![]() ![]() ![]() A book had to reach a certain level of demand to merit the high expense of stereotyping, but it was worth it. Stereotyping was expensive, but imagine that poor compositor having to re-set some ridiculously popular book for the 26th time. That way you could take apart the type (called “distributing”) and immediately use it for other projects. In yet another example of font tyranny, the process of stereotyping sought to address the chronic scarcity of type supplies by making molds of already set type, then casting whole metal plates of the page for reprinting later. Electrotypes are a type of stereotype plates with a layer of copper. HOT OFF THE PRESSĪn electrotype plate that has partially worn away you can see the layers. The ones in the lower part of the case are, you guessed it, all lowercase. All the capital letters are on the top, or the uppercase. Look back at that image of the type case from Moxon’s book published in 1683. But more than that, it changed the way we think about the alphabet. The type case clearly ruled the compositors’ lives. That’s why it’s “mind your p’s and q’s,” not “mind your b’s and d’s,” which are not neighbors in the type case. The lowercase p’s and q’s are right next to each other, just begging to be mixed up. In older type cases, each letter was kept in a segregated section to be picked out by the compositor setting the type. This required a certain amount of focus from the workers who set the type (known as “compositors”), especially when it came to letters that look like mirror images of each other. ![]() Setting type means placing each individual letter in backward, so that when the inked type is pressed into paper, the mirror image reads the right way forward. Both versions make sense coming from the print shop. This phrase means being on one’s best behavior in British English, and paying close attention in American English. Image of a type case from Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, 1683 // Public Domain But sometimes this meant running out of type in the middle of a job, making you out of sorts. For most of the history of print, purchasing type was expensive, and to save on costs, many printers would only keep enough on hand to get the job done. A sort is an individually cast piece of type. This phrase has come to mean feeling a bit off, unwell, or grumpy-which is entirely appropriate because it comes from printers running out of type. Evidence of this lives even in our language: The following everyday phrases all came from the practical lives of people at work behind the scenes, printing books that would carry revolutionary ideas to the front lines. There’s more to that physical object we see most of the time only as a stand-in for the ideas it holds. With my co-author JP Romney, I’ve written an entire book about the flesh-and-blood humans behind the printed book called Printer’s Error: Irreverent Stories from Book History. But the people behind the books, the ones who made these objects, left their own marks too. It used the orbits of the planets, called “revolutions,” to argue for a sun-centered system over an Earth-centered one. Even the word revolution, in the sense of overturning an entire established system, comes from the 1543 publication of Copernicus’s De revolutionibus. It surprises no one to say that the printing press has revolutionized the world. ![]()
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