Democratic Sentinel, Volume 17, Number 43, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 November 1893 — MARVELOUS SPEED. [ARTICLE]

MARVELOUS SPEED.

Wonderful Work of a Modern Perfecting Printing Pres*. To supply the Youth’s Companion’s hundreds of thousands of subscribers, says tie Companion, and not to employ the web perfecting printing press, would require the employment of several times as many presses as are In use. The comparatively oldfashioned “flat” press, properly “fed” and tended, prints one side of a sheet at the rate of two or three thousand impressions an hour. The web perfecting press, working for the most part automatically and five times as fast, supplies itself from a roll of paper, prints any number of pages at one impression, separates and counts the finished sheets, and delivers them in almost any desired form. Without this economy of time and labor, large editions could hardly be produced at moderate cost. With it, there are possible such marvels in cheap book-making as are shown by a New York publisher who has brought the best machinery to bear on the manufacture of cheap novels. His press, described by the American Bookbinder, has two cylinders, each of which receives electrotypes of one hundred and forty-four pages of a book. As the long strip of paper passes through the press, both sides are printed, making two hundred and eightyeight pages. Then the strip, after being carried over rollers which dry the ink, is automatically cut, folded, and brought together into the shape of a small volume, with the edges all trimmed. Every time the great cylinders go around a novel is printed, folded, and trimmed, and five thousand of these are turned out every hour, while, if it were necessary, the number might be incseased to eight thousand. From the printing-press these books are carried to a little machine that looks like a sewing-machine, and two wire stitches are taken in the back of each. The stitched volumes are then carried to the coveringmachine, where they are put side to side in a long feeding trough. At the end of this is a compartment large enough to take a book, carried on an endless chain running over wheels at each end. Indeed, there is a series of litile compartments on this chain, and as the chain moves along each compartment receives a book. As the book proceeds a wheel running in a glue pot presses against its back, smearing it with glue. A little farther along there is a pile of covers that comes up at the right moment, leaving a cover sticking to the back of the book. Of course the cover stands out straight on each side, but as it is carried all the way around on the chain, the glue has time to dry; and when the circuit has been made the book drops off on its back, and falling in between other books, the covers are folded up against the sides. Fifty books can be covered every minute.