In relief printing, a flong is a temporary negative paper mould made from an impression in a forme of set type or other relief matter, such as printing blocks. A flong is an intermediate step used to cast a metal stereotype (or "stereo") which can be used in letterpress printing on either flat-bed or rotary press. After the flong is made, the original type can be distributed (for hand-set composition) or melted-down (for hot-metal typesetting). A flong is part of the stereotype process.
The term flong was introduced no later than 1862 to refer to paper-based molds, also called a stereotype matrix (or mat, for short), which were in use no later than the early 1850s. [1] These molds may have been made through the papier-mâché wet process, which involves macerating paper, though contemporary writers suggest that was impractical. [2] More commonly, flong refers to sheets of paper interleaved with paste or a solid cardboard-like industrially produced sheet like cardboard.
Prior to flongs, the following were used to moulding type to create stereos:
The process for making moulds for electrotypes was similar, except that these were made with soft materials such as beeswax or the naturally occurring mineral wax ozokerite. [13] : 34 The thin electrotype shells had to be backed with type metal to a depth of 8mm make them robust enough for use. [13] : 54
Partridge describes the papier-mâché process thus: "A few sheets of thin paper are soaked in water until soft and then pasted together to form a flong. This flong is beaten into a page of type and dried, thus forming a matrix to receive the molten metal, which, when cooled, becomes an exact duplicate of the type page. A large number of duplicate casts may be made from the same matrix, either in flat form as required for flat-bed presses, or curved to fit the cylinders of rotary presses." [10] : 17 The flong was constructed by pasting together two sheets of wetted soft but tough matrix paper and four sheets of strong tissue paper. [10] : 17 A rice-straw based tissue paper was used for the side of the flong facing the type. [10] : 19 After making up the flong matrix, it can be kept for several days if kept suitably moist by wrapping in a wet blanket for example.
The flong slightly larger than the forme was laid over it and then carefully beaten into the forme of type using a brush with stiff bristles. Many gentle blows were better to fewer strong ones. [10] : 31-32 Any hollows in the back of the flong after it was beaten in were filled, either with strawboard or pieces of flong or with a packing compound. [10] : 33 The flong was then covered with a sheet of backing paper and moved, still sitting on the forme, to a steam drying table. Here it was covered with four to eight pieces of soft blanket and pressed down to ensure that the flong stayed in contact with the forme while it dried. Drying took six to seven minutes typically, but this depended on the steam pressure. [10] : 36
The golden rule for stereotyping was to have cool metal and a hot box to avoid problems with shrinkage cavities on the face of the plate or sinks, where the face of the plate shrank away from the front. Sometimes a casting board was used to slow the cooling at the back of the casting, as this could help to avoid problems due to the flong being a poor conductor. [14] : 48-49 Before casting, the casting box was heated. This could be done by ladling hot type metal into it as many as three times and removing the resulting plate. Alternatively, the mould could be gas-heated.
The dry flong was then trimmed, leaving just enough of a margin to go under the gauges in the casting box. These gauges were the pieces of metal, typically an L-shaped piece and a straight piece to border the sides and bottom of the flong in the casting box. The flong was then place in the casting box and the gauges placed at its sides. The box was closed up, with scrap paper used to form an apron to help funnel the molten type metal into the box.
The type metal mixture used for stereotype plates had from five to ten percent of tin and fifteen percent of antimony, with the balance in lead. [14] : 44 The percentage of tin varies with the type of mould as tin makes the cast sharper. Five percent was fine for text letterpress, but ten percent was needed for half-tone blocks. [15] : 163
The following illustrations from Stereotyping and Electrotyping (1880) by Frederick J. Wilson show some of the steps in the process of making and using a flong. [7]
Wheedon stated that a limited number of duplicate casts could be made from one flong. [15] : 157-169 However, Partridge states that a large number of duplicate casts may be made from the same matrix. [10] : 17 Dalgin states that to his knowledge as many as thirty, and maybe more, plates have been cast from a single flong. [12] : 86
Printing historian Glenn Fleishman states that while flongs could make multiple casts, they typically could not be removed and reused. However, flongs might be made and then stored without being cast for future use, potentially for decades in the right conditions. Kubler noted that in 1941, the United States Government Publishing Office in Washington had over a quarter of a million flongs in "Mat Only" storage, "the mats being stored for future use and the type destroyed." [4] : 331
Wilson notes that the word flong is an English phonetic form of the French word flan, which is pronounced in almost exactly the same way. [7] : 27 The word is attributed both to Claude Genoux who used the word flan in his original patent to describe the papier-mâché matrix, and to James Dellagana, a Swiss stereotyper in London. [3] : 40 Apparently, when living in Paris, Dellagana frequently visited a café where he would eat a pastry called a flan, which was built up of different layers. [7] : 27 However, flan or crème caramel is a solid custard, and does not resemble the way in which the flong is built up, with layers of paper interspersed with paste, instead rather closely resembles another popular French dessert, mille-feuille, dating to the 16th century.
