“It has six plate cylinders, each cylinder carrying eight stereotype plates, which represent eight pages of the ‘Herald,’ and six impression cylinders. These cylinders, when the press is working at full speed make 200 revolutions a minute. The period of contact between the paper and the plate cylinders is therefore inconceivably brief, and how in that fractional space of time a perfect impression is made, even to the reproduction of such fine lines as are shown in these illustrations, is one of those things which, to the man who is not ‘up’ in mechanics, must forever remain a mystery. But that it does it you know, because you have the evidence of your own eyes. “A double folder forms part of this machine. A single folder would not be equal to the task imposed upon it. As it is, this double folder has to exercise such celerity to keep up with the streams of printed paper that descend upon it that its operations are too quick for the eye to follow. “The press has two delivery outlets. At each the papers are automatically counted in piles of fifty. No matter how rapidly the papers come out, there is never a mistake in the count. It is as sure as fate. By an ingenious contrivance--if I should attempt to describe it more definitely most people would be none the wiser--each fiftieth paper is shoved out an inch beyond the others that have been dropped onto the receiving tapes, thus serving as a sort of tally mark. “Truly it is a marvelous machine--this Sextuple press. Nowhere will you find a more perfect adaption of means to ends; nowhere in any branch of industry a piece of mechanism which offers a finer example of what human skill and ingenuity is capable of. And it is free from that reproach which is sometimes brought against the greatest triumph of inventive genius in other departments of human activity--that they make mere automatons out of human beings. “The printing press is synonymous with progress, with the diffusion of knowledge and the spread of ideas. Without the great improvements that have been made in it within the memory of many men now living the modern newspaper, the best friend of liberty, and the greatest foe of tyranny, would be an impossibility. It has more than kept pace with the advancement in other departments of industry. In 1829 the Washington Hand Press was introduced and regarded as quite a mechanical triumph. At its best it printed 250 impressions an hour on one side, or 125 complete newspapers of insignificant dimensions. Now, a little over sixty years later, a machine is brought out which, when the number of papers alone is compared, does 150 times as much work in the same time, and which, if the comparison is extended to the actual amount of printing done, does over 2,000 times as much work.” [Illustration: APPLETON ROTARY BOOK PRESS]