University Park, PA -- The film Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu will be shown October 8, 2003, 2:00–3:15 p.m., in the Foster Auditorium, 101 Pattee Library. Following the film, Gene C. Foreman, the Foster Professor in Communications, Journalism Department, College of Communications and William L. Joyce, the Dorothy Foehr Huck Chair and head of the Special Collections Library, University Libraries, will lead a discussion.

The film documents the night the New York Times rolled off the press for the last time using hot lead and the Linotype system. It tells how that process was replaced by computerized, electronic, automated technology and includes interviews with workers. A 1980 Blue Ribbon winner at the American Film Festival, the film is narrated by John Schlesinger.

So just who is Etaoin Shrdlu? With the idea of speeding up the setting of type, the old Linotype keyboards had their letters arranged in decreasing order of the frequency with which they appear in the language, making the first two rows ETAOIN SHRDLU. In the daily race to prepare the newspaper for the press, the letters would end up as space holders and were often accidentally printed. The curious phrase, recorded both in the Oxford English Dictionary and also in the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, caught the imagination of a number of authors who offered it as a character, two lovers, among other interpretations.

The event is open to the public and is sponsored by the Libraries Colloquia Committee.

For more information, contact the Office of the Dean, 814-865-0401.

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Editor's Contact:
Catherine Grigor, 814-865-0401