the preparation of a new one from the beginning. In this electroplate and stereotype department, with its complexity of overhead gearing, its grime of black-lead, and its smell of hot wax, there are no fewer than twenty-two entirely different sorts of machines at work; and it must be remembered that a deal of skilled hand-work is done with various additional tools.
The "Tit-Bits" Printing Room.
When all these plates are prepared, of which no fewer than 460 are required every month, they are fixed upon the cylinders of the printing machines. And to see these machines, which for The Strand Magazine alone are of three different sorts, we must descend to the basement. The most noticeable of these is the "Rotary Art Press"—the only one in Europe—which will print sixty-four illustrated pages at one revolution of the cylinders. Another is the Web Press, which will print and fold sixty-four pages at each revolution; and the third, a smaller "Stop Cylinder" Press, capable of very fine work, but printing only sixteen pages at a time, and covering 750 of such sheets on one side in an hour.
But before any printing takes place, the paper, in great rolls of more than two miles long, must be re-wound, and for this a special winding machine is provided, whereon the paper unwinds from its original roll and forms another. This liberates the electricity with which new paper is usually highly charged, and which hinders and interferes with accuracy of the folding; it also facilitates the detection and cutting out of the inevitable faulty joins in the paper. Much depends on the paper, and great care is requisite in its use; it is often found that different reels of, to all appearance, exactly the same make of paper, for unaccountable reasons, produce entirely different results, good and bad.
Mounted on platforms attached to the Rotary Art Press are four men, whose business it is to "feed" the machine with sheets of paper. These sheets of paper are gripped by the machinery, and pass between two cylinders. The lower of these cylinders carries, firmly fixed to its surface, sixty-four plates of The Strand Magazine pages, and sixteen inking rollers, supplied with ink from two fountains, ink these plates. The upper cylinder is simply the "impression cylinder," carrying no plates, its function being to press the paper against the lower. Thus only one side of the paper is printed at a time—it being found advisable in the case of fine work to allow one side to dry before treating the other. The printed sheets pass over and down on rows of guiding tapes, which keep them flat; they go four at a time, two on each set of tapes, and in the end slide over a light frame of laths, hinged at the bottom and looking like an exaggerated and very wide comb.
