The "Lure of the Type and Smell of the Ink" Story

It was an ordinary day. Smelling a magazine that Carol brought home from work yesterday. I always do that. I guess printers never get over the sweet smell of printers' ink from a newly printed magazine or brochure. As soon as I pick up anything printed, I have to small it. I'm smelling and reading about a local printing club having to find another place for their equipment so they can continue to give demonstrations of letterpress printing to the public. Club is called .918. Yep, just .918. Probably doesn't mean anything to you if you were never a printer. Have you ever heard of the Handbrake Club which is for car enthusiasts or the Harriers Club which is for runners or the Silent Skull Club which is for motorcyclists? My guess is you have never heard of those either. Well, the .918 club is much the same for the old time printers, like me! .918 is what is referred to as 'type high' and is said to be the height of a shilling on it's edge. 'Type high' means the height of a piece of movable type that can be used to set type for a letterpress. The .918 refers to the distance from the base of the type to the top of the letter that will touch the paper and register an impression. I found some info I will share with you and if you get bored, skip a line or two until you pass the explanation of 'type high.' The .918 was agreed upon by the United States Type Founders' Association in 1886. The system stated that eighty-three picas (measurement in printing) became equal to thirty-five centimeters, then dividing the pica into twelve equal parts, (points). Thirty-five centimeters then also became a standard for type-high (height-to-paper). By this plan fifteen type-heights (.918) were made to equal thirty-five centimeters. The old standard was eleven-twelfths or .9166 of an inch. The difference of 20/10,000 or 1/500 part of an inch may seem trivial but it was enough to drive many pressmen of the day to consume large quantities of booze! The preceding was in part from Theodore Low De Vinne’s (c) 1899, “Plain Printing Types,” Oswald Publishing Co., New York, 1914. Are you totally confused? Well there's more ....... Moore’s Universal Assistant, a book printed for those headed to the American Wild West in 1880, lists “type high” to be “15/16ths of an English Inch, less a small amount”. Of coursehe fails to say what the difference in an English inch and an American Inch might be…. or how small the “small amount” is supposed to be….. or why you’d need to know that in a Wild West Town anyway…. but hey, it’s a cool book! So, there are as many explanations as there were probably printer's in the old days. A little more about the field of printing in Lancaster County. Ben Franklin is considered the Philadelphia godfather of American printing. Ben was a founding father of Franklin and Marshall College and founded Lancaster city's first print shop in 1751. They could never duplicate the success they had in Philadelphia because of the nearby Ephrata Cloisters printing shop which was founded by Germans and a German by the name of Johann Gutenberg was the inventor of movable type in 1455. In 1753 Ben sold the print shop and eventually John Dunlap, an apprentice in this shop, is said to be the first to print the Declaration of Independence. All with movable type that has a height of .918. The type was placed in a wooden case called the "California Job Case" (I'm sure you don't want to hear why it is called that) and pulled one letter at a time from the case and placed in a job stick which you would hold in your hand. From there it would be locked in a metal frame called a 'chase' and placed in the letterpress for printing. When the .918 club started a few years ago in downtown Lancaster, I donated a few chases, job sticks and racks of 'furniture' which are wooden blocks in varying sizes that are used to hold the metal type in the chase. These were 'left-overs' from my shop at Manheim Township High School where I taught printing and graphic arts for 33 years; the first 10-12 of those years was printing using movable type and the letterpress. Seems like so long ago! That's when .918 meant a lot more to me. It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy. PS - photos from the top are: LDub holding a piece of metal type, the flag is the part that would hold the ink and press against the paper while the groove at the bottom right would help in the alignment of the type; A 'California Job Case' that holds all the letters, punctuation and spacing materials; a case of 'cuts' which I have, such as the flag I was holding, that can be used when setting type; a person's hand holding a metal job stick that holds the type as it is being set; a floor model letterpress that can be powered with a motor, but originally was keep running by pushing the flywheel on the left of the machine.