More Printing Trivia...

After my post on letterpress printing, I received an email from my sister, who reminded me of another commonly used phrase that could be traced to printing sources. My dad had at least two sets of type drawers. We called them "galleys of type". I'm sure a professional printing office would have many more than that. Each drawer looked something like this: (Dad would often pull a drawer completely out of its case when he worked with it. Sitting at an angle on something else, it was sometimes in a precarious position. My mom would strongly warn me not to upset and spill the drawer of loose type. I used to wonder if maybe she had done that herself!)

All the "sorts" would be organized in these shallow drawers, only about 2" deep. The more-often-used letters were usually in a bigger section than other letters, which was another thing that I didn't understand as a child. I thought each letter should get equal space! Each sort is a reverse of the character that it prints, so when the ink is applied and it is pressed into the paper, it prints correctly aligned. A printer needs to remember this as he creates his project, since some letters like "p", "q", "b" and "d" look very similar. Hence, the phrase, "Mind your p's and q's".

(I have also heard other possibilities for explaining the source of the P's & Q's phrase, so this also may or may not be true.)

How about this one....... most galleys (or tray drawers) of type were designed to hold either all capital letters, or all lower-case letters. Printers would keep the case of more-often used small letters close to them, and the less-often used capital letter tray was higher and further back. So now you have, "uppercase" and "lowercase" letters.

And finally, as I mentioned in my earlier post, with letterpress printing, the words are pressed into the paper, making it a dimensional, de-bossed image. If the ink is applied too heavily or the type is damaged at all, the image is of poor quality. So, a good printer who is careful about the quality of his product will also check and test his prints....... because he wants to make a good impression.