Stereotype (printing)

“ The invention of stereotyping is also a great improvement in printing. Almost all works, after being put in type, are stereotyped; the advantage is that a new edition can be struck off as often as called for, without the labor of resetting the type.
The process of stereotyping differs from common printing, in that the letters, after being set up, are cast in plates of entire pages, from plaster of Paris moulds.
The workman in the picture is about removing the moulds from the type beneath. ”

“ The stereotype is like the lavender window-panes on Beacon Street, like the door-keeper at a costume ball who judges whether the guest has an appropriate masquerade. There is nothing so obdurate to education or to criticism as the stereotype. ”

“ Stereotyping gradually spread, and soon effected a considerable reduction in the cost of books. The arguments that were advanced against its utility have a ridiculous look at the present day, when almost every important work is stereotyped or electrotyped. ”

“ Regardless of our vocations-working in a large corporation or heading one's own business, farming, creating art, teaching language or mathematics, programming, or even participating in a university's board of trustees- we accept, even if with some reluctance, the rationalization of language. Our lives take place increasingly in the impersonal world of stereotype discourse of forms, applications, passwords, and word processed letters. ”

“ This stereotyping of their books has caused the stereotyping of their ideas; and kept them in the same eternal round of uniform notions, without variety or improvement. While the discovery of printing, therefore, has enabled them to multiply copies of their ancient books, it has discouraged the compilation of new works, and tied them down to an imitation of antiquity, without assisting them to burst the fetters which custom has laid upon them. ”

“ Stereotyping is a process by which the composed types of a page are founded in one piece. The object is to preserve composition so that it cannot be distributed, to cheapen cost, and save wear of type. ”

“ Instead of presenting a casual fact, a large screen of stereotypes, and a dramatic identification, they break down the drama, break through the stereotypes, and offer men a picture of facts, which is unfamiliar and to them impersonal. ”

“ The formula works when the public fiction enmeshes itself with a private urgency. But once enmeshed, in the heat of battle, the original self and the original stereotype which effected the junction may be wholly lost to sight. ”

“ Social Movements, Economic Forces, National Interests, Public Opinion are treated as persons, or persons like the Pope, the President, Lenin, Morgan or the King become ideas and institutions. The deepest of all the stereotypes is the human stereotype which imputes human nature to inanimate or collective things. ”

“ There is another reason, besides economy of effort, why we so often hold to our stereotypes when we might pursue a more disinterested vision. The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society. ”

“ And, therefore, the stereotypes are loaded with preference, suffused with affection or dislike, attached to fears, lusts, strong wishes, pride, hope. Whatever invokes the stereotype is judged with the appropriate sentiment. Except where we deliberately keep prejudice in suspense, we do not study a man and judge him to be bad. We see a bad man. We see a dewy morn, a blushing maiden, a sainted priest, a humorless Englishman, a dangerous Red, a carefree bohemian, a lazy Hindu, a wily Oriental, a dreaming Slav, a volatile Irishman, a greedy Jew, a 100% American. ”

“ There is in each set of stereotypes a point where effort ceases and things happen of their own accord, as you would like them to. The progressive stereotype, powerful to incite work, almost completely obliterates the attempt to decide what work and why that work. ”

“ What with our insensitiveness and inattention, things scarcely would have for us features and outlines so determined and clear that we could recall them at will, but for the stereotyped shapes art has lent them." The truth is even broader than that, for the stereotyped shapes lent to the world come not merely from art, in the sense of painting and sculpture and literature, but from our moral codes and our social philosophies and our political agitations as well. ”

“ STEREOTYPING. This term is applied to the process of obtaining the impression of a form of movable types, or of a woodcut, on a plate of metal which can be printed from. These plates, after the required number of copies 633have been printed, can be stored away; and they are ready for use whenever another issue of the work is required. When the pages that are to be stereotyped have been set up in ordinary type, there are several methods by which the stereotype plates may be obtained from them; or rather, there are several materials used to form the matrix or mould in which the metal is cast. ”

“ Men of letters, who had held an inferior and dependent position, were penetrated with the spirit of a refined society, while men of the world, in a circle where wit and literary skill were distinctions, began to aspire to the role of a bel esprit, to pride themselves upon some intellectual gift and the power to write without labor and without pedantry, as became their rank. Many of them lacked seriousness, dealing mainly with delicate fancies and trivial incidents, but pleasures of the intellect and taste became the fashion. ”

“ To some extent the journalist does sink his personality in that imaginary personality of his paper, a personality built up, like the human personality, by its past; and the result is a pompous, colourless, lifeless simulacrum. But in every other department of letters the trail of the "I" is over every page and every sentence. The most impersonal essays and poems are all in a sense egoistic. ”

“ It is true that we are going in for universals. Our books reach the hundred thousands, and our magazines the millions. The successful writer of plays, stories, or special articles trades in the thoughts that circulate through a vast community of common education, experience, and environment. The result is to spread and perpetuate the ideals and the liberal hopes that we call American, but also to stereotype and thus weaken their influence. They become counters in a game, or, better still, standardized foods for the imagination, whose popularity is certain until the fashion wears out. ”

“ To utter the unuttered thought—that is really the problem of literature in the future; and if a writer could be found to free himself from all stereotyped forms of expression, and to give utterance to the strange texture of thought and fancy, which differentiates each single personality so distinctly, so integrally, from other personalities, and which we cannot communicate to our dearest and nearest, he might enter upon a new province of art. ”

