Hey! Check This Out, Yo!

Everybody who's ever taken a course or who has read the book knows that one of the first things to do when putting a form in a chase & then putting that on the press involves moving the grippers.
     For the uninitiated or those unschooled in the mysteries, the grippers are the two finger thingies on the platen of the press which usually stand off the platen when the press is open. The job of the grippers is simple: hold the paper down as the type pulls away from the printed sheet so the sheet doesn't get picked up off the platen and set to wrapping up on the rollers.
     If you leave the grippers inside the frame of the form – as in: you leave the grippers too much toward whatever edge the form is going to take – the grippers will be between the type and the paper when the press closes. Thus the grippers will be where the type is going to hit the paper, but because the grippers are in the way, the type will be pressed against the metal grippers with a force of some 170 ft/lbs per square inch.
     That's a nice way of saying that the type is going to get smashed into the grippers.
     If the type gets smashed by the grippers, all the letters in the form making contact with the grippers will be ruined.
     Type that's smashed into grippers is usually very far from type-high when the press opens. Such type might get inked but it will no longer meet the paper and if it still does, whatever it was supposed to look like will not be what it will look like.
     
That's a cardinal rule of letterpress: move the damn grippers to the outside of their place on the platen so you can check and set the form prior to printing.

Now there's another minor codicil to this rule, that being the mandatory removal of any extension fingers attached to the grippers under the same provision of not smashing the type.
     And you'll notice that I said "removal of any extension fingers," not just moving them one way or the other so the type is out of harm's way.
     Failure to remove the extension fingers might work out if the fingers are out of the way, but if you're using the simple spring type fingers that just clip on the grippers there's always the possibility that the finger will get moved or nudged.
     Imagine then that you're putting the chase in the press from the belt wheel side and your arm happens to nudge the finger off the gripper so the finger is pointed down across where the form is going to fit.
     If such is what happens, you might, in a moment all too easy for a beginner, run the press closed to check the impression against the draw sheet without ever noticing that the finger is going to be dead under the type.
     If such is the case, you'll have sheet that looks like the one to the upper right here.
     If such is the case, you'll open the press and immediately see that you've ruined a stretch of type going from the middle of the page downward over a good inch or two of the form.
     If such is the case you'll swear to yourself and then you'll sit down and look at what you've done and realize that you have only two options:

1. You are going to have to sit down and set every damn one of every damn line that you've ruined . . . or
2. You're going to have to sit down and individually try to reset the last inch or so of every line on that side of the page because of what you did.

And either way, you know from experience that, unless you fix what you've fouled up, the page is going to look like the example to the right, with an open space the exact shape and size of the finger where the type (now ruined) used to be.

And that's the most cardinal rule of all: if you smash the type, it ain't gonna print.

So for me, the answer was to sit down and pick through the form, line by line and letter by letter, replacing every single piece of type on that section of the form. And when all was said and done, I still had to fiddle with the spacing so the form would lock up solidly without too much jimmying around.
     And every single piece of type that I pulled from the form to fix my foul-up went straight into the hell box with the other bits and pieces of metal that have either been cut off, cut up or otherwise taken out of service.
     Yeah, all that 10 pt Century Schoolbook, most of it ATF casts with some F&S Type Foundry sorts mixed in, all of it went into the hell box.
     And the only consolation in that will be that some day the contents of the hell box will end up in the pot of somebody's caster and the tiny bit of foundry metal therein recycled will add to the hardness of whatever is cast from the contents.

Not much of a consolation prize, really.

The worst part of this is that over the next half hour or so after I'd squashed the type I had two more episodes of fighting with the extension finger problem. This was because, as I slipped the chase into the press from the belt wheel side again, I noticed that my left arm came down on the part of space where the extension finger was still none-too-firmly clipped to the gripper.
     Twice.
     Two more chances to smash type again.
     Two more moments when – and before which – it became clear to me that the problem was not so much my leaving the finger on the gripper but more one of my damn arm getting in the way.
     So I tried putting the chase in the press from the delivery board end and decided that my slowly aging vertebral parts were not quite up to the task of hoisting that much metal across that much space.
     And thus I grabbed the finger and pulled it off the gripper and stuffed it in the drawer under the delivery board where I keep such items as extension fingers, a pencil and a small jar of Badger Balm.
     This action, however late it might have been, prompted me than to grab a hank of string off a nearby shelf and use the string – tied between the grippers – to replace the metal of the extension finger.

Some time later, after all was done and the press was cleaned up and the used type returned to a galley for later distribution, it came to me that this was a good object lesson in paying attention. That and it would give me a chance to show off how good I was at messing things up.
     It also gave me pause to consider how much money would have gone into what I'd done, were I running the print shop as a business or was otherwise deluded into thinking that I had a studio.
     I figure I wasted a couple hours, which would be an easy $30 by today's money and a small hank of type, probably some $50 by today's money. So all-in-all, I'd messed things up good enough that, were this a money-makin' shop – I'd have been cussed at, threatened and maybe, on a bad day, fired for my lack of attention to cardinal rules.

The lesson thus learned is that I am just as fallible as the next non-pope and that, for all my carping about how things are "supposed to be done," I had no grounds for making any more of a case for what was once an art and a profession (as opposed to an art studio thing on the tail-end of a graphic arts degree) than I do for carping about all the people who have printing studios.

Wanna bet I do it again? Within a couple weeks?
 

