Type Hacking

We think hacking was invented in the 1960s. And maybe that’s when the word came into common use to mean “inventive workaround.”

But inventive workarounds predate hacking; take this example from The printers’ handbook of trade recipes, hints, & suggestions relating to letterpress and lithographic printing (surely a precursor to the O’Reilly books with the same spirit) on the subject of how to make accented letters from scratch:

Soldering on the top part of a colon with a small blowpipe: blows my mind. The closest I’ve ever come is using cabbages as a stand-in for brussels sprouts.

Apologies for the raft of letterpress book snippets; I’m plumbing the depths of Google Books and finding an amazing – at least to me – collection of letterpress books from the 1800s.

Comments

Dave's picture
Dave on August 22, 2010 - 15:12 Permalink

No apology necessary. Fascinating stuff.

Jason's picture
Jason on August 23, 2010 - 02:03 Permalink

That is cool!