Monday, March 16, 2015

Hot type flashback

dingbat1

The garage cleanout continues at a slow pace because I keep finding stuff that I want to look at and keep.

Like this relic from the hot type era. We called these things dingbats. My memory is a little hazy about the circumstances under which they were used, but I think they ran with our bylines in The Indianapolis News for a brief period in the early 1970s.

I would have thought only columnists would have them, but I didn’t start writing my weekly motorcycle column until later and I had a different dingbat for that feature.

If memory serves, staff artist Ron Schwartz did the drawing. A photoengraving was made from it and then glued to a block of lead for insertion into the page.dingbat2

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