Kubler states that outside of France and England the general term for a papier-mâché mat was not a flong but a wet mat. [3] : 40 However, several technical manuals from the United States use the terms including Kubler himself [4] [3] and Partridge, [10] as well as the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics 1929 study of productivity in Newspaper Printing. [9] : 90
Fleishman provides a thorough and well-illustrated explanation of the process in his blog. [16] Dalgin provides a good overview of the mechanics of newspaper production in the middle of the 20th century, including different methods of reproduction. [12] There are also books on the whole stereotype process such as those by Wilson, [7] Partridge, [10] Hatch and Stewart, [17] and Salade. [13]
On 1 April 1977 The Guardian , a UK newspaper, published a seven-page special report on San Serriffe , an imaginary island to the north-east of the Seychelles. [18] The hoax was full of typographical and printing puns, with towns named after different fonts. The indigenous inhabitants were said to be the Flong and their language was ki-flong. The hoax is well described, along with images of the pages in the seven page special report which perpetrated the hoax on the Museum of Hoaxes website. [19] The Guardian followed up in 1978 with parodies of twelve UK and Irish newspapers across ten pages: The SS Guardian, The SS Financial Times, The SS Times, The SS Morning Star, The SS Mirror (half page), The SSun (half page), The SS Daily Express (half page), The SS Daily Mail (half page), The SS Irish Times, The SS Telegraph, The SS Sunday Times, and the News of the SS World. [20] However, this was considered to be less successful than the original. [19] Most of the parody newspapers make some reference to the flong. The San Serriffe hoax is ranked fifth in the top one hundred April Fool's Hoaxes by the Museum of Hoaxes. [21]
Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and images using a master form or template. The earliest non-paper products involving printing include cylinder seals and objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder and the Cylinders of Nabonidus. The earliest known form of printing evolved from ink rubbings made on paper or cloth from texts on stone tablets, used during the sixth century. Printing by pressing an inked image onto paper appeared later that century. Later developments in printing technology include the movable type invented by Bi Sheng around 1040 AD and the printing press invented by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century. The technology of printing played a key role in the development of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution and laid the material basis for the modern knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses.
Movable type is the system and technology of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document usually on the medium of paper.
Papermaking is the manufacture of paper and cardboard, which are used widely for printing, writing, and packaging, among many other purposes. Today almost all paper is made using industrial machinery, while handmade paper survives as a specialized craft and a medium for artistic expression.
Typesetting is the composition of text for publication, display, or distribution by means of arranging physical type in mechanical systems or glyphs in digital systems representing characters. Stored types are retrieved and ordered according to a language's orthography for visual display. Typesetting requires one or more fonts. One significant effect of typesetting was that authorship of works could be spotted more easily, making it difficult for copiers who have not gained permission.
Bronze is the most popular metal for cast metal sculptures; a cast bronze sculpture is often called simply "a bronze". It can be used for statues, singly or in groups, reliefs, and small statuettes and figurines, as well as bronze elements to be fitted to other objects such as furniture. It is often gilded to give gilt-bronze or ormolu.
