The oldest ones are square foot-long pieces of boxwood, each face stamped with measurements in Pica, Brevier, Nonpareil, Paragon, and so forth. Line gauges, sometimes called pica poles, are well-known even to today’s printers who have never touched a piece of metal type. The unrestrained use of the mallet and planer gave rise to the epithet “blacksmith” for any printer lacking a delicate touch. Mallets are simply traditional carpenter’s tools the planer evolved into a thick hardwood block. The easiest way to do this is simply to lay a flat piece of hardwood on a loose form and give it a tap with a mallet to push down any pieces of type that are too high. In letterpress printing it is essential for every letter to be at exactly the same height of its fellows. The mallet and planer are ancient tools for leveling a form of type. (Smaller hand-held lead cutters made by Rouse eventually came into use in the twentieth century.) Large shops used rotary saws for cutting greater quantities of leads. Eventually inventors added compound leverage for cleaner, easier cuts in thicker metal. Then small choppers were made of iron, much like paper trimmers today. Leads are cut with snips or metal saws until about the middle of the nineteenth century. They quickly became indispensable not only for adjusting the amount of space between lines, and the length of pages, but also made handling and moving type in the composing stick easier. Peter Schoeffer is credited with being the first to use leads, or strips of metal, between lines of type to separate them, in 1465. Most old shops had long racks full of every size. Leading can be purchased in uncut lengths and cut as needed, or purchased as a set of common lengths. If you are buying new type, consult with the seller on where to buy spacing. If you are buying old type, many cases will come pre-stocked with necessary spacing. Spacing sizes must correspond to your font sizes. Spacing adds extra space between the words or letters of inline text, and leading adds it between lines of metal or wood type. By the 1880’s compositors had elaborate fitted oak cases lined with plush to hold a complete set of rules. Composing rules traditionally had projections or “ears” by which they could be removed from the stick. In addition to setting the stick, the composing rule was used when setting one line of type over another by placing the composing rule on the first line, the second could be set much more smoothly. Sticks could also be set with a typefounder’s quads for accuracy. The lengths would have to have been specific to each foundry, since one typefounder’s 20 picas was not the same as another’s. These were strips of steel made to different lengths, which could be put into a composing stick to set the measure. It was not possible to set the knee to a certain measure without the use of a set of composing rules. Composing Rulesīefore 1883, when United States typefounders agreed on the standard size for the pica, it was every founder for himself, and no composing stick could have an engraved pica scale on its bed. For a modern-day equivalent, consider the QWERTY keyboard. Two hundred years of habit are not discarded lightly, and rather than disturb the established order, J and U were added at the end. J was added to distinguish certain sounds from I, and U was added about 1630 to indicate the use of V as a vowel. Why are J and U at the end? Because the case had already been in use for almost 200 years before J and U were added to the English alphabet in the early 17th century. Just about every upper case in the English-speaking world has the letters in this order: A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V W X Y Z J U. The type case is a good example of the long tradition of letterpress. One of the strongest appeals of letterpress printing is a traditional way of working that extends back in time over 500 years. It would not be too extreme, in fact, to say that some tools, like the composing stick itself, are essentially the same as those used by Gutenberg’s workmen. Every letterpress printer-amateur or professional-uses compositors’ tools (tools used in composing handset type) that are essentially unchanged from those of the last century.
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