was no longer a need for stereotypes. The phototypesetting machines were replaced in their turn by the personal computer and desktop publishing. Kubler's firm that made dry mats dissolved on 13 August 1979.
Over time, stereotype became a metaphor for any set of ideas repeated identically or with only minor changes. In fact, cliché and stereotype were both originally printers' words, and in their printing senses became synonymous. However, cliché originally had a slightly different meaning, being an onomatopoeic word for the sound that was made during the process of striking a block into molten type metal during another form of stereotyping, later called in English "dabbing".
The term stereotype derives from Greek στερεός (stereós) "solid, firm"[1] and τύπος (túpos) "blow, impression, engraved mark"[2] and in its modern sense was coined in 1798.
George Adolf Kubler (18769 January 1944) was probably the person who wrote most about the process. He was the founder and president of Certified Dry Mat Corporation. The firm made stereotype matrices or flong mats, which were used to first take a mould from the set-up type, and then to cast the stereotype plates. His writing included:
Fleishman provides a thorough and well illustrated explanation of the process in his blog.. Dalgin provides a good overview of the mechanics of newspaper production in the middle of the 20th century, including different methods of reproduction. There are also books on the process such as those by Wilson, Partridge, Hatch and Stewart, and Salade.