Job 02Type4 sections8 min

Sorting wood and metal type bought by the kilogram

Almost every letter in this room arrived mixed, in crates, sold by weight to whoever got there first on a Sunday morning. Sorting it is slow work with a very poor hourly return, and it is also the only way an amateur ends up with anything worth setting.

First pull: 27 October 2024
Last revised: 15 January 2025
Room: Vilnius, Lithuania

What is actually in the crate

A crate sold as type is about half type. The rest is spacing material, leads and reglets, a quantity of rusted furniture, the occasional wooden block that once carried a photo-engraving, and grit. Metal sorts come out grey and dull under a film of old oil and lead oxide that marks everything it touches. Wood letters come out chipped along the shoulders, because wood type spent its working life in poster work and poster work is rough. Expect two or three complete-looking fonts and a great deal of nothing in particular.

Lead is the part people forget. Old type is lead with antimony and tin in it, the dust settles in the bottom of the crate, and handling a few kilograms of it leaves a grey film on the hands that no amount of wiping on trousers removes. I sort on a bench covered with paper that goes in the bin afterwards, wearing gloves, with the window open and nothing to eat or drink within reach. Hands get washed before I touch a door handle. None of this is dramatic, and all of it is the difference between a hobby and a slow problem.

Height first, then body, then face

The first sort is not by letter. Type cast in different countries stands at different heights, and two heights in one forme is a forme that prints half an image and dents the other half into the packing. I keep a straightedge and a known-good sort on the bench, stand a dozen unknowns beside it, and sight along the tops. Anything visibly short goes in a separate box. Anything visibly tall goes in the same box with a note, because a tall sort will punch through a sheet and mark the cylinder before I have understood what happened.

The second sort is by body size, which is easier than it sounds because the nicks along the side of the sorts do most of the work. Sorts from one casting carry the same nick pattern, so a handful can be lined up and read almost like a barcode. Face comes last and takes longest, since a twelve