When a newspaper leaves the press it is folded, cut, and ready for the news stand. Not so with the book and magazine press. There are too many pages to be handled by a single press, and, furthermore, the pages must be bound together. Some large magazines contain regularly more than 500 pages and occasionally they will run over a thousand pages. Obviously no single press could handle so many pages and it takes the product of many presses to make up a single copy. Each press prints what is known as a form or signature and these signatures from the different presses are then gathered, wire-stitched, and bound into individual copies. There are machines which will do this work of gathering and binding at the rate of sixty 1,000-page magazines or catalogues every minute. The machines are adjustable for pages of different dimensions. The forms may consist of four, eight, sixteen, or thirty-two pages. A separate compartment is provided for each signature. A large machine will handle thirty-six 32-page signatures. The compartments are kept supplied by an operator, there being usually six compartments for each operator to attend to. The bottom signature in each compartment is brought into position by a suction device which seizes the signature and draws it out, depositing it in a steel trough. Here a belt conveyor moves the signature along at the right speed to carry it before the next compartment just as a signature is being withdrawn therefrom. Thus the magazine or book is progressively built up and the signatures reach the end of their course properly assembled. A very delicate adjustment is provided to insure the proper adjustment of signatures. The grippers are adjusted to receive signatures of a certain thickness. If the operator should make a mistake and put a signature of a wrong size in the compartment the whole machine would come to a standstill. The adjustment is so delicate that even a variation of a single thickness of paper is enough to operate the stop mechanism. Each assembly of signatures as it reaches the end of the trough is squared up and then bound with wire stitching. From this point it moves on to receive its cover. A thin coating of hot glue is applied to the rear edge of the signatures. The cover is automatically applied and firmly pressed into place. The finished book is then carried on out of the machine and deposited neatly on a pile of previously bound books. To operate such a machine there are required one chief operator and an assistant and six girls to feed the signatures to the compartments. SETTING TYPE BY MACHINE