The opening section of The Young Job Printer contain a very useful glossary. In particular, three terms have served me well today:

Planer.—A smooth block of hardwood used for leveling the surface of type-forms after they have been imposed. The planer is laid on the face of the type and then tapped gently with the mallet.

Proof.—An impression taken from a form before it is sent to the press. The proof is read and compared carefully with the copy, the errors marked on it, and then given to the compositor to correct. After the matter or the form has been corrected, a second proof is taken. This is again read by copy, and should there be any errors found, another proof or revise is taken. The last proof, on which there are no errors discovered, is called a revise.

Proof Planer.—A planer covered with felt cloth, used for taking what is called a stone-proof. The form as it lies on the stone is inked and a piece of dampened paper laid carefully on top. Then the proof-planer is laid down carefully and tapped with the mallet, until a good impression is secured.

From these three definitions I was able to concoct a method for pulling a “proof” of the first sentence of Anne of Green Gables without messing about with the press (which saves a lot of cleanup).

First I rolled out some oil-based ink onto a piece of plexiglass with Speedball roller. I then rolled the ink over the type. Next I spritzed a fine mist of water out of an old Windex bottle onto a flat surface; I then laid a sheet of white bond paper into the mist so that it became a “dampened paper.” I took this sheet of paper and placed it, less-wet-side-down, into the inked type. Finally, I placed a piece of think felty fabric over the paper, and over that a piece of plywood – together they formed a makeshift “proof planer” – and rolled a clean roller over the plywood.

The result was this:

It’s not perfect. But then again it’s not supposed to be: it’s only a proof. And it’s just about clear enough for me to actually “proof” the copy before making any corrections and then moving to print on the press.

Our colleague Heidi at The Old Farmer’s Almanac has put together a great little video about the hole that’s in top-left corner of every copy of the book:

More useful insights from the The Young Job Printer from 1889 that foreshadow issues we face every day with web design.

The importance of  standards:

Simple is better:

Regular readers will recall that I briefly flirted with a Kindle before selling it due to general discomfort with the physical force required to turn the pages.

Since that time I’ve continued to keep an eye on the “e-book reader” market: I’ve tried out iBooks on the iPad, handled the Kobo and the Sony Readers, and sought the advice of friends who are more seasons e-readers than I. And nothing I learned convinced me that there’s an ebook solution that works for me ergonomically.

And then I discovered Google Books. Or, rather, rediscovered.

I’d known it was there all along, and I’d followed the various legal twists and turns of (insert name of aggrieved party) vs. Google (well-aided by a chance dinner conversation with David Weinberger who nicely summed it all up for me).

But Google Books had never really caught my interest, mostly because its fully-readable books are mostly those out-of-copyright. And gripping though some of those books may be, man cannot get by on The House of the Seven Gables alone.

And then I suddenly became deeply interested in letterpress printing. And the great thing about letterpress printing is that it’s a technology that has its modern technical heart in the 1800s. And so most of the really good books about letterpress printing were written in the 1800s. And a lot of those books have been scanned by Google.

Google handily makes PDF downloads available of their full versions of these books, and so all I needed to profit from the wisdom contained within them was a workable e-reading solution that worked with PDFs.

But, like I said, none of the e-readers I’ve seen are “workable” for me, and I’m just not the kind of guy who can take any pleasure in reading while seated in front of a computer screen.

So I decided to opt, instead, for Shawn.

Shawn Mackenzie runs the local Kwik Kopy, conveniently located a block from my office. And Shawn has been following along with my letterpress adventures since I looked at some gear he was selling back in April (he also happens to own a very sweet Golding Jobber press – you can see it in the front window of the shop – that’s in mint condition, albeit not in use at the moment).

So here’s my e-reading solution:

1. Find book in Google Books.
2. Download PDF.
3. Email PDF to Shawn.
4. Pick up printed and bound copy of book at Kwik Kopy a few hours later.

It’s not all that expensive – 10 cents a double-sided page, including cover and coil binding. So this book, for example, cost me $7.36 to have printed.

The end result is way, way better than any e-reader I’ve found:

• the type is large and easy to read;
• I can write notes anywhere in pen or pencil;
• no need to worry about batteries or light conditions or about getting crumbs on the book – I can throw the book in my bicycle basket and carry it to lunch (which is why that first page is a little crinkled);
• I can easy share the book – I just hand it to someone else, or get Shawn to run off another copy;
• And the ergonomics of page turning: well, it just works for me.

I wrote about a similar project I undertook last year which involved getting a modern “open sourced” book printed up at Staples; using Shawn to print my books means I don’t have to get out to Staples, and allows me, in a small way, to support a locally-owned business here in the neighbourhood.

The really great thing about using Google Books as the “library” from which to draw is that while I have my printed book for actual reading, I can take advantage of Google Books’ excellent searching, clipping and organizing tools along with the printed book. The best of all worlds.

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.

