Extreme responses to the frustration and boredom of dissing
included on one occasion, I recall, a boy simply picking up handfuls of type
from his stick and sprinkling them like broadcast seed over the type-case.
Another witness remembers seeing a boy quietly pocketing handfuls of type from
his stick and at the end of the session walking over the football field and
hurling them in disgust over the cliff. The type-cases used the most often –
12pt Caslon – were commonly in a more or
less foul state. For the conscientious compositor, this meant slow work, as
every second or third sort had to be replaced in the right compartment before
another attempt was made to secure the right one. But where the boy compositor
had been (perhaps) happily chatting to his neighbour as he worked (the motto ‘A
still tongue makes a full stick’ adorned the printing room wall before the war)
the extent of his mistakes might only become apparent when his work was
proofed.
‘The setting-up is exceedingly well done though the sorting
still needs greater accuracy,’ remarks the school newspaper in the Spring 1923.
But then in the Summer 1924: ‘This term has been chiefly notable for the much
greater skill in distribution’. How long did it last? It would be quite wrong
to assume that the fact that the matter is not mentioned again in the school
newspaper for another three decades means that it did not continue to be an issue;
more likely, it was so well established a problem as to be no longer worthy of
comment. The Christmas 1960 number reports that the lower forms of the senior
school had then been reorganised, allowing ‘more periods of printing [in] much
smaller groups’ and there had been in consequence a notable improvement in
workmanship, except distribution:
‘Here much more care must be taken, for bad distribution means a great deal of
correction in the galley if the compositor does not take great care with his
work’.
In 1959, while visiting Oxford as part of the arrangements for
the publication of Ruskin’s Diaries, edited by Joan Evans, Jim Dearden became acquainted with the
antiques dealer and private press bibliographer William Ridler and for a dozen
years or so from the mid-1960s sent him for his collection an annual packet of
Yellowsands proofs, trials and dummies, etc. These are now in the John Johnson
Collection. They contain some spectacular examples of careless
schoolboy setting. (The sheer number of mistakes often reminds one of the
specimens of corrected setting which usually accompany the table of proof
correctors’ marks in printers’ manuals or authors’ guides to printing - to
which a note is sometimes added reminding the reader that this is of course not
the frequency of error which will ever be found in practice.)
Occasionally, the compounding of error with misplaced skill
achieves a kind of sublimity. In one proof, the text of a hymn, the first lines
have been methodically indented, at first glance to accommodate a drop initial
letter to be inserted later – except that, carefully centred in the space
created there is a small figure in parenthesis: it’s the number of the piece of
copy being set. The parentheses are as close as the compositor has been able to
get to the circle in the manuscript indicating that the matter within it is not
to be set.
Five years in to his long tenure as Printer Dearden compiled
some Notes & Rules for Compositors at
the Yellowsands Press (1964) which
appears to be the only surviving such reference work produced by the Press. It’s
a sixteen-page style guide cum printers’ glossary cum index of common errors,
and provides an interesting (and not wholly predictable) reflection of some of
the problems and potential mishaps of composing room practice.
Accented
letters: When setting accented letters, it must be remembered that the
accent is reversed on the type.
Confused
letters: The following pairs of letters are frequently confused,
especially in distributing: b d, p q. The letter on the actual piece of type is
reversed, so that when the type is examined, the nick being downwards, the ‘b’
looks like a ‘d’, ‘p’ like ‘q’, and vice versa.
The letters ‘u’ and ‘n’ are frequently inverted and used in
place of each other. This, too, should be avoided…
Care should be taken to differentiate between o (oh) and 0
(nought). Study the examples to see the different shapes…
Leads
& reglets: Care should be taken to use leads and reglets that
are the same length as the line of type.
Spacing: To
justify a line of type the spaces must be changed working outwards from the
centre using (when spacing up) combinations of spaces in the correct sequence as shown in the table of comparative spaces.
It is not permissible to put in an
extra space to fill up a line.
Spaces may be put at the end of a line only if it is the last line of a paragraph or a line of verse. In
these cases the largest space used should be put at the end of the line.
There is no space between a word and the punctuation following
it.
Titles: must be
set in the type specified on the manuscript.
Correcting poorly spaced setting could be particularly demanding,
lacking the reward of the immediate clarification of language. One vice was the
impatient forcing-in of spacing material. In the worst cases, the compositor might
actually contrive to gradually increase the line length to which his composing stick
had been adjusted. Sometimes it was quicker just to start again.
It’s remarkable, looking through Bembridge School Newspaper over the seven decades of its existence,
how few typos there are – and how few indications, in the notes on the
activities of the printing room, of the extraordinary feat of proof-reading and
correction that lay behind the exclusion of error. But the consequence of this
was that the common, amateur printer’s bias in favour of accuracy in
composition, over careful presswork, was entrenched.
Doubtless there were boys – there must have been many of them
over the years - who interested themselves in the arts of making ready and
achieving a consistent quality of impression on the Albion, but such was the
vigour of the publishing imperative at Bembridge, conditions in the printing
room were frequently against them. As one observer has noted, working the hand
press was often treated as a kind of sport, ceasing, at times, to be a printing
exercise at all. In the fifty-four years of printing before the Newspaper
was finally put on machine*, phases of sustained improvement in presswork tend
to coincide with either the arrival of a new Printer, obviously intent on
making his mark, or (an even rarer event) the purchase of new type. Certainly,
in the 1960s - perhaps the high point of printing at Bembridge School - such
tasks as the preparation of the tympan or the adjustment of the platen, were
largely the province of the Printer. There being no general investment in them
on the part of the boys, standards of presswork might easily slip. Nevertheless,
term after term, the Newspaper was got out. Though it was still then the
custom for masters to address even the most junior boys in the senior school as
young adults, somehow expecting them thereby to behave as such, we were most of
us still children, and we were having fun.
*Spring number, 1973. It was a change Dearden always
regretted, but as he explained, it had became necessary because in the busy
final weeks of term the availability of a team of four printers, as and when each
forme was ready, could no longer be relied upon. The printing of the Newspaper
was transferred to a Furnival vertical platen acquired from Lightbown’s, of
Ryde, a few years before.
