Type gauge

Gibson Square commented on yesterday’s Type measurement post remembering his metal Monotype type gauges, now buried in the attic.

Maybe I should have covered type gauges in the first post, but here we go. I can’t find my plastic type gauge, so couldn’t photograph it — and I’ve not got an attic as an excuse, just a very full drawer and a couple of boxes. However this simple YouTube video from Jackie McNeilly shows you the use of what we today refer to as a type gauge. The type gauge is printed on transparent plastic and can be laid over the type to measure its size. (For myself I was never 100% confident that the reading would be correct, as obviously there’s only one typeface shown.) But it does all the other tricks too. I always found the transparent sheet difficult to deal with — mine was awkwardly large and floppy and it’d always get lost under the piles of paper which seemed to make up my work space.

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This plastic flip-flopper is however not what Gibson Square was referring to. Here from Briar Press is a photo of the type measuring tool used by hot metal Monotype typesetters:

The photo isn’t very clear, but you can just make out the type sizes 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6 near the ends of the blades, so you could check the size you thought you were using. Another six scales are engraved on the back of the blades. In his description Bob of the Briar Press asks “I’d be grateful if a Monotype user can supply IN ONE SENTENCE (we have a restricted character field) what this object is used for.” Gibson Square to the rescue? From the answers they’ve already received as comments I’d say one sentence, unless of gargantuan length, would never be sufficient. This gauge could apparently also used to measure set width* in order to calculate how long a line a particular bit of copy would make†.

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* Tolbert Lanston, inventor of the Monotype system, “devised a unit system that assigned each character a value, from five to eighteen, that corresponded to its width. A lower case “i”, or a period would be five units, an uppercase “W” would be eighteen. This allowed the development of the calculating mechanism in the keyboard, which is central to the sophistication of Monotype set matter.” From Letterpress Commons.

† One might ask why would a comp mess with casting off display lines? It surely took time. Nowadays all this sort of calculation has been assigned to the computer, a natural home for such numerical gymnastics, and of course we no longer really care whether a line of display type breaks with a single four-letter word below a really long line of words. It’s all a matter of “p”s and “q”s — not the normal ones — but Profit and Quality in this case. In the olden days typesetting was a craft and was controlled by craft unions. No typesetting craftsman would wish to be seen by his fellows as having made a line-break solecism, so much care was devoted to quality details to which we no longer have ways or means of attending.

Type measurement

Before the computer came along to show and tell you the size of the type you were using, we used to spend a fair amount of ingenuity in figuring out what size this or that bit of type was, or the other way round, how this or that line or paragraph would look in type of different sizes. And this leaves aside the question of the identity of the typeface itself.

Type sample books from different printers would be consulted — the same face, same size, might measure differently when it came from different typesetting systems, or in the hot metal days, from different type foundries. We’d have rulers marked in various point sizes. Of course measuring type isn’t just a matter of laying the ruler down beside a word and reading off a number. In theory you’d want to measure from the top of the ascenders to the bottom of the descenders, though there exist faces where some ascenders ascend more than others and ditto down below, especially when you take the caps into consideration. It was easy enough to establish the line depth — just lay down the ruler and read off the number of points from the baseline of one line to the baseline of the next. Say the answer was 13 points. This did not mean (almost certainly didn’t mean) that the type was 13 point. It might most likely be 11 point type, 2 point leaded, or in more modern days 11 point type set on a 13 point body — this would mean that the compositor wouldn’t have to bother with inserting leads; the leading would already be cast into the sort. But your 11/13 might really have been 10/13, or 12/13; if it had been 9/13 that would have been fairly obvious as 4 points of interlinear space would look very loose in any text setting. So you still had some measuring to do.

It was always a little awkward to measure the height of the type itself. A useful tool was a loupe with a point grid printed onto the glass: position it right, over a neighborly ascender and descender, and you’d be there. Unless you were extremely unfortunate in the typeface you were examining — maybe you’d picked a short ascender, or perhaps you were looking at a letterpress type from a foundry which always made it’s Garamond a shade smaller than Linotype did, or than the originals used for film or digital typesetters. And bear in mind that the lines on your ruler were quite probably more than a point thick, which makes measuring points a bit of an adventure.

You can enlarge the photo by clicking on it.

Here’s a picture of my old type rule from Geliot Whitman. Turn it over and it takes you from 10½ to 14 points. Above it is an old wooden ruler labelled on the other side J. Rabone and Sons Makers. This has a lenticular cross section, so you can roll it closer to the page, and shows readings for BOUR, EN, BREV and MIN. The other side shows P & NON, S.P and L.P & PE. These I read to be Bourgeois, English, Breveir and Minion, then Pareil and Nonpareil, Small Primer, and finally Long primer and something else. Pica might be expected here but what the E is I can’t work out.

