The New York Herald's composing room, filled with linotype machines, circa 1902 (Library of Congress) Last Wednesday night, I was hanging around at home when a mysterious tweet crossed the transom. “If anyone knows this it’s you,” the message said, with a link to another tweet that laid out a bit of a mystery: “Rumor says in the 1950s, NYTimes created a special skinny ‘S’ so they could fit ‘EISENH