A Morning on the Type Foundry Floor

Malik Osei: There's a steady clatter in here, like a sewing machine with hiccups. That's a Monotype caster, one of nine in this workshop, making metal type one letter at a time. This is Field Notes, I'm Malik Osei, and the woman feeding it is Greta Lindahl, one of the two people who work here. Greta, what's it casting right now?

Greta Lindahl: Lowercase e, twelve point, in a Caslon. Six hundred of them. It makes about a hundred and forty a minute, so this order takes around five minutes of casting and about an hour of setting up.

Malik Osei: Who orders six hundred lowercase e's in 2026?

Greta Lindahl: A printer who lost theirs. That's honestly most of our work. Somebody drops a type case, half the e's roll under a cabinet, and they phone me. E is the most used letter in English, so it wears out first and gets lost first. I cast more e's than the rest of the alphabet put together.

Malik Osei: How does the machine know what shape to make?

Greta Lindahl: From the matrix, this small bronze block with the letter struck into it. Each machine holds a case of two hundred and twenty-five matrices. Molten metal, mostly lead with tin and antimony, is pumped into the mould at about three hundred and forty degrees, against the matrix, and a second later a finished letter drops out on the right.

Malik Osei: It's still hot.

Greta Lindahl: Don't pick it up. Give it ten seconds.

Malik Osei: Where do the matrices come from?

Greta Lindahl: Everywhere. Bought from closing foundries, mostly in the eighties and nineties. Some of ours are from 1911. You can't easily make new ones any more, so we treat them carefully. A matrix that cracks is a letter that may never exist again in that size.

Malik Osei: What breaks most?

Greta Lindahl: The machines, a little every day. They're from the 1950s. My colleague Piet spends most mornings with a spanner. We have a tenth machine at the back that has never run; we take parts from it.

Malik Osei: I can see shelves of paper ribbons with holes punched in them.

Greta Lindahl: That's the other way of using the caster. A keyboard operator types the text and it punches the ribbon; then the caster reads the ribbon and casts whole lines in order. We still do that for small poetry presses. A book of forty pages is about three days of casting.

Malik Osei: And the metal?

Greta Lindahl: Recycled forever. Customers send old type back, we melt it down in that pot, and it becomes new type. Some of this alloy has probably been a hundred different books.

Malik Osei: Greta Lindahl, thank you. From the type foundry floor, this has been Field Notes.