Gutenberg! The Musical!

Well, perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that Printing Impressions would give Gutenberg! The Musical! a less than glowing review. After all, it’s not about printing or Gutenberg — it’s about two guys who want to write a play about Johannes Gutenberg but can’t find any source material on-line. So they make it up. The show portrays a backer’s audition of their chaotic piece in which the two actors play a variety of characters, changes indicated by labelled hats.

I think Bob Neubauer, our reviewer gets a bit carried away on the subject of the printing press. The press itself is represented in this show by a box labelled “Printing Press”. Gutenberg sings “I’m gonna take the grapes out and put letters in,” which upsets our reviewer — of course Gutenberg didn’t print on a wine press, but I always thought it was generally agreed that the idea of a printing press (which in any case predated Gutenberg by centuries) was at least suggested by the wine press. They kind of work in the same way after all; if one didn’t follow the other it was at least a case of parallel invention. But hey, it’s a theatrical show not a lecture on printing history! Incidentally, Mr Neubauer manages in his excitement to overlook the real inaccuracy of that wine press bit. — Gutenberg did not invent the printing press: he invented movable metal types (which could indeed be used on a printing press, though not successfully on a wine press).

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CUP Museum

I keep meaning to visit — I assume I did actually see all (or much) of this stuff years ago when the building in which the Press is now housed was the University Printing House. Next time!

John Bull Printing Outfit

I had one of these when I was a child. I remember it with a wooden dabber, just like the rubber stampers you used to encounter in ancient banks and offices. It came with a little ink pad, tweezers, strings of rubber letters which you had to tear apart into individual letters — preparatory to losing them all! — and then pick up with the tweezers and insert into grooves on the face of the dabber. Load it up with ink on your ink pad, then carefully press it against a piece of paper, and a few words at a time you were in a position to print an entire book. Ha, Ha. I have to confess I was better at losing the bits than I was at printing anything and rather quickly lost interest.

A collection of John Bull type trays

Just My Type, Simon Garfield’s 2010 book about fonts, quotes the instructions for set No. 4, “Separate the India-rubber type carefully. The letters are merely pressed into the holder. When the word or sentence is complete see that the face of the type is level. To print, carefully ink type on the pad . . . Should pad dry, damp the surface with a little water.” The sets were made by The Charter Stamp Company (makers presumably of those office stampers), the first one coming out in 1922 (though British Letterpress in 100 Objects has located one which seems to have been made prior to the formation of Charter). They also relate more nefarious uses, for instance, “In October 1976, the Hammersmith & Shepherds Bush Gazette reported on a Social Security fraud where blank DHSS vouchers had been stolen and then been typewritten over then stamped with a John Bull set to allow criminals to take £28,000 they were not entitled to.” They claim that lots of people who became printers had their interest piqued by a John Bull Outfit. I suspect criminal fraud is however now more easily achieved.

This is letterpress printing at its most basic. You can see Stephen Fry playing with one of these Outfits early on in his Gutenberg film, which you can see here. His is a more modern set than mine was and the wooden stamper’s been replaced by a plastic one — his is No. 30. Go about 1 minute 35 seconds into the video to see him opening the box.

Nostalgia Central has a little post about the toy, introduced by a photo showing the wooden stamper. More of the history and prehistory of the John Bull kits appears at British Letterpress in 100 Objects.

Block or cut

In letterpress printing you need something solid, a piece of metal or occasionally wood, for everything you print. This solid piece is carved out to leave a raised area which is what will get the ink and thus print (in reverse). In a letterpress world type is pretty obvious as a collection of little bits of metal, but this requirement applies of course to artwork too, be it halftone of line art.

Here’s an old line cut made in Binghamton, NY for Vail-Ballou Press. Perhaps counter-intuitively it’s the light areas of the picture which will print black. After the forme comes off press and the type is distributed, the cut will be cleaned off for storage, and remnants of ink remaining in the deep cut-away areas are ultimately irrelevant because they will never rise to the level where ink will come into contact with the paper. They are also quite useful for quick ID. (The rather prominent nails in the corners are not relevant to the printing process — they were added later to secure the discarded cut to a bookend. I was given this bookend in 1982 after Vail-Ballou had abandoned their letterpress printing business.)

The caption reads They found Kaa stretched out out on a warm ledge in the afternoon sun — as of course anyone who has worked with letterpress printing will be able at once to read.

