#composing stick

St. Brides Printing Library: Letterpress and Typesetting

I spent this evening getting my hands dirty and running through the basics of typesetting at the St. Brides Typographic Library, London. I'd seen the process before and know the theory but I've never used a composing stick myself.

There's lots of little details & techniques to physically setting type well. Some unexpected observations after being hands-on are:

Navigating a case of type and knowing in which compartment each letter is stored takes a little while. (see top right image of a 'job' or 'jobbing' case). 

Being left-handed can make it a little more awkward to hold the compositing stick (unless you find a left-handed one)

Knowing the sizes of your Ems and Ens suddenly becomes very important to composing each line: spacers (or blanks) of various sizes and combinations are required to told each line of type tightly bound in the stick.

At small sizes composing the type is very fiddly. The time it takes while learning to set a full pages of dense type should not be underestimated.