And so, after exchanging a few emails, I found myself at the home of the man who owns and operates the only functional Monotype caster in the country. After chatting for a while about hyphenation and justification (my knowledge of which was woefully inadequate) Harry showed me around the press itself. His office was an organised chaos of computers and printing paraphernalia of varying vintage, and as we sat down at a modern PC he explained to me how the Chepman & Myllar Press differed from a traditional Monotype shop. The text is set, he said, not by a Monotype keyboard but by computer.[11]I’m ashamed to say that it took me some time to grasp this. When I finally did so, I was intrigued; when Mr McIntosh demonstrated it to me, I was flabbergasted.
Shiny Characters. If you have any interest in typesetting and printing, this is a fascinating story.