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Hot Metal Typesetting

Woodside Press is home to a large and unique collection of Linotype and Ludlow typecasting equipment and typefaces. We offer typesetting services for use with our letterpress printing, and we provide hot-metal typecast "slugs" for other letterpress printers, for artist printmakers, and for foil stampers. With an vast collection of faces for either machine, we are qualified to fulfill any job, large or small, that comes our way. What are Linotype and Ludlow? Read on to find out.

Linotype
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Called "the epitome of Late Victorian industrial design," the Linotype is an amazingly complex machine that assembles and casts a solid "line of type." Introduced in 1886, it was the industry standard in publishing almost a century.

 

Woodside Press is home to two fully functional Linotype machines as well as an unparalleled collection of linotype typefaces by some of the pre-eminent type designers of the 20th century including Hermann Zapf, Frederick Goudy and Rudolph Ruzicka.

 

Today, Woodside Press uses the Linotype to produce type for use in our presses, but with a little extra care and diligence, Linotype can be used in foil-stamping equipment as well.

Ludlow
 

While the Linotype excels at producing fine typography, it is limited to smaller point sizes. The Ludlow Typographic Machine was invented to fill this void by enabling type-

casting in larger sizes for use in headlines, book titling, and advertisements.

 

We have one Ludlow caster and a large selection of typefaces that run the gamut from the timelessly beautiful to the quirky and retro. Some of our faces will remind experienced graphic designers of familiar families (like Futura) but with subtle variations that make them unique.

 

Ludlow slugs are uniquely well suited for foil stamping due to the distance between the face of the type and the top of the slug body.

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