The inking system of printing press is very elaborate. It is highly essential that the ink be spread upon the type surface in just sufficient quantity to be picked up by the paper and that the ink be uniformly distributed over the whole surface. There is an ink reservoir and a set of inking rollers for each cylinder. The reservoir consists of a trough running the whole length of the cylinder. At each turn a revolving roller dips into the ink and transfers a thin film of ink to a series of small rollers. These are grouped about a large roller to which they deliver the ink. The small rollers have an axial reciprocating motion whereby the ink is uniformly spread over the large roller. The latter transfers its thin coating of ink to a pair of rollers known as “form rollers” and these in turn deliver the ink to the printing cylinder. A SEA CAPTAIN’S CONTRIBUTION The folding mechanism of a printing press is interesting. The paper is first fed over a wedge-shaped form which folds the paper lengthwise and then it is given a cross-wise fold. Curiously enough the folding mechanism for printing presses was first invented by a Yankee sea captain, named Cromwell, who could not read a drawing but developed his invention by whittling out wooden models. He also contributed other valuable improvements for the printing press worked out in the same primitive way. The rotary press was evolved especially for the printing of daily papers and for a long time magazines continued to be printed on flat-bed presses. But as the circulation of magazines grew into the hundreds of thousands it became necessary to build high speed presses to turn out these large editions. Accordingly rotary machines were constructed similar in design to newspaper presses, but with refinements to enable them to produce the better class of work required of magazine printing. Although there are many magazines still printed on flat bed presses, particularly those which publish small editions of less than a hundred thousand, all the big national weekly journals and monthly magazines are printed on rotary presses and some of them even use web presses. GATHERING AND BINDING MAGAZINES