March 27, 2004
.918
Random observations from the first day of our letterpress workshop:
- In Britain and America, the standard vertical distance from the top of a piece of type (i.e., the relief surface for printing) to its foot is .918 inches. This is called “type high.”
- Form, case, quoine, key, furniture, bed, roller, nick, groove, point, pica, lead, slug, press, stick, ink—for the most part the vocabulary of letterpress consists of one- or occassionally two-syllable words—short, sharp, and eminently material.
- Compare: pixel, layer, keyframe, markup, function, variable, routine, linker, compiler, system, interface.
- Twenty years of repetitive work on keyboards does not leave one’s fingers nimble enough to handle 10-point type.
- If you mess up and spill what’s in your composing stick you get “pied type.” This is bad.
- There is no separate compartment for <angle brackets> in a so-called California Job Case, the most common layout scheme for a drawer of type.
- Printing takes patience. Lots of it.
Posted by mgk at March 27, 2004 05:38 PM
Curious. What's a nick? Is it a piece of broken type?
It's the notch at the base of an individual piece of type that lets allows a compositor to know (by touch alone) whether it's facing "up" or "down".
Yes! Keep type alive! When I first started working, it was in printing and publishing operations that used the old Linotypes augmented with handset display type, etc. Everything about it fascinated me and does to this day. I stumbled onto your blog by accident, but it was sweet to find color photos of students TODAY still learning how it was done sans computer.
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