It seems that my recent acquisition, 30 pounds of Bodoni 12 point, is a little less “sorted” than I would like it to be.

The type arrived in California Job Case, which is essentially a drawer with dividers that make compartments for each letter:

The placement of each letter is standardized by tradition; here’s the California layout (from briarpress.org):

As soon as I started to set my first paragraph with this type I started running into problem: I was pulling more non-letter-d’s out of the d’s than I was actual letter d’s; I had l’s in my t’s and b’s in my q’s.

A collection of completely unsorted type – like this – is called pied type. What I’ve got is certainly much, much better than that. In my case it seems that the mis-sorting is a combination of simple laziness on the part of previous printers combined, perhaps, with a desire to fill up every letter’s compartment with something to increase the perceived resale value of the type (I’m confident this didn’t happen at Don Black Linecasting, where I bought the type, but rather at an earlier stage of its life).

So I have two choices: put up with it and handle the mis-sorting as I go along – death by a thousand cuts, perhaps – or buckle down and sort everything out in advance.

I’ve opted for the second, and am now making my way slowly through each letter.

I pull all the type for a single letter out of the case, sort it into a composing stick, and then use a lighted magnifying glass (thanks to [[Catherine]] the jeweler for the lend of this!) to pull out every mis-sorted letter with a pair of tweezers (also from Catherine – it helps to have a silversmith in the family).

If you look at the job case layout above, I’ve made my way from the top-left corner – ffi – across through fi, ‘, k, j, ? b, c and d to e, and and then down through !, z, l, m, n, h, x, q, and v.

It’s tedious (though oddly relaxing) work, but it does have the surprising upside of making me very intimate with Bodoni letter-shapes and with the Calfornia job case layout (and given me cause to wonder whose idea it was to locate the ! and l characters and the z and x characters right beside each other – even under a magnifying glass x and z look almost exactly alike).

When I’m done – it will likely take me another week or so, working an hour or two a day – I’ll have a completely sorted case of job, and from then on I’ll have only myself to blame for mis-sorted type.

This type-sorting process is very evocative of the process I used to go through with my TRS-80 Model One computer and program listings from Creative Computing magazine. The magazine used to publish programs that enterprising geeks like myself could type in, line by line, to our computers to run locally (this was pre-Internet and, indeed, pre-cheap-transfer medium of any kind).

It would take hours and hours to type in a decent sized program. And then some more time to correct all the typing errors that prevents the program from actually running. Like sorting type it was tedious work, but the result was an intimacy with code that I’ve not experienced since; I get the same feeling from sorting type: there’s a knowledge of metal type that can only be gotten by examining each and every letter of a font under a microscope.

Did you know that the first sentence of the first chapter of Anne of Green Gables, a paragraph long, contains 148 words? It just goes on and on and on. There are 831 characters, punctuation marks and spaces in all. And 46 of these are the letter d.

Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.

I know this because I’ve decided to use this sentence as a way of taking my Bodoni out for a ride.

It turns out that my Bodoni wasn’t exactly lovingly handled in its previous home: I’m batting about 50% pulling letters out of where they are supposed to be. There are u’s where there are supposed to be n’s, and almost everything but d’s where the d’s are supposed to be. But I’m making my way. Slowly. Here’s a rough proof of where I finished off tonight:

It’s taking me about 10 minutes a line right now, in part because I’m just learning my way around the California job case layout.

There are 102,232 words in Anne of Green Gables in all; at my rate of about 1 word a minute, it would take me about 150 days to set the entire book (working 12 hour days).

Longtime readers may recall the Anne of Green Gables Wordle I made a few years ago; this is a good map for where my hands would be heading were I to proceed; I would need many, many capital letter A’s.

The first job on my Adana Eight Five using the Bodini Bodoni 12 point that arrived yesterday from Don Black Linecasting. More photos of the process here.

[[Oliver]] and I were snuggled in front of our workstations here at the office on Sunday afternoon, content to spend an afternoon at work and play, when I was suddenly struck with one of those “oh my, winter will be here soon” revelations. At that exact moment I read this Tim Chaisson tweet:

heading up to souris to play a show in the park! last ‘morning fold’ show of the summer on pei, should be fun :)

With winter bearing down on us, and the added attraction of this being the last show of the summer, we had no choice: we detached from our desks, piled into the car, and headed east.

When it comes to music I’m very much a contextualist: I’ve little interest in workaday music shows, but give me a special venue and you’ve got me hooked (see also Garnet Rogers at the Trailside and Oddawn at the mall in Porto).

