Are Any Newspapers Still Printed Using Linotype?

Everyone knows that traditional printed newspapers are in decline. Just don't tell that to the man who runs The Saguache Crescent.

The little weekly in Saguache, Colorado, has 360 subscribers in a town of only 500 people. If you don't subscribe, you can buy a copy for 35 cents at some local businesses or read it for free at the town diner. Notably, The Saguache Crescent is the only newspaper in the country that still uses a linotype machine to set the type – the others switched to computer typesetting in the 1970s and 1980s. For those unfamiliar with linotype, it's a hot metal typesetting machine – introduced in the 1880s – that casts individual lines of metal type (known as slugs). The slugs are then arranged and clamped into a frame to make a one-page press plate.

The first copy of The Saguache Crescent (then known as the Advance) rolled off the press in 1882, and since 1902 it has been put together in the same building. Now run by 70-year-old Dean Coombs, the paper has been in the Coombs family since 1917. The newspaper's famous linotype machine, a Mergenthaler Model 14, was purchased in 1920. Coombs runs the paper as a one-man show, and he is the only one who knows how to operate (and repair) the antique linotype machine.

According to Coombs, he will be the last person to put out a newspaper the old-fashioned way. He has no children, and no other relatives who are interested in it, and he's not training any other successors. “To hand the paper off, I’d have to say, ‘You’ll never go anywhere. There will be no vacations.’ That’s not the way people want to live," he says.

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