Justified - printing perfection

Our family had a printing business in the early second half of the 20th Century.  My husband was a compositor, the one who set up the type for printing.  In the early days of the business, before there was a linotype amongst our machinery, each individual letter or grammar point, full point, question mark, etc. was picked out of a case of type and put into a setting stick to form lines of type.

A full page was placed in a form which held it all together.  These lines of type had to be "justified" so that the lines were all the same length.  Now all the pieces of type were not the same width - a full-point was skinny, a capital "M" was wide.

 

Richard Evans, hand compositor at James Wilkes Ltd, at work in 1953. Image from the Wolverhampton History & Heritage website (http://www.localhistory.scit.wlv.ac.uk/)

 Sometimes the compositor had to put in small pieces of lead between the words to spread the line; even a piece of card could be enough. That "justifying" could amount to a lot of work for the compositor.  He was very proud of his job when it was finished.  He had put a lot of work into making it as perfect as he could.

And of course, the compositor would know the correct place to split a long word with a hyphen to carry over to the next line.

 

A composing stick loaded with metal movable type, held over a lower case with larger boxes for more common minuscule letters: the upper case holds capital letters. Photo by Wilhei. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Handsatz.jpg#/media/File:Handsatz.jpg

There were many "cases of type" to "pick" from because of all the type sizes and fonts. Sometimes a "wrong font" letter got put in. The compositor would run some ink over his page of type and print a copy for "reading" for mistakes. My husband was remarkably accurate in his work.

The reader may like to read about the Printing Art in the book Mary Baker Eddy and Her Books by William Dana Orcutt*.  In particular he recounts his search for the perfect book which resulted in a family bible-sized Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mrs. Eddy's seminal/major work.

Oh yes!  All those pieces of type had to be "dissed" -- distributed back into the boxes.  That is when the "wrong font" letter could have gone astray.

Joyce Voysey

Ed. * This interesting book is available in Christian Science Reading Rooms. See https://booksthatchangelives.org.au/books-publications/biographies-of-mary-baker-eddy/

 Ed. Joyce has pointed out to me that yesterday’s post incorrectly noted that it was in a justified format. Of course it was not. It was merely left-aligned. For type to be justified, it has to line up on both the left and the right-hand sides. Thus, for this post to be justified, I have simply high-lighted and clicked the “justify” icon on Word and presto, it’s done (Done, that is, following several perplexing un-justified passages that needed persuading into the justified format!) This is rather different from the laborious and skilled expertise carried out by trained compositors like my Dad.