Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/448

408 408 THOMAS NELSON. mous. Everything, from the compilation of a book to the lettering of its binding, is done upon the pre- mises, and for the founts of type and the paper alone are the proprietors indebted to outside help. The letterpress department consists of a spacious composing-room, a splendidly fitted machine-room, a press-room, and a stereotype foundry. As very large numbers of the works are issued, they are almost invariably printed from stereotype plates a process said to have been invented by William Ged, a gold- smith in -Edinburgh at the beginning of the last century; the Dutch, however, with some justice, claim the discovery for one of their countrymen, a very long time before this date ; at all events, the process was still almost a novelty when, as we have seen, Kelly first utilized it in London. In the machine-room and the press-room there are nineteen machines and seventeen presses constantly at work. Here large numbers of children's books are produced, and a number of machines are devoted to colour printing. From the machine-room the sheets are taken to the drying-room, where they are hung up in layers upon screens, which, when filled, are run into a hot-air chamber, where the ink is thoroughly dried in six or eight hours. The book-binding department occupies several large rooms, and employs two-thirds of all the work- people engaged. Although machines are provided for a great variety of operations, a large amount of hand-labour is found to be indispensable. As soon as the sheets have been thoroughly dried, they are folded by young women, as the machine-folding is only suitable for the coarser kinds of work. After