Composing Stick Photos

The images are a little dark, but here they are to supplement your understanding of composing sticks, and the title of this blog. The one pictured here is smallish, but larger ones in the print shop are larger in length, not width or depth.

The type set in this first image is about 12 points, and says "wow," not "mom." Type is set upside down in a composing stick, but not backwards.


At this angle, you can see that another name for composing stick is "job stick."



This is derived from a type of press shop often called a "job shop" or "job press" that does mostly odd jobs, like broadsides, cards, pamphlets, and small books, for various clients. Jobs require a wide variety of type, whereas a press that publishes a newspaper or large books requires an awful lot of only a few different kinds of type. The print shop here at the college has type from both kinds of shops, so we have mountains of a few classics like Garamond, Palatino, and Caslon, in many sizes and styles, but only a handful of sizes and styles of hundreds of other fonts, as wild as Jokerman.