In Harper’s, volume 75 from June 1887 there’s an article by R.R. Bowker on how books are printed, part of the magazine’s “Great American Industries” series. My favourite paragraph concerns attempts to replace human printers with “steam men”:

You may recognize the name R.R. Bowker from the company that bears his name; among other things the company produces Books in Print.

This afternoon I finished setting the type for the first sentence of Anne of Green Gables in Bodoni 12 point. I took a photo of the type in the chase and then digitally mirror-imaged it to allow me to proof it; here’s what that looks like:

I’m still thinking about the ends of each line: as you can see I threw in a couple of hyphenated word breaks to keep the right edge relatively uniform; I don’t think I’ve got it in me to do a full justification, but it would probably be a good exercise to go through.

Once I’d sorted my type drawer, the setting went much more quickly because I could be relatively confident that pulling a given letter out of the drawer would result in that letter being in my hand (before sorting it was a 50-50 chance it would be the wrong letter). The exercise also drilled the California job case layout into my head, so I now find myself almost being able to reach for the right letter without looking at the case layout diagram.

The other lesson learned: my case of Bodoni doesn’t have enough lower case d’s to set much more than this: I only have a half-dozen left over.

Next step: trying printing it.

In the excellent 1889 book The young job printer: A book of instructions in details on job printing for beginners, from the chapter on job composition:

Who among us has not encountered the retailer or store-keeper looking for a website that “helps to communicate their brand identity” with elaborate ornamentation like this.

With all my lowercase Bodoni sorted into place, I needed a break from the pitter-pat of sorting type, and so I turned my attention back to setting the type for the (marathon) first sentence of Anne of Green Gables.

Once I got to eight lines I decided it was time to see how it was shaping up: I packed the type into the chase (not spending a huge amount of time on makeready), put some ink on the Adana Eight Five, and gave it a go. Here’s the best of about 3 dozen proofs I printed:

If you click on the image to view it in Flickr you can hover over the image to see notes about all the things that need correcting – u’s for n’s, and so on.

I used this opportunity to do a lot of experimenting with the various adjustments on the press, not all of which are well-oiled and fully-operable; I found that even tiny, tiny turns of the screw that adjusts how close the bed is to the platen (there are four of these, one in each corner), could result in one side or the other receiving no ink at all. I need to do some more experimenting with these controls to understand more about how to do it right.

I also experimented with different papers, and I’ve come to realize that the standard-issue 110 lb. white card stock from Staples is probably not the best paper to use for letterpress: it simply doesn’t have enough “give”, and so everything I print on it seems like I’m fruitlessly smashing my head against the wall. Here’s the maladjusted press printing on card stock:

By contrast, the (much nicer) first example above was printed on HazelTree straw paper; there’s too much ink on that one, mostly because I’d over-inked the press in an attempt to have more success with the ill-fated card stock. But the oatmeal paper is about 1000% better than the card stock: the type feels like it’s biting into the paper just the right amount. I’ll have to swing by HazelTree soon to pick up more.

Meanwhile, I’m about halfway through setting the type for that first sentence, and the result should just about completely fill up the available space inside my 8 inch by 5 inch chase. Stay tuned.

For the last seven years I’ve been a happy and enthusiastic voice-over-IP user: since I moved into the office here at 84 Fitzroy Street in 2003, all of my telephone calls have been handled by the excellent open source Asterisk system.

So when you call me at 892-2556, it’s Asterisk that’s answering the phone (and possibly taking a message). And when I’m in Europe it’s Asterisk that’s taking your call, making a call to my European mobile, and conferencing the two together, giving you the illusion that I never left town. 

It’s also Asterisk that’s answered more than 5,000 calls for public transit information in Charlottetown.

Until this morning, calls from Asterisk to me here in the office got routed from my Asterisk server downstairs over Ethernet to a switch and on to a Sipura SIP device into which a regular old Nortel telephone was plugged.

This system worked well, had great call quality, and I was generally happy with it.

In recent years, however, I’ve been having more (and longer) conference calls with clients, and the ergonomics of cradling a phone in my neck meant I needed to find a better solution; I found it in Telephone, a simple and elegant Mac VOIP client that lets me route VOIP calls into my Macbook and talk and listen using a headset.

This is much better ergonomically, lets me answer calls anywhere I have Internet and has the additional benefit of allow me to clear a lot of cables and other devices out of my office.

Here’s what the space under the left side of my office desk looked like before I cleaned out everything required to run the regular old telephone:

And here’s the same space after I cleared everything telephone-related out:

Without the telephone (and its power brick) I didn’t need the SIP device (along with its power brick), I didn’t need the switch (along with its power brick) and I didn’t need to run Ethernet into the office at all.

My next step? I’m thinking about going completely digital, converting 892-2556 from an Eastlink POTS line into a digital line riding in on the silverorange T1 like the 367-3694 transit information line. I’ve resisted this for a long time (to the consternation of my landlords, who had to go to great pains to keep the analog box attached to the back of the building) but, on reflection, my resistance seems silly, especially because going digital means I would finally be able to have incoming calls identified (the old Digium analog board could never seem to handled call display data properly).