Metrostyle Lines
By John Phillips
Hi everyone; I've just got back from a short holiday and have been enjoyably working through a backup of MMDs.
As usual, Dan Wilson has come up with a knowledgeable and interesting note on player rolls,this time on the Metrostyle line. I agree with Dan; it's a useful guide, but doesn't need to be treated as holy writ. Dan also indicates that rolls Metrostyled after WW1 aren't very reliable. But how about those with a liitle block of text at the beginning of the Metrostyle line; weren't these lines put on the roll with a rubber printing strip (or stencil) as long as the roll itself? Didn't the Aeolian Co. in the UK build a special printing tower at the factory at Hayes near London in order to print Metrostyle and expression lines on their rolls?
I'm only regurgitating stuff here that Dan has told me in the past or that I've read in the (British) PPG Bulletin, but my understanding is that in the early days of Metrostyling, an operative (usually female) would follow a line on a master roll with a pantograph arrangement that controlled about a dozen pens. Each pen wrote a red line on a separate roll. The accuracy of the result depended on the care of the operator, which was likely to very - I can't think of a more boring job! But I would have thought that if Aeolian went to the trouble of making a rubber stencil 30 or 40 feet long, they would have also made the effort of getting it right.
My feeling is that the stencilled Metrostyle lines are usually pretty reliable but the hand-drawn ones aren't. What do you say, Dan?
John Phillips.
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(Message sent Mon 23 Sep 1996, 01:37:37 GMT, from time zone GMT+1000.) |
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