It's good to know that there are still quite a few of us out there who
have worked with hot type and who remember the technology. I myself
learned it back in the late 1940's in high school because I had to take
a shop course and the choices were woodworking, metal shop, and
printing. I'd already taken woodworking in junior high school, and the
metal shop classes were full of guys fixing up their cars so they could
drop out of school and drive around looking cool (of course, we didn't
say "cool" in those days), so I took a semester of printing, and I liked
it so much that I took another year of it. I learned how to use a
clam-shell job press, but I never got to use the rotary press that was
an old-fashioned model even then. Then fifteen years later I needed a
job for a year, so I walked into a print shop in Hartford and talked my
way into a compositor's position. Bought myself a stick and a rule
(which I've since given away to a younger academic colleague who
remembers something about the old days because her father was a
printer). We set a lot of repro proofs for ads. The shop had one of the
last collections of hot type in all of New England, and the last time I
looked the whole building (which was a warehouse next to the train
station) has become apartments full of yuppies. But the shop was on the
third floor, and you have to have a well-built building to hold up all
those cases full of lead alloy. The Monotype casters putting along were
fun to watch, and I still like the smell of ink. And I belong to the
Type Directors Club, altho I've only been once to their meetings in NYC.
By the way, there's a good printing museum in Houston.