Them Good Ol' Days Are Gonna Cost You Now

Life must have been very interesting in the early 19th Century. That was back when a man could break his back all day long, six or seven days a week, and come home to his wife and family with a dollar in his pocket.
     Yeah, a whole dollar in his pocket.
     'Course there were things that the dollar could buy and there were things that a dollar all by its lonesome couldn't buy. But that was what a hard-working stiff could expect as pay at the end of the week back around 1820 or so.
     And the banks printed their own money, too.
     Yep, life must have been very interesting. All that penny candy and all those penny dreadfuls and all that food at a nickel and a dime. Oh what that kind of money could get a hard-working stiff.
     Not to mention the increase in earning power after the Civil War and the true kick-ass onset of the industrial revolution. Iron foundries pounding out bits and pieces of this and that, hard metal shipped and machined and finished and polished and painted so it would look pretty in the barn or on the shop floor.

You have to see it that way, the advances in technology.

Back during the Korean War medics and doctors noticed the large number of men with leg wounds also had the worse circulation in those extremities. Arterial deposits & disease, something that had been around diagnosed but seriously not all that urgently treated, suddenly got notice.
     It was the beginning of the world's acknowledgement of blood chemistry. And that led to the chemistry of life, the recognition of the structure of DNA, the double helix, the beginnings of research into the genome, which led to a new understanding of what life itself is all about.
     All about life is dedicated to one task: the survival of the DNA.
     Such a thought, such a recognition of life as a strangely interlaced physics experiment running on molecular engines scares the hell out of people. It means that life itself has no real purpose, no higher purpose, no grander goal.

You have to see it that way: advances in technology.

Such a microscopic view of existence, the world viewed through a electron microscope is the alternate parallel of the beginnings of the industrial revolution and the one dollar-a-week pay envelope. Now we are so sure of what's going on inside that we've begun to see flowers a different way.
     Flowers become elements in the chemistry of DNA being moved around and mitigated by chunks of DNA that fly around with chunks of DNA attached to their legs.
     Flowers, for all their beauty to the eye of a creature with reflective consciousness – and yeah, I'm talkin' about you and me, pilgrim – are really just replication machines to keep the DNA around.

Weren't always that way, of course. Back when it was a dollar-a-week world, people painted flowers on machines because, if you follow the delusion that life has a higher goal, a more sensitive focus, machines are things of beauty that give a brighter meaning to life.
     Machines allow humans to undo a fair amount of drudgery from their lives, even if those who build the machines are pulling their own share of drudgery.
     And since machines do that – that giving of a brighter meaning and a meaningful future – they are part of the beautiful interaction of life. Not a beautiful interaction of molecules and atoms and molecular structures like we sense today at the benefit of science and technology, but the sunlight-in-your-eye sense of life as purposeful and meaningful and contributory.
     That's why old steam tractors have gold pin-striping on the spokes of their flywheels and why the levers and handles of the steam drive machine shop drill presses were painted red and decked with little splashes of blue and green. That's why old machines sometimes look much more beautiful than any thing you can buy today made out of plastic.

And for those who are into letterpress printing often spend time cleaning up and repainting machines from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries so they look as bright and beautiful as something just offloaded from the rail car down by the telegraph office and the sheriff's office.
     You have to see it that way, from a time before technology had miniaturized life and made the commonness of it so absolutely uninspiring . . . at least to those who are inspired more by old delusions of higher power and higher purpose.
     All the same, you have to admit that the painted spokes on the flywheel of a 19th Century cast iron press do look pretty when the machine's at rest. You'll also have to admit that a press in that condition, with the spokes pin striped and the flywheel rim painted a bright white and the manufacturer's name on the draw bars outlined in gold is something that looks more like a sculpture than a machine.
     Perhaps the closest you can get to that beauty, that finesse and loveliness in today's world is a carefully preserved & sweetly treated Shelby Mustang, say, circa 1958. You might have heard of one but the chances are good – unless you one of those who believes with religious ferocity in Mustangs – that you've never seen one in your life, let alone on the road.

That kind of pretty.

Thus you have the pictures of printing presses placed around this text. The Golding Jobber above is a serious museum-grade piece of sculpture that has obviously been decked out in all the finery that it might have had when it was built, somewhere between 1890 and 1927.
     Other similar beasts show up now and then on eBay, a few of which are shown here. Notice the florets and piping, the simple little adornments of what you or I might take as quaint moments in time from a society that we have lost.
     While you're admiring the nice lines and the shiny metalwork, pay attention to a simple fact: every one of these presses was produced first by an ironworks, a foundry where the hot, molten steel & iron was poured in to sand molds. Consider what the heat and dust and smell must have been like in those factories.
     Charcoal and coal fired furnaces melted the metal and huge amounts of particulate matter was belched into the air by those fires. What didn't get sent up a flue or chimney was inhaled by the workers or the folks who lived nearby.
     All that heat and all that metal, molten or not, was worked in a time before health and safety agencies of the federal or state governments even thought to consider the dangers that factory workers faced. The sheer tonnage of equipment and the tonnage of the products of those plants could crush a limb or a finger. Flying metal could blind or lacerate anyone.
     The machine tools that ground down bearing surfaces and finished & leveled the material didn't have safety guards and the drive systems themselves were exposed belts and pulleys. There was no room for error.
     And then someone had to paint those flywheels and stand castings. Someone had to finish by hand various parts and bits that were also eventually painted, often with lead-based paints that ran like water into buckets and drums.
     All the pretty colors of the rainbow, poisonous.
     All the mass of the machinery, deadly.
     And a finished product that cost quite a bit more, unit by unit, than the dollar a week that the workers got – and these would only be the high-end workers who finished and polished and assembled the presses. More often than not it was children or women doing the finish work. And children are not that big a deal. You can pay 'em pennies and they'll do the job. If they don't or won't, well, fire 'em and get another. Just like the kids who treadled these presses day after day & got paid by the piece.