II
The number and variety of faces at the disposal of the master printer equalled their ugliness, though this apprentice considered them all beautiful. There were of course the Roman faces, some of which were good, and still are, but these were strangely distorted as condensed, extra-condensed, extended, expanded, as well as shaded, open, skeleton, contour, sloped (both ways), ornamented, and hair-line letters.
One would think these were enough for all the printing anyone would want to do, but there was also a bewildering multitude of so-called job types of fancy and fantastic design. Each foundry put out a book as big as a dictionary, filled with bizarre creations in which the innocent alphabet was twisted and tormented and decorated until some of its masterpieces were illegible.
Among them were a number informally standardized and cast by all foundries. Such were Antique, Boldface, Gothic, Lightface, Clarendon, Caledonian, Ionic, Doric, Egyptian, Runic, Celtic, Rustic, Script, Grecian, Monastic, Norman, Title, and these too were also condensed, extended and otherwise squeezed, stretched and pulled about. When the type-writer came there was added that monstrosity, type-writer type. But the pride of each foundry was its own exclusive creations, to which were given names as fantastic as the designs, putting Pullman nomenclature to shame, such as Pansy, Olive, Asteroid, Van Dyke, Vulcan, Schwabacher, Florist, Teuton, Text, Eastlake.
From such an array the country printer was expected to choose the types to equip his shop. His outfit consisted of fair quantities of Roman, nonpareil, brevier and long primer for straight matter—the weekly newspaper, booklets and pamphlets, with larger sizes for job work, too many faces with few fonts large enough to set more than a line or two. This did not matter since it seemed obligatory to set in a different letter each line of display, advertisements, title pages, as well as dodgers and handbills, the greater the contrast and variety the better, with "ands" and "thes" in lines by themselves, centered and flanked by flourishes on each side. Type larger than two-line canon was made of wood, and was called "stud-horse type" because used for the big bills tacked up on barns and trees to advertise the services of a stallion.
Small fonts of job type were listed in foundry catalogues "5A 13a," to indicate quantity, other letters being in proportion. There was seldom more than one of little used letters, necessitating a shift to another font when a line turned up with two Xs or two Zs. Job types were laid in cases like the uppers of Roman, the boxes all of a size, capitals on one side, lower case on the other.
New type was an abomination. The compositor's fingers, already tender from the lye used to wash forms, were cut by the sharp edges, and his eyes blinded by the glare from sorts, and the printers were forever prowling the shining metal. There was chronic clack of up and down the live bank with tweezers, pulling out the needed letters, and inserting an equal-sized type upside down to mark the place. Another source of trouble was the font from a different foundry, supposedly the same body, but with a slight variation, that was forever getting into the wrong case and being set up, dropping out when the form was lifted.