Peanuts: A Treasure Trove of Flongs
Channel: Glenn Fleishman
Date: 2022-05-20

Journalist and printing-history researcher Glenn Fleishman unveils nearly 200 Peanuts printing molds, or “flongs,” just acquired. Yes, it’s an unboxing! If you’re interested in comics or print history, take a look. I also share parts of the cartoon syndication and print production process, including showing a curved metal plate of a page full of comics, weighing about 40 lbs, and used on a newspaper press. 

Flongs were used to produce full-page metal plates, often for newspaper printing, from the 1800s through the 1980s. While largely forgotten, some who study the history of printing have found or purchased examples of flongs used for cartoon syndication, advertising production, full-page newspaper printing, tickets, and many other purposes. 

Find the 1926 Popular Mechanics article I mentioned and showed at https://books.google.com/books?id=PdgDAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA451&dq=popular%20mechanics%20comics%20skeezix&pg=PA451#v=onepage

A video of the Chicago Tribune’s 1937 newspaper production process shows the comic art to etched plate process https://archive.org/details/0081TreesToTribunes (advance to 19:01); also some great stuff here at 06:01: https://archive.org/details/0194_From_Trees_to_Tribunes_M0026_13_14_34_20 and at the start of https://archive.org/details/0194_From_Trees_to_Tribunes_M0026_13_00_38_01

Read more about flongs at https://glennf.medium.com/flong-time-no-see-2b54438027dd

Glenn Fleishman https://glenn.fun is a journalist, printer, designer, and creator of the Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule https://tinytypemuseum.com (Twitter @glennf) and the author of Six Centuries of Type and Printing.