Book History from A to Z: S is for Stereotyping

And you thought stereotyping was when someone made assumptions about a group of people based on some broad category...read on for the probable origination of the term as we now use it.  ;D

Stereotyping was an advance in printing that involved making a mold of an entire page of print.  The page could then be printed in future without resetting the type.  Besides making reprints cheaper and faster, stereotyping made metal type last longer—it would normally be worn down each time it was used.  Stereotyping was tried as early as the 1700s;  in 1804 Lord Stanhope invented a method of making a plaster mold of the page of type, then filling the mold with molten lead, in essence making a copy of the “bed of type.”  Even though the stereotype plates could make reprints of popular items like Bibles easy to reproduce, it wasn’t widely used during the 1700s partly because typesetters, called compositors, organized into unions to protect their jobs and partly because the process of stereotyping required extra training for workers.  The plaster used to make the molds was difficult to clean from the type, and the type could be damaged in the process.  Later on, a material called “flong,” which was made of paper, was used to make the molds for stereotyping.  Flong did not damage the type as the plaster did and was easily removed from the type.  

Photo source:  commons.wikimedia.org, labeled for reuse.