'Farewell Etaoin shrdlu' film A film given to the London College of Printing by the printers of The New York Times. A printed note stuck to the box states "This is a filmed record of our life as newspaper printers. We are honored to have worked with the inventions of Johannes Guten- berg and Ottmar Mergenthaler, gifted men whose methods and machines made newspaper printing possible. These inventors made practical the development and spread of the low-cost printed word. Now we members of New York Typographical Union have passed our type-composing skills to the next generation of 'printers', called Electronic Computer-Typographers. May this film re-mind all who will see it of the way we worked in the Mechanical Age of Printing. We labored dilligently to make this industry 'The Art Preservative of All the Arts". Producer-Director David Loeb Weiss, Technical Adviser-Narrator Carl Schlesinger. The film is named after the first two rows on a lithography machine. When operating the machine, printers sometimes would make mistakes by leaning on the rows of buttons or running their fingers down the first two rows of buttons which would cause 'etaoin shrdlu' to be printed. You can see this in some historic newspapers and publications. The phrase became an inside joke in the printing industry. Digitised copies of the film can be found on the New York Times website as well as via the Internet Archive. Mar 1985