We bought fonts at a foundry

Ours looked almost exactly like this one... in a museum today!

The tech has changed, but have the tenets?
 
My very first paying job was as the owner of my own printing business. When I was about 14, I bought a used printing press, and set up shop in my parents' basement.
 
I said that that press was used. Very used. I contacted the manufacturer—Chandler & Price—with the serial number, and they told me it had been built in 1896. Civil War vets probably ran it, or read its output, at some time.
 
It was a big, cast-iron monstrosity, a death trap the size of a washing machine with open gears and massive flywheels on each side; its one concession to the modern world was that, at some point in its history, its original human-powered treadle had been removed, and replaced with an electric motor. Attached to a leather belt.
 
So what’s this have to do with InDesign?
 
Hang in there, we’re still reminiscing. If you were curious, I’d learned how to operate one of these things in junior high school; “Print Shop” was a course you could take back then. So these ancient things were still workhorses at the time; indeed, there was a type foundry not far from my house, and I would go there to buy fonts of type, wrapped in brown paper, and still warm from the foundry.
 
Then it was back to the basement, to sort the tiny pieces of lead into California job cases (which are nowadays relegated to knick-knack displays) and set type for business cards, stationery, raffle tickets… whatever I could sell back then.
 
Here’s what’s cute. There would be little sticks of lead, which you’d insert between lines of type to open up the vertical spacing. That’s why it’s still called leading. The individual pieces of type would have kerns on them, which could overlap the adjoining piece. The nomenclature still applies.
 
And that’s not all. The principles of good, clean design, and the beauty of crisp, well-delineated type endure. You might be looking at them on the Retina display of your iPad. You might be reading them in a printed book. But the interplay of positive and negative space (which we’d expounded upon in this article) are still vital to your comprehension and enjoyment of the material.
 
The “kiss impression”
 
That’s a term you probably don’t hear anymore. It’s from the age of letterpress: You wanted to align the platen (the part of the press which meets the “chase,” which holds the wooden-block “furniture” which keeps all the type squeezed in place via “quoins”) so that the freshly-inked type just “kisses” the paper when the two massive pieces of iron fly at each other at speed. Too light, and there’s no ink on the page. Too hard, and the type will chisel right through the paper.
 
There’s some apt poetry in that description. Making something good can be mere work. Making something beautiful is a labor of love.
 
Thoughts? Stories to share? Contact us. We’d love to hear them. 

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