What is this antique thing-a-ma-bob? [resolved!]

[MercyA]

MIL found this and another similar thing when cleaning out an old desk. The two little holes in the middle are covered with a glass or plastic panel. It is small, maybe 1.5" long.

Any ideas?

My FIL did work in the newspaper printing business but was also very adept at fixing all kinds of things, so it really could be from anything.

Edited March 29, 2022 by MercyA

[MercyA]

Found it!!! Will update later tonight.

 

[Amy in NH]

Looks like it is upside-down.  A semi-colon?

[MercyA]

Okay! So I searched for similar images using Google, and the only thing that remotely looked the same was an image in someone's 2015 thesis on journalism and National Geographic. He had a picture of a similar item on his dedication page, but didn't identify it.

However, his dedication page included this phrase:

"...for etaoin shrdlu, the ghost of journalism innovations past."

I searched for "etaoin shrdlu" and found this on Wiki:

"Etaoin shrdlu is a nonsense phrase that sometimes appeared in print accidentally in the days of "hot type" publishing because of a custom of type-casting machine operators to fill out and discard lines of type when an error was made. It appeared often enough to become part of newspaper lore – a documentary about the last issue of The New York Times composed using hot metal (July 2, 1978) was titled Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu – and "etaoin shrdlu" is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary and in the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.

It is the approximate order of frequency of the 12 most commonly used letters in the English language.

The letters on type-casting machine keyboards (such as Linotype and Intertype) were arranged by descending letter frequency to speed up the mechanical operation of the machine, so lower-case e-t-a-o-i-n and s-h-r-d-l-u were the first two columns on the left side of the keyboard."

I googled Linotype parts, and that's what it is. Part of an Linotype printing machine. 

Thank you, thesis writer. 🙂

ETA: And @Amy in NH! It's a semi-colon from an old printing machine.

Edited March 29, 2022 by MercyA

[MercyA]

1 minute ago, Amy in NH said:

Looks like it is upside-down.  A semi-colon?

I didn't even notice the shape of the holes. You are brilliant!!!

[Miss Tick]

Interesting! Thanks for the update