In Britain we call these objects blocks. In America they are known as cuts. Like so many things in the book business the terms which have survived from hot metal days are still used as the names of many common objects. This can confuse the layman, but occasionally the expert too. I remember my boss in Cambridge becoming more and more exasperated as I insisted on repeating “But it’s printing litho” in reply to his repeated question “Have you ordered the blocks yet?“. Of course, he wasn’t just using outdated terminology, he’d just forgotten that the world had moved on from letterpress which he’d grown up with, to offset lithography, where the illustrations will be printed from a plate made from a negative of the image. However back in the day his question would have been very relevant. Engraving a block was a specialist trade, and you had to be sure to order the block-making in plenty of time to get the illustrations to the printer at the same time as the type. See Engraving a halftone block for a series of three videos showing how block making was done. Obviously it took time to engrave blocks, so making sure they had been ordered well ahead of the completion of typesetting was rather important. In the end I could only placate him by saying “No. But I’ll get onto it right away.”

Like him, I rather regret the passing of the block/cut.

Flexographic label printing

This story can kill two birds with a single stone. In the first video you may observe the printing of pressure-sensitive adhesive labels, as well as receive a good introduction to flexographic printing. Now labels can of course be printed by any method, not just flexography (letterpress). The secret sauce consists in the paper stock and in the post-imaging processing, die-cutting, slitting into rolls and so on. Lithography and gravure are responsible for a large proportion of the labels you’ll encounter. More customized labels (shorter runs) will probably have been printed on a digital press.

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The second video shows the detail of how the labels are applied — although in this video the operator is taking each label by hand. You can see how the adhesive labels are carried on a shiny paper carrier. The labels have been die-cut to shape immediately after printing, and the background paper simultaneously removed. When the carrier sheet (which has avoided the die cut and now carries only the labels) takes that final 300º or so bend out of the way the label continues straight on to where it meets up with its target, a bottle, a carton, an apple, or in this case the operator’s fingers.

The picture below shows the die-cut adhesive paper being separated from the carrier sheet, after the die-stamping which has just taken place in the unit to the right of the picture.

Avery’s website gives you a “recipe” for the construction of their adhesive label paper:

Here the face stock represents the label, and the liner is what I was referring to as the carrier sheet.

Tailoring

Surprising to relate, I guess, but when I was a young man, you’d still go to a tailor if you needed a new jacket, and he’d cut it out from a bolt of cloth and sew it up to fit you. Of course I lived in a wool town so such practices may have gone on a bit longer there.

In a post by Abner Aldarondo the Folger Shakespeare Library blog, The Collation, introduces us to a sixteenth century Spanish manual of tailoring by master tailor Diego de Freyle, Geometria y traça para el oficio de los sastres (Geometry and patterns for the trade of tailoring) — which all looks nostalgically familiar to me. A digitized version of the book can be found here.

Here is the tailor in his workshop — OK the clothes did look a bit different in my youth, but what’s going on is what went on then. The tailor in the middle is holding a pair of dividers and a Spanish yardstick: la vara. (You can enlarge the image by clicking on it.) Obviously patterns were cut, and we are here given 48 of them. Below is one for a cape and doublet.

The book was printed in Seville in 1588 by Fernando Diaz. The format is unusual: it’s landscape, 10 x 29 cms. almost 4″ x 11½”, no doubt because they needed to accommodate all these woodcuts along with scant text. Mr Aldarondo also suggests that the format helped to keep the book open. The pages are numbered in leaves, so that folio 7 recto is followed by folio 7 verso, and also show signature marks at the bottom right. The 72-page book was probably printed two pages to view, four per sheet, so presumably the sheet was something like 8½” x 11¾” with two sheets gathered together to make a signature. I haven’t managed to figure out why four pages (folios 7 and 8) are printed so that only a diagonal chunk of text is shown. Here’s folio 7 recto:

It’s not like it’s some press error, for example having a loose sheet of paper lying on top of the forme and taking the ink intended for the book, because the running heads show up in the expected location, and you can see the signature mark C3 in the bottom right hand corner. It’s almost like you’d want to fold the page back in order to see something below — but there just doesn’t seem any target which would make sense of this. This page does seem to be a listing of yardage cloth requirements — maybe you were meant to cut off the blank part of the page, or write your annotations here. I still don’t get it though. Let’s assume the introduction explains it all.

Freyle advises tailors to sit with their backs straight on a stool half a vara high, and to push needles outwards away from their nose and cheek! You are told how many yards (varas) of material you would need for each pattern, though presumably this would vary depending on the dimensions of your customer. Apparently sixteenth century Spain was the center of the European fashion trade and there was some disquiet among the world of haute couture espagnole that by publishing such books all their trading advantage might evaporate — which of course it ultimately did.

