The leading material forces in newspaper production are type, paper, and presses.

Printing types are cast from a composition which is made one-half of lead, one-fourth of tin, and one-fourth of antimony, though these proportions are slightly reduced, so as to admit what the chemist calls of copper “a trace,” the sum of these parts aiming at a metal which “shall be hard, yet not brittle; ductile, yet tough; flowing freely, yet hardening quickly.”  Body type, that is, those classes ever seen in ordinary print, aside from display and fancy styles, is in thirteen classes, the smallest technically called brilliant and the largest great primer.

In the reading columns of newspapers but four classes are ordinarily used—­agate for the small advertisements; agate, nonpareil, and minion for news, miscellany, etc., and minion and brevier for editorials—­the minion being used for what are called minor editorials, and the brevier for leading articles, as to which it may be said that young editorial writers consider life very real and very earnest until they are promoted from minion to brevier.

A complete assortment of any one of these classes is called a font, the average weight of which is about 800 pounds.  Whereas our alphabet has 26 letters, the compositor must really use of letters, spaces, accent marks, and other characters in an English font 152 distinct types, and in each font there are 195,000 individual pieces.  The largest number of letters in a font belongs to small e—­12,000; and the least number to the z—­200.  The letters, characters, spaces, etc., are distributed by the printer in a pair of cases, the upper one for capitals, small capitals, and various characters, having 98 boxes, and the lower one, for the small letters, punctuation marks, etc., having 54 boxes.

A few newspapers are using typesetting machines for all or part of their composition.  The New York Tribune is using the Linotype machine for all its typesetting except the displayed advertisements, and other papers are using it for a portion of their work, while still others are using the Rogers and various machines, of which there are already six or more.  It seems probable that within the early future newspaper composition will very generally be done by machinery.

It has been suggested to me that many of my hearers this evening know little or nothing of the processes of the printer’s art, and that some exposition of it may interest a considerable portion of this audience.

The vast number of these little “messengers of thought” which are required in a single modern daily newspaper is little known to newspaper readers.  Set in the manner of ordinary reading, a column of the New York Tribune contains 12,200 pieces, counting head lines, leads, and so on; while, if set solidly in its medium-sized type, there are 18,800 pieces in one column, or about 113,000 in a page, or