Read Ebook: Printing and bookbinding for schools by Vaughn Samuel Jesse

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: PAGE Introduction 1 The Art of Printing--Methods and Tools of Composition 5 Type Setting 14 Rules of Composition 25 Proof Marks 27 Imposition 28 Presswork 38 Cleaning and Distributing 42 What to Print and How to Proceed 45 Wood Cuts and Metal Plates 50 The Equipment--Its Selection and Cost 56 Arrangement and Disposition of Equipment 65

INTRODUCTION

Printing as a Manual Art in Schools.

Woodwork has been quite generally introduced into the high school and grammar school. With all the defects of the earlier presentation of the subject, not to speak of those in later efforts, it has made a surprisingly general appeal, and has met with unusual and deserved success. Some of the methods employed, tending to place a ban on originality and thought, have brought it far short of its possibilities in the aid of intellectual development. To a considerable extent the woodwork has not touched, as intimately as it might, the vital interests of the pupils and of the homes; and, by its own limitations, it has not had an especially strong social bearing. The need is not less woodwork but more original and thoughtful woodwork, and also a greater variety of other constructive work which touches more and wider interests and which may appeal to those not particularly adapted to that one line. In this way it will be possible to strengthen the places where woodwork is weak. So far experience with printing in school indicates that it makes quite as general and permanent an appeal as woodwork.

Printing makes this very strong appeal to the boys because, in the first place, the printshop comes as near to reproducing a great world industry in the school as any other line of industrial work. Instead of doing simply the "roustabout" work of the beginning apprentice the boys are put to work with the regular shop equipment, and soon are ready to begin turning out some printing. It is a common thing to hear a boy remark, "This is just the way they do it down town." So they look upon printing as the work of real men, and feel that they are actually taking part in some of the activities that are potent in the affairs of men. It's wonderful, the pull of this feeling of participation in the world's work.

Besides this, there is probably no other line of Manual Arts work in which pupils, grade boys especially, get so practical a working knowledge of the actual shop work as in printing. This fact is often turned to good advantage by the boys, for there can scarcely be found a commercial printshop anywhere which is not glad to employ one or two boys during vacation time, if they know a little about the work and are interested.

There is the still further fact that printing offers the concrete embodiment of rules of punctuation, capitalization, syllabication, sentence structure, paragraphing, etc. It is an indisputable fact that work in the printshop influences in a remarkable way the disposition to observe good form and to follow the best usage in all such matters. It is a daily occurrence in the school printshop that some boy brings a text book or newspaper to exhibit what he considers a glaring disregard of some of these principles of composition.

Printing furnishes a distinctly different type of motor activity from woodwork, for it is the arrangement of certain unyielding forms within limited space to produce some desired effect.

In the matter of social significance printing is practically ideal. Almost every problem is a community project, that is, a number of pupils combine their efforts to produce it. Practically every task in the printshop is undertaken with the consciousness of real service to a great number of people in the school or in the community at large.

It is interesting to note that among the boys in school, the genuine joy in the production of printed matter does not necessarily arise out of a sense of the commercial value of the product. The class that has printed and illustrated a little pamphlet of stories for the second or third grade are proud and happy immeasurably beyond the pride and happiness that would come from a job of office blanks worth so many dollars. In other words, they are happy to the extent that the quality of their work merits praise, and that they feel able to make others happy by their services.

The school paper is an enterprise of very much the same nature. It is a real influence and a genuine service performed for which they expect no individual return except in the appreciation of those they serve, and pride in the excellence of their work and the skill it shows. This is certainly a kind of training for which there is a distinct need just now.

There is no other one of the Manual Arts that can touch so intimately the varied classwork, interests, and activities of school life as does printing, especially when combined with bookbinding.

It brings a freshness and vigor to the elementary reading and language work; it touches the athletics and social activities through announcements, programs, and notices in the school paper; it becomes an important factor in the celebration of special days, and in the preparation of material bearing on them; and it bears an intimate and vital relation to art.

Another interesting development is in the relation of printing to the other lines of constructive work. It has proved extremely valuable to have the completed problems written up in descriptive articles by the pupils, and to have the best of these compositions printed.

THE ART OF PRINTING

Methods and Tools of Composition.

In printing, composition includes all the steps from receiving the copy until the type is set up, proofed, corrected, and made up into page forms.

This discussion presupposes a knowledge of spelling, syllabication, punctuation, paragraphing, etc., all of which good composition really includes. Practical rules bearing on these different phases may be found in various handbooks for the printer.

The first essential in printing is, of course, a quantity of type properly arranged.

Type is cast from a composition of metals--lead, tin, antimony, and sometimes copper. This composition is melted and poured into moulds the size and shape of the desired type.

Lead alone is too soft to wear well and to retain the shape of the type under the constant pressure of the printing press. Tin is added to give hardness, and antimony or copper to give toughness to the type metal.

The various faces are distinguished by names applied by the foundries, as "Caslon Old Style," "Engraver's Old English," "Banker's Script," etc.

The extreme length of type from the face to the foot is .918 inches, or about eleven-twelfths of an inch.

The column of metal on which the letter or character rests is the body or shank of the type and the distance which the body extends beyond the edge of the letter or character is the shoulder .

On the side of the body next the base of the letter or character are one or more nicks . The chief purpose of such nicks is to indicate the base of the letter or character, and thus to aid the compositor in keeping the type right side up without constantly referring to the face of the type.