“ Since there is no stereotype without some basis in actuality, it goes without saying that individuals could be found resembling Page’s loyal Uncle Billy or Stark Young’s William Veal, or Dixon’s brutal Gus, or Scarlet Sister Mary or Van Vechten’s Lasca, or even Uncle Tom and Florian Slappey. But when, as is frequent, generalizations are drawn from these about a race or a section, the author oversteps his bounds as novelist, and becomes an amateur social scientist whose guesses are valueless, and even dangerous. ”

“ That the world at large are alarmed at acuteness and originality greater than their own? What has all this to do with the formation of the English language or with the first conditions and necessary foundation of speech itself? Is there nothing beyond the reach of prejudice and party-spirit? It seems in this, as in so many other instances, as if there was a patent for absurdity in the natural bias of the human mind, and that folly should be stereotyped! ”

“ There is a marked identity about their features, person, manners and costume, so unmistakable that it betrays their nationality in a moment. So stereotyped are even the features and form of this singular people, that we cannot fail in their identity in the rudest cut that pretends to represent them. ”

“ Yet useful as these general statements may be, the interpreter 15 of men of letters must always go back of the racial type or the social system to the individual person. He recognizes, as a truth for him, that theory of creative evolution which holds that in the ascending progress of the race each thinking person becomes a species by himself. ”

“ A further social habit of this people which we should find very strange and which I for my part think unaccountable is their habit of judging the excellence of a literary production, not by the sense or even the sound of it, but by the ink in which it is printed and the paper upon which it is impressed. ”

“ A book may become a fashion based on conventional acquiescence and appearances rather than [189] on real worth. Let the judgment of individualism, with courage and restraint, lay bare the fashion, and where then is its habitation or what is its name? Such judgment sets up more or less arbitrary lines of taste that run wide, and it makes a guess at what is enduring literature, a hazardous kind of guess. Yet the peculiar thing of it all is that in this guess pedantry is as likely to play false as is the capricious fancy of the reading public that takes the book of the hour, whatever it be. ”

“ The subtlest and most pervasive of all influences are those which create and maintain the repertory of stereotypes. We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception. ”

“ All the resemblances, of social origin, noticed in the social world are the direct or indirect result of imitation in all its forms,—custom, fashion, sympathy, obedience, instruction, education, naive or deliberate imitation. ”

“ TITLE-PAGE OF 1872
Showing the development during the nineteenth century of a severe and uninteresting style
Attractiveness is as necessary to the typography of the general job of printing as dignity and legibility are to a law brief, but, endeavoring to get attractiveness into their work, job printers often go astray. They wrongly labor under the impression that to have a job distinctive it must be made freakish. Typography is not good unless based upon art foundations. ”

“ I shall never repeat a conversation, but an idea often. I shall use the same types when I like, but not commonly the same stereotypes. A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times. ”

“ Just as emphasis in style is difficult when one habitually uses the strongest words and emphasis in voice is difficult when one habitually shouts, so emphasis in print is difficult when one habitually uses large capitals, display type, and italics. Loud printing is as objectionable as loud talking. ”

“ There still may be a few "extremists" and etiquette fanatics who insist that typewritten letters are for business purposes only, and that they are an insult when used socially. Prevalent custom to-day permits typewritten correspondence for nearly every occasion, and the well-typed social letter reflects better taste upon the sender than a hand-written letter that is difficult to read—and yet took a much greater length of time to write. ”

“ The outré in everything pertaining to good social usage is offensive to good taste. Thus, those who are refined and well-bred avoid such startling color combinations as deep purple paper inscribed with white ink. Of course, by its very daring, such a letter would gain immediate attention. ”

“ It is a prejudice altogether too common, a prejudice which dealers in old books have kept alive and profited from, to think that the editions of the fifteenth century are more accurate because they were printed from manuscript copies. ”

“ On the other hand, persons of a delicate taste will be disgusted with the simplicity and defective style of many of the letters, whilst the generality of readers, led away with the idea that every thing that appears in print is a work of labour, will think he sees in some of the other letters the laboured style of an author sufficiently apparent, notwithstanding the disguise he has assumed. ”

“ A pattern of stereotypes is not neutral. It is not merely a way of substituting order for the great blooming, buzzing confusion of reality. It is not merely a short cut. It is all these things and something more. It is the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world of our own sense of our own value, our own position and our own rights. The stereotypes are, therefore, highly charged with the feelings that are attached to them. They are the fortress of our tradition, and behind its defenses we can continue to feel ourselves safe in the position we occupy. ”

“ In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture. ”

“ In fact, he has made clear that even the most level-headed are blindly or slavishly governed by custom or fashion or both. He does not develop, however, the fact that imitation is largely a result of like-mindedness and common social stimuli. ”

“ Is it not a common complaint against inferior artists, whether in prose or verse, in painting or music, that their compositions lack character and originality? Uniformity is the distinguishing feature of mediocrity, while the work of genius is at once recognized and attributed to the origin whose impress it bears. And a little reflection will show that this is exactly what is meant by "style." Various tricks of voice, gesture, and dress, are associated by every one with his friends, glimpses of the hidden self being granted in such halt-unnoticed revelations. ”