San Serriffe is a fictional island nation invented for April Fools' Day 1977, by Britain's The Guardian newspaper. It was featured in a seven-page hoax supplement, published in the style of contemporary reviews of foreign countries, commemorating the tenth anniversary of the island's independence, complete with themed advertisements from major companies. The supplement provided an elaborate description of the nation as a tourist destination and developing economy, but most of its place names and characters were puns and plays on words relating to printing. The original idea was to place the island in the Atlantic Ocean near Tenerife, but because of the ground collision of two Boeing 747s there a few days before publication it was moved to the Indian Ocean, near the Seychelles islands. Because of this late decision, the authors made San Serriffe a moving island – a combination of coastal erosion on its west side and deposition on the east cause it to move towards Sri Lanka, with which it will eventually collide, at about 1.4 kilometres per year (0.87 mi/a).
Offset printing is a common printing technique in which the inked image is transferred from a plate to a rubber blanket and then to the printing surface. When used in combination with the lithographic process, which is based on the repulsion of oil and water, the offset technique employs a flat (planographic) image carrier. Ink rollers transfer ink to the image areas of the image carrier, while a water roller applies a water-based film to the non-image areas.
Letterpress printing is a technique of relief printing for producing many copies by repeated direct impression of an inked, raised surface against individual sheets of paper or a continuous roll of paper. A worker composes and locks movable type into the "bed" or "chase" of a press, inks it, and presses paper against it to transfer the ink from the type, which creates an impression on the paper.
Papier-mâché, frequently miswritten as paper mache, is a composite material consisting of paper pieces or pulp, sometimes reinforced with textiles, and bound with an adhesive, such as glue, starch, or wallpaper paste.
In the manufacture of metal type used in letterpress printing, a matrix is the mould used to cast a letter, known as a sort. Matrices for printing types were made of copper.
This page describe terms and jargon related to sculpture and sculpting.
In printing and typography, hot metal typesetting is a technology for typesetting text in letterpress printing. This method injects molten type metal into a mold that has the shape of one or more glyphs. The resulting sorts or slugs are later used to press ink onto paper. Normally the typecasting machine would be controlled by a keyboard or by a paper tape.
Punchcutting is a craft used in traditional typography to cut letter punches in steel as the first stage of making metal type. Steel punches in the shape of the letter would be used to stamp matrices into copper, which were locked into a mould shape to cast type. Cutting punches and casting type was the first step of traditional typesetting. The cutting of letter punches was a highly skilled craft requiring much patience and practice. Often the designer of the type would not be personally involved in the cutting.
Electrotyping is a chemical method for forming metal parts that exactly reproduce a model. The method was invented by Moritz von Jacobi in Russia in 1838, and was immediately adopted for applications in printing and several other fields. As described in an 1890 treatise, electrotyping produces "an exact facsimile of any object having an irregular surface, whether it be an engraved steel- or copper-plate, a wood-cut, or a form of set-up type, to be used for printing; or a medal, medallion, statue, bust, or even a natural object, for art purposes."
Modelling clay or modelling compound is any of a group of malleable substances used in building and sculpting. The material compositions and production processes vary considerably.
In printing, a stereotype, stereoplate or simply a stereo, is a solid plate of type metal, cast from a papier-mâché or plaster mould taken from the surface of a forme of type. The mould was known as a flong.
A release agent is a chemical used to prevent other materials from bonding to surfaces. It can provide a solution in processes involving mold release, die-cast release, plastic release, adhesive release, and tire and web release.
Type casting is a technique for casting the individual letters known as sorts used in hot metal typesetting by pouring molten metal into brass moulds called matrices.
The Monotype system is a system for printing by hot-metal typesetting from a keyboard. The two most significant differences from the competing Linotype machine are that
Kashmiri papier-mâché is a handicraft of Kashmir that was brought by Muslim saint Mir Sayyid Ali Hamadani from Persia in the 14th century to medieval India. It is based primarily on paper pulp, and is a richly decorated, colourful artifact; generally in the form of vases, bowls, or cups, boxes, trays, bases of lamps, and many other small objects. These are made in homes, and workshops, in Srinagar, and other parts of the Kashmir Valley, and are marketed primarily within India, although there is a significant international market. The product is protected under the Geographic Indication Act 1999 of Government of India, and was registered by the Controller General of Patents Designs and Trademarks during the period from April 2011 to March 2012 under the title "Kashmir Paper Machie".
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