Midden Heap · Track 19 · middle

The Linotype Men

The Linotype operator (1886 – 1970s–80s): newspaper typesetters using hot-metal machines that cast a line of type at once. Computerized typesetting wiped out the trade in the 1970s–80s. Some operators committed suicide when their newspapers converted overnight. Mechanism: automation — the machine arrived, the trade vanished in years, not generations.

Lyrics

Four in the morning, the whole city sleeps.
But here, the lead river runs hot and it runs deep.
Five hundred degrees in the pot by your hip.
The taste of the metal is there on your lip.
Shirt off in summer, the air thick as oil.
A headline is cooling, born out of the toil.
The copy comes down in a tube with a sigh.
Another edition, another night dies.

Etaoin Shrdlu, the key fall, the matrix slide.
A hot metal slug where the letters reside.
Tap-tap on the keyboard, a ninety-key prayer.
Clack-hiss of the casting, it's shaking the air.
We built you the world in a line o' type.
We made you the truth for the morning's first light.

A callus grows hard on the spaceband thumb.
For thirty-odd years 'til your fingers are numb.
You learn every whisper and groan of the beast.
From the Western edition down to the East.
You can spell out a murder, a wedding, a war.
Without looking down at the keyboard no more.
Your body remembers the rhythm and beat.
The pulse of the city, right under your feet.

Then one Tuesday morning in 1983,
they brought in a terminal, cold as the sea.
No heat and no hiss, just a screen with a hum.
The skill in your hands, it was suddenly dumb.
They came in the night to obliterate the trade.
A life's worth of knowledge, a ghost they had made.
And the silence they left, it was louder than lead.
It's a different machine talking now in your head.

The pots are all cold now.
The galleys are rust.
The truth is all pixels.
The men are all dust.