While wooden cases are used by printers chiefly for holding type fonts, they are now also used for a large variety of auxiliary material which it is necessary to keep more or less carefully classified in convenient containers. The increasing quantities and varieties of this material now needed in an average composing-room make convenient receptacles and orderly, systematic arrangement a necessity if the work is to be carried on without excessive waste. In no other trade is there a greater multiplicity of details to be considered in order to obtain a finished product, and a thoughtless, unnecessary waste of time, effort, or material in attending to these details adds enormously to the expense of the product. And so it is becoming the practice of good managers to use cases more abundantly than formerly and to store them in convenient racks and cabinets, so that this large mass of material may be kept classified and may be obtained quickly when needed.
Besides the ordinary pair of upper case and lower case, many styles of single cases are made to hold a complete font of capitals, lower case, figures, points, etc., and others are planned to hold small capitals in addition. Some are made for fonts of capitals, figures, and points only; some for figures only (especially for time-tables and tabular work), for fractions, accented letters, special characters and sorts, for leaders, type borders and ornaments, etc. A large variety of cases are planned for labor-saving fonts of brass rule. Others are made especially for spaces and quads, for leads and slugs, and for metal furniture. These are made in many sizes, from the small space-and-rule case, 5 inches by 6¼ inches, which can be placed beside the compositor's galley, up to the mammoth metal furniture case, 18 inches by 72 inches, covering a space equal to the top of a double stand. Dealers' catalogs now show from seventy-five to a hundred or more different kinds of cases for printers' use.