So the opportunity to hear Tim Chaisson and his group on home turf in Souris, for free, was simply too good to pass up.

I was not disappointed.

We got to Souris about 30 minutes after things were supposed to be starting – Souris is far away – and so we were just in time to catch two songs from Brielle Ansems, the opening act. Man, does she ever have a voice; she’s someone to watch for:

Twenty minutes later, Tim Chaisson and Morning Fold were on stage. And while this was a tiny free concert, with, it would seem, mostly Chaissons in the audience (and mostly Chaissons over 60), the band was as good as ever, and they came with a full kit and very good PA. Like I tweeted later, it was like seeing The Beatles in Liverpool.

When the concert was over we found ourselves in Souris and needing a place to go for supper.

My first thought was the Indian restaurant we’d eaten at least year, over by the hospital. We swung around there and found, alas, that it was all boarded up and overgrown. Back into town we stopped at the tourist information centre and asked for advice: our friendly travel counsellor confirmed the demise of the Indian place (and from her non-enthusiastic description of it you could derive some of the reasons why an Indian restaurant in Souris might not work out). Our choices turned out to be the Bluefin in Souris, the Sheltered Harbour in Fortune and the Sandstone in North Lake.

My personal mantra being “when in doubt, go to North Lake,” we headed off deeper into the heart of the eastern tip of the Island. My other personal mantra being “why go the regular old highway when you can go overland,” we found our way, with Oliver doing a decent job of navigating, to route 305, which led to route 335, which led (and so on). Each road smaller than the previous.

View Souris to North Lake, Overland in a larger map

So what started out as a regular old highway, soon became this:

A few minutes later we arrived at the New Harmony Demonstration Woodlot and, being woodlot fans as we are, we swung in for a look. This ended up as a futile attempt to find the parking lot and trailhead and instead became a harrowing journey looping completely around the woodlot on a road like this:

There were a few times, faced the mud puddles of unknown depth, that visions of walking back out to the highway danced in my head. But we made it, the only drama being running into another car when we were at the very farthest point from civilization, a car driven by ruffians wearing headscarves that I reasoned it was best to not stop and chat with.

We emerged from the red clay roads mere steps from North Lake and the Sandstone:

The Sandstone, it turns out, is an uncommonly good seaside restaurant. I had a platter of fresh haddock, scallops and shrimp that, while slightly over-paprika-ed, was wonderfully cooked and was accompanied by potatoes – “baby reds cooked on the grill” the were described to me – that were out of this world. Oliver had a kids portion of fish and chips that he made short order of. I finished up with a slice of strawberry-rhubarb pie and Oliver with a moist chocolate brownie. The service was quick and friendly and their only misstep was prematurely clearing away our mostly-finished meal while we were off to the bathroom (how do single parents cope with this? it’s the second time it’s happened to us).

We emerged from the Sandstone around 6:30 p.m. with thoughts of taking in the Monticello ceilidh up the road, but decided to head back to town so as to not be out to all hours. With map in hand Oliver navigated us along Route 16 to St. Peters, memorizing the names of the communities along the way – Priest Pond, Rock Barra, Hermanville, Clearspring, St. Margarets, Naufrage, Monticello, Goose River – and by 8:00 p.m. we were pulling into the driveway at 100 Prince Street.

All in all a great Sunday afternoon.

Elephant magazine is a lush magazine with sharp typography and beautiful illustrations. Unfortunately it tethered strongly to print, and its web presence, such as it is, it more digital paper than useful companion.

The latest issue has a fascinating section on “microworlds” – artists and photographers who create worlds in miniature. By way of helping others who found this equally fascinating, here are the artists that were profiled:

• Adalberto Abbate
• Jason Barnhart
• Amy Bennett
• Vincent Bousserez
• Daniel Dorrall
• Thomas Doyle
• Audrey Heller
• Minimiam
• Liliana Porter
• Jonah Samson
• Slinkachu

That seems like a sufficient microworlds bibliography to give anyone a foothold on this artistic sub-genre.

For me it’s less about the art than it is about pondering what wonders I could have created in the sand pit under the willow tree in our back yard when I was a kid had I had access to such inspiration.

You can buy the printed Elephant at Indigo in Charlottetown, or you can buy a digital copy from the magazine itself for 10 EUR.

Two interesting commentaries on the workplace: Why you Can’t Work at Work from Jason Fried and an episode of The Conversation with guests Merlin Mann and Jeff Veen. Both are worth listening to, especially if you find yourself in a job, or in a workplace setting, that isn’t working for you.