Fount count

Before Ottmar Mergenthaler (1886) and Tolbert Lanston (1885) made their inventions enabling printers to create their own metal type, if a printer needed more type they’d send round to the nearest type foundry. Of course for many printers this went on for years after these machine setting innovations. Well into the twentieth century, George Bernard Shaw was among the conservative authors who insisted that mechanical typesetting machines like the Linotype and the Monotype should never be used for his books. He wanted everything set by hand. And this meant a trip (or several) to the type foundry to get hold of the types you needed.

If you buy a font (font in America, fount in Britain) of type how many “A”s or “B”s will you get?

Wikipedia informs us that “A font when bought new would often be sold as (for example in a Roman alphabet) 12pt 14A 34a, meaning that it would be a size 12-point font containing 14 uppercase ‘A’s, and 34 lowercase ‘a’s.” The number of the other letters followed from that in some regular proportion governed by the frequency of use of that character in the local language. You are after all buying an amount of metal, an alloy of lead, tin and antimony, so the numbers of each character will vary according to size and other features. Here is the Font Schemes Chart from Skyline Type Foundry in Prescott, Arizona. They tell you how to use it in the bottom right hand corner. (I don’t know how much, if any, variation there might be between the counts for different foundries.)

What this means is that (if they work from a chart using the same proportions) if you bought a font of 12 point Binny Old Style No.21E, 15A 32a, (shown below) from M & H type foundry in San Francisco, you’d be getting 32 of the lower case a; 13 of b; 17 of c; 19 of d; 43 of e (our commonest letter); 17 of f; 13 of g; 21 of h; 32 of I; 9 of j and k; 21 of l; 17 of m; 32 of n and o; 13 of p; 6 of q; 32 each of r, s, and t; 17 of u; 9 of v; 13 of w; 6 of x; 13 of y; and 6 of z. You can work out the punctuation marks that’d come along with the font.

This font might do you for surprisingly little. In fact you’d already need a second font before you’d finished setting the first eight lines of the page below from Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant by the author described on the title page of my possibly pirated American edition of 1904 as Bernard Shaw. (The book is of course not set in 12pt Binny Old Style, so all this pretended precision is just approximation.) This copy seems to be a reprint, as the publisher, Herbert S. Stone and Company of Chicago and New York audaciously claims “Copyright 1898” in their own name. Thus these considerations are irrelevant, as the book was no doubt set without the author’s involvement, using the Linotype machine. Had it been handset, the letter we would have run out of first was lower case “w”, but it matters not which one it was, off to the foundry for another font. Running low would also be “t”, of which you’d only have five left.

Obviously you’d need quite a lot of bits of type to print a book. In addition to the Roman we’ve looked at, you’d need Italic, and Small Caps, as well as larger sizes for display lines, running heads and folios. In the early days of printing a sheet of however many pages (4, or 8 most probably) would be printed and set aside while the type was broken up (distributed) and used for the setting of the next few pages. And so on and so on until done.

Korean printing reach?

It’s well established that printing was well established in Korea long before the idea dawned in Europe. What’s not known, is whether the same thought processes that went on in seventh century Korea also happened later on in Europe independently, or whether some breathless messenger from the east ran into Mainz town square gasping “Look, look. Here’s a great idea . . .”

I dare say it’s Atlas Obscura‘s fault, but they present this story about research into early Korean printing under the headline “What Do We Really Know About the History of the Printing Press?” as if it was a search for influences on Gutenberg’s printing press of earlier Korean presses. That’s fine, and fun, but it is not the real question. Gutenberg didn’t invent the printing press: he took the already existing concept of a press and added to it the ability to generate a text page using movable, reusable, metal types. So whether he was influenced by Korean printing presses or local wine presses, or even local presses used to print woodcuts, is irrelevant. What’s interesting is where he got the idea that provoked him to create movable, interchangeable metal types.

A scan of SoMiGaSookJumGyoBuEum TongGamJulYo, a 15th-century Korean document, using the synchrotron. Photo: Mike Toth/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Scientists in California are using a synchrotron, a type of particle accelerator, to take fluorescence scans of some pages from a Korean book printed in 1377. Analyzing Korean printing pages from the 14th century may reveal evidence of the nature of the image used for printing, and such evidence might enable researchers to consider whether the traces came from metal, even movable metal types. But concluding that the pages reviewed were printed on a press would be a waste of time. Of course they were, as were lots of things around the world being printed thus then.