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.

Workshops

[Note: Please forgive the extensive exposition, but it is necessary for cleaner, livelier posts in future that they not be cluttered with explanations.]

The Print Shop is holding two workshops this semester, one called "Introduction to Letterpress" and the other "Advanced Letterpress and Book Arts." Mike Kaylor, our Master Printer, runs these workshops.

Introduction to Letterpress involves a number of excellent lectures on the history of printing, the history of paper, the history of fonts, as well as lectures on the technical terms and procedures for setting type and printing. The students are working on making their own postcards.

Advanced Letterpress and Book Arts is for anyone who has completed the introductory workshop. At this point, students work on real jobs in order to gain experience and keep up their skills. In between the real jobs, they learn to make and bind books in the Bindery.

I take the Advanced workshop as a separate activity from my work at the Print Shop, but I do end up helping Mike with jobs that extend beyond the time commitments of the workshop, especially because the jobs are real jobs required of the Print Shop.

This semester, we're focused on three major jobs.

The first is a run of 350 broadsides to be distributed in schools around Kent County in celebration of teachers and teachers of writing.

The second is a run of 350 broadsides that celebrate the re-dedication of the Literary House that is scheduled for February to cap off the completion of an extensive renovation.

The third is a design for a new bookmark or postcard, to be used for demonstrations to prospective students, and other interested visitors or students.

The deadline for the first job looms. The first workshop has only met twice. We have done extensive research into appropriate and striking quotes, we have reviewed samples from the archives for inspiration, and we have sketched out our design ideas and submitted them to the Master Printer for review.

The next step is to envision one or two final drafts digitally, with the help of Adobe InDesign, on our brand new 30" monitor.

Setting the Scene

Come into the Literary House, this big white house with its fresh new deck. Step into the foyer, and you'll see the kitchen straight ahead, and cozy reading rooms to your left. Turn right, though, and come down the stairs into the Print Shop, down because the shop is set lower than the rest of the House.

The light in the afternoon floods the print shop, sliding down from the high vaulted ceiling to idle along the heavy lines of the cylinder press and work tables, casually slinking to the floor in broad beams. The two tables, back-to-back, are black and pitted with age, cluttered with stacks of broadsides and reams of paper, littered with miscellaneous notes. The broadsides are fine, weighty things, basking muted greens, greys, and blues, sunning themselves.

Letterpresses and type cases line the perimeter of the room, their bulk leaving only two and a half feet or so between their fronts and the work tables. Tall windows promenade the walls above the cases, ushering green from a half-wild garden into the dusty atmosphere of the Print Shop. The walls fade out of attention, water-damaged and aging.

A broad doorway opens under a placard that declares "Book Arts," and the room beyond is darker, woodier. There is a work table in the center of the room. Another rests along the right-hand wall and offers a view into the garden. Large drills, broad sheets of cutting board, and the naked guts of books rest on the back of this work surface. Underneath, filing cabinets house the archives of posters.

Shelves line the other two sides of the room and are stuffed with books of various ages on printing, bookmaking, paper. Two new Apple computers are installed on the countertop beneath the left-hand shelves, along with other high-tech equipment to bring the medium of pixels to the studio. These computers have so far been used primarily to create a digital archive of the Literary House's posters. They are waiting to be tapped for design and multimedia.

This is the print shop: a world of iron, lead, wood, and paper, a melding of the handmade and the mechanical.

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.

Dear Reader,

A collection of buttons lets me conjure letters from the aether, arrange them into words. With another button, those words enter cyberspace, where people all over the world can read them. People like you.

We're living through a change in the way our world is structured, a change that people like Noah Robischon of Gawker Media are calling the biggest since the one ignited by the invention of movable type.

And by "moveable type" I don't mean the blog hosting service. I mean the technology invented in Europe around 1450 C.E. by Johannes Gutenberg (and far earlier by others in China and Korea) that cost a lot of monks their Bible-copying jobs. I mean the method of setting letters cast of lead - tiny physical backwards letters that you can rearrange and drop on the floor - into a composing stick. Letters form words, form lines, lines stack, and a page of type is locked into the plate of a printing press. Ink coats the type, then a sheet of paper is "pressed" between the type and a hard flat surface. Remove the sheet and repeat with another, another, another, and you have publication of a broadside. The process' complexity multiplies if you want a book, at which point you have to muck around with folios, binding, and even more type-setting.

This technology once shifted our world on a faster track toward modernity. It made the making of books cheaper, thus more accessible to non-monk publishers. It made books themselves cheaper, so they reached a wider audience, and helped to make that audience more literate. Books could contain more topics than religion. It did more, but for now I'll let it rest here.

This technology is represented by the printing presses, type cases, and book bindery crowded into a large, airy room of the Rose O'Neill Literary House at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland. This is the Literary House Print Shop and I work here, as a student. My job title is "Printer's Devil" and I work under the Master Printer, doing the dirty and tedious jobs. I clean the presses, and I set and put away type for posters and poems and books.

Four times a week, I enter this room and step back into time. Let me show you this dying technology, this growing art. At the very least, you'll step away with an appreciation for your keyboard, mouse, and word processor.