It was a thrill to see a Linotype Comet press on show at a museum in Kansas City last week. The Comet was first introduced in the 1950s according to Metal Type. It is a beautiful piece of engineering and an piece of newspaper history around the world and in Australia. In researching this I found a terrific post connecting this model back to the Sydney Morning Herald.
I remember them well from the days when my father published a country newspaper. The letterpress production process was centuries old and he became the first rural based paper in Australia to go to web offset in 1969. It entailed computerization of the whole process. It was amazing technology nearly 50 years ago and done in a small country town