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.

What is a Composing Stick, Anyway?

My first instinct was to try to explain it myself, and the best I came up with was "a thingy I put type into when I want to set type," but that's really not a very clear identification.

So I shall direct you to The Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary's explanation:

"The composing stick is an essential tool for setting type by hand. The printer adjusts the stick to the width of the lines of type to be set, then puts the metal type in upside down, letter-by-letter and line-by-line. As several lines of type are completed, they are transferred onto a galley and held until the page of type is complete."

This primarily gives you a sense of what a composing stick does, less so what it is. A physical description reveals that it is an iron tray that can vary in length so that you can vary the width of the lines they're setting. It has edges that are just as high as the type itself, to keep the type in. It is usually three inches wide, and varies in length, but does not become so long as to be unwieldy in your hand. The composing stick is usually covered with a layer of grime from oxidization and use.

So there you have it. This blog takes its name from this tool that best demonstrates the difficulty of setting type, the labor intensive fiddling with letters. One difference: I'll be proofreading these posts, so they'll be cleaner than lines of type are right after being set in the stick.