I knew a little about the topic - but it turned out to be a very little. When I was teaching at a school for the deaf all those years ago, I saw a linotype machine in action - back then many deaf lads were trained as typesetters, as it was thought the noisy environment wouldn't bother them.
Metal type goes up to 72 point, and larger type is wooden. Furniture, spacing, etc is measured in picas (12 points to a pica) - you can see some furniture in the frame, and also the quoins that lock the type in. On the papers are the layouts of the cases of type - something to memorise -
We each set a line of type, which was moved onto a galley and locked in with powerful magnets. This is the amount of ink (oil-based) you need to roll out for inking up a thin film on the type -
We each set a line of type, which was moved onto a galley and locked in with powerful magnets. This is the amount of ink (oil-based) you need to roll out for inking up a thin film on the type -
Here it is, printed up - there was time for each of us to set our name, and to print a copy -
Around the room, examples of work -
The alphabet is "quite a local font", said James (who is in charge of the facility) - it's called Flaxman and was designed by Edward Wright, who taught at Chelsea. The "&" shows clearly how the etcetra symbol is a ligature made up of E and t.Elsewhere, before and after -
On the subject of kerning (the spacing between letters) - "RAILWAY" is a tricky word to space out; you can see that without intervention there are lots of strange white spaces between letters. Here's how the adjustment is done with wooden type -
On the subject of kerning (the spacing between letters) - "RAILWAY" is a tricky word to space out; you can see that without intervention there are lots of strange white spaces between letters. Here's how the adjustment is done with wooden type -
The recommended book is Robert Bringhurst's "The Elements of Typographic Style", which was first published in 1992 and has many revised editions - quite tricky (and pricey) to buy online.
On the way out, we stopped to see the laser cutting machine in the 3D workshop, another facility available for student use.
Margaret – how I envy you getting to work in the letterpress shop! I was raised in a printing family and even learned to hand-set type in college. Fortunately I’m still surrounded by lots of type that we realized had to be snatched up before it was thrown away, and it has indeed become so precious.
ReplyDeleteIn the interests of joy-killing pedantic accuracy, may I slightly correct your terminology? The ampersand doesn’t stand for “etcetera,” it simply stands for “et,” which you pointed out is clearer in some fonts than others.
And in the context of letterpress, “kerning” doesn’t refer to spacing between letters, it refers to sneaky ways to get letters to fit more closely together than would be possible with plain rectangular blocks of metal or wood. Technically the kern is a portion of a letter that extends into the space of a neighboring letter. Slicing away empty portions of the block, as in the A and Y you show, is one way to do this. Or sometimes just the type part of the letter is allowed to extend as a little tab over the top of the empty portion of the neighboring piece of type.
After typesetting became digital, “kerning” morphed into the all-purpose term for spacing between letters, losing its original meaning.
Near Lausanne in Renens, there is a presse museum, with all the beautifull big printers.
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