When I’m traveling away from Prince Edward Island I give myself permission to be more liberal in my media impulse purchases. Living here in the remotest edge of the country, there’s plenty of Danielle Steel to go around, but anarchist zines are few and far between. So I seize the moments. Here’s what I collected on last week’s trip to Toronto:

• From Function 13 in Kensington Market: an issue of Zoetrope: All-Story, a DVD of the Sydney Pollack documentary about Frank Gehry, and a copy of Objectified.
• From Type Books on Queen Street West: What’s the Matter with Albert? for Oliver, and Biking to Work (a very practical book full of useful information).
• From The Paper Place, next door on Queen Street West, a nice variety of coloured card stock for letterpress experimenting.
• From Steel City Surplus in Hamilton: a USB and cigarette lighter charger for my [[Nokia N95]] (only $3.29!), some cable ties and a carabiner.

Along the way I also had a very nice stuffed naan at Dufflet Pastries, several very good cups of coffee at My Dog Joe in Hamilton, a decent Vietnamese meal at Little Saigon on the mountain in Hamilton, a fantastic vegetarian hotdog at Easterbrooks in Aldershot and saw Inception on the IMAX.

We all need one of these stuck to our workstation. This one was on a complicated-looking piece of printing machinery at Don Black Linecasting.

Back in May at the letterpress workshop at The Arm, personable printer Daniel Morris pointed me toward Don Black Linecasting in Toronto as a good source in Canada for letterpress equipment in supplies and I resolved to make my way there as soon as I could.

That ended up being yesterday: on a quick breeze through southern Ontario to visit family I swung through Scarborough on my way to the airport and ended up spending two hours in the place yesterday.

Wow.

If you’re a letterpress aficionado, a visit to Don Black Linecasting is like a visit to heaven: a huge warehouse full of presses, drawers of type, binding machines, and all the supplies you might ever need. Here’s just one of the many rooms in the place that’s packed to the gills:

Upon arriving I got a quick tour of the place from Don’s son (and co-worker) Craig: he showed me their selection of platen presses for sale (some great looking machines, all priced way, way out of my range) and then let me wander around by myself until Don was due to arrive back from lunch.

Twenty minutes later Don was back and we spent an hour or so talking letterpress, printing, newspapers, and all manner of things. The Canadian letterpress community is tiny, and Don knew almost all the names I mentioned and I knew a good part of those he mentioned. As I’ve found with almost everyone else in the letterpress world, mentioning Gerald Giampa (formerly of Mount Stewart, PEI) requires a good 30 minutes of conversation all on its own, and Don was no exception.

Then I laid out my needs: enough of a serif typeface to allow me to do some serious typesetting (I’m tired of not having any number 9s in Times Roman Bold), a composing stick, enough leading to keep me going (mine is old and bent out of shape), and some wooden furniture to bolster the collection that came with my Adana Eight Five.

Before we got going, though, Don showed me the working Intertype linecasting machine they’ve got in the office. It’s an amazing device: fabulously complicated but, compared to hand-setting, a huge time-saver (imagine setting the Globe and Mail letter by letter!).

Don set my name, and Oliver’s name, in lead. I learned firsthand the “hot” part of “hot metal type” when he handed me my name fresh out of the machine and almost melted my hands through.

Demonstration and chat completed, we set out to shop. Don set me loose in the area of the warehouse where all the wooden furniture is gathered and I grabbed enough in different sizes to make sure I never run out:

Next he pulled out the drawers containing dingbats, ornaments and various and sundry type elements so that I could pick out a selection:

(So now I’m equipped to start offering letterpress workshops to 4H in the fall.)

He found a composing stick for me, and a tool for cutting leading:

And then we started the hunt for type. They’ve got a computer system that catalogues everything they have – you can search it on the web – and Don would go back into the office and look up some likely suspects and then we’d track them down in the warehouse to see if they fit the bill.

I ended up with a case full of 30 pounds of 12 pt. Bodoni – “to set any amount of text you really need 30 pounds,” Don and Craig agreed – that they’ll pack up and ship to me:

Beyond its natural attractiveness, one of the things that so draws me to letterpress is the small size of the letterpress community: I’d much rather have an avocation where there’s but a single well-equipped nexus in the country staffed by knowledgeable experts than I would an everyday hobby where you can pop around the corner for whatever you need.

That either makes me an elitist or a loner or some sort of analog nerd. Either way, it’s a wonderful avocation to have, and having people like Don Black to keep the world alive and active is a great gift.