To the manufacturer, these nicks indicate other things in addition to that mentioned above, but these need not be detailed here.

The size of the type has to do with the body, and signifies the vertical distance through the body, or the distance from the nick side to the opposite side, as from x to x?, Fig. 1.

Of course it is clear that among the large amount of type manufactured, there must be a great number of different faces on the same size of body; and that there may be two or three sizes of the same face on the same size of body.

In order to indicate a specific type, it is necessary to mention its size and the name by which that particular face is distinguished; as, "10 point Author's Roman Wide," "18 point Pabst Old Style," "6 point Caslon Bold Italic," etc.

When the printer speaks of dimensions, like the length and width of a page, he says it is a certain number of ems or picas long and wide. An em pica is one-sixth of an inch; so a page three inches by five inches is eighteen by thirty ems pica.

Until comparatively recent years there was no definite standard of type sizes. Each foundry established its own standards. If a printer wished to use type from different foundries, it probably was necessary to make some troublesome adjustments with bits of paper or otherwise to get them to line properly.

There was a sufficient similarity in sizes of type to justify the use of names to indicate certain sizes. The names used to designate the common sizes from 4 1/2 to 12 point type according to the point system, are as follows:

Some of these names, such as Nonpareil, Brevier, Long Primer, and Pica, are still in quite general use.

Not only is the height or depth of the body determined by the point system, but the width or set of the body is also cast on the point basis. There are no fractional points in the width of type made on the point set basis. Any number of letters or characters placed side by side make an integral number of points. This is called point set.

Also, in case a number of differently faced type with the same body are used in the same line, they are so cast that the different faces line with each other as well as if they were all of the same face.

In any size of type there are four kinds of quads. Fig 2 shows the ends of the 8 and 12 point quads and spaces. An em quad is the square of the type body. The 10 point em quad is a square quad whose sides are 10 points wide. An eight point em quad is 8 points or one-ninth of an inch square.

An en quad of any size type is one-half the em quad of that size of type. A two em quad of any size type is equal to two of the square or em quads, and a three em quad is equal to three of the square or em quads laid side by side.

There are four of the thinner blanks in any size of type, known as spaces. The 3-em space is one-third of the em quad; the 4-em space one-fourth of the em quad; and the 5-em space is one-fifth of the em quad. The hair spaces are very thin spaces of copper and brass. These are very seldomly needed in general work.

The em quad must be clearly distinguished from the em pica. Every size of type has its em quad; but the em pica is simply the 12 point standard unit of measurement.

Type may be bought in weight or job fonts. If bought by weight, it contains capitals, small capitals, small or lower case letters, including ligatures , figures, marks of punctuation, spaces and quads. Twenty per cent of a weight font is made up of spaces and quads unless otherwise specified. Job fonts are small assortments of type, where only small quantities or unusual faces are needed. Such fonts do not include small capitals, spaces or quads.

Fonts or parts of fonts come from the foundry wrapped in small packages. The capitals, the small letters, and the quads and spaces come, of course, in separate packages. The letters are arranged for the most part in alphabetical order; but there is an occasional insertion of a mark of punctuation or a thin bodied letter out of regular order to fill out a line.

In taking the type from these packages, the entire face side of the mass of type is wet with soapy water. Then, beginning with the first of the alphabet, a few letters are taken at a time and put into the proper boxes of the case. This is called laying the case.

The right side of the job case contains only thirty-five boxes for capitals instead of forty-nine, as in the capital side of the upper news case.

It will be observed that the capital letters are in regular order in the case with the exception of J and U. It is interesting to note that these two letters were the last to be added to the alphabet, and hence were simply placed at the last of the alphabet in the case.

In the lower case there is but little regularity of arrangement, except that the most commonly used letters occupy the most convenient and conspicuous places. The printer knows the locations of the various boxes, so that the picking out of a certain letter becomes almost purely automatic.

TYPE SETTING

In beginning to set type, the first tool the printer needs is the job stick, Fig. 6.

This is the receptacle into which the compositor places the type as he sets up the form, letter by letter. Sticks are made in great variety, and almost any length from six inches up. There are the simple, ungraduated stick, adjusted by the thumb screw; the marked and perforated stick for nonpareil adjustment by means of a lever, Fig. 6, and the non-adjustable stick for news or book composition.

The printer sets the stick the length of the desired line. This is done by placing into it a lead or slug, the desired length, and moving the clamp up against it tightly enough that the type will not easily fall forward, and yet loosely enough to allow the lines to be lifted from the stick without binding.

A lead or slug generally of the thickness to give the required space between the lines, and of the length of a line, is placed in the stick, and the type is set with the top of the letter toward this lead. Then with the lead or slug in the stick and the stick in the left hand, the compositor stands upright at the case, picks out the letters and characters one at a time, and places them, nick out and face up, into the stick, beginning at the lower left hand corner. Fig. 8. As the type are put into the stick, they are held there by the thumb of the left hand. The method of holding the stick at the proper angle to prevent the type from falling out and to allow the thumb to do its work properly, is quite an art which it takes time to acquire.

When a line has been thus finished and a lead put in above to support it, the compositor proceeds with the next line exactly as before. It is wise for the beginner to leave all the work leaded, so as to simplify the operation of removing the lines from the stick. If it is desirable, the leads or slugs may be removed after the type is emptied from the stick. If the last line of a paragraph is not a complete line, it is filled with quads and spaces, but the spaces should never be placed at the end or between the quads.

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