David Seat
David Seat has been working in Letterpress since 1971 when he started work at John H. Harland Check Printers in Nashville, Tennessee at the age of 18. He started out learning to run a Miehle V-50 press and then went into the National Guard. A year after he came back from Basic training, he applied for a job at another company called Check Printers, also in Nashville.
This is where he learned to work on Linotypes, Vandercook proof presses, Miehle Verticals, McAdams three-to-a-page presses, along with everything else in the plant. In 1979 he went into business with Jerry Spurlock repairing Linotypes and Intertypes around the state and the U.S.
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Dave and his wife Beth, drive thousands of miles a year to locations around the country repairing hundreds of Linotype, Intertype, and Ludlow machines. Museums, printers, and letterpress shops are indebted to their company, Hot Metal Services. www.hotmetalservices.com
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Dave may look familiar to those in the printing business as he is one of the stars of “Linotype: The Film.” It is a feature-length documentary centered around the Linotype type casting machine – dubbed the “Eighth Wonder of the World” – by Thomas Edison. The film tells the emotional and charming story of the people connected to the Linotype and how it impacted society and revolutionized the world of printing. https://linotypefilm.com
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We were fortunate to catch up with Dave at the Museum of Printing in Haverhill MA, where he was gracious enough to give us this demonstration.
Special thanks to David Chmielewski of DirectLine Media and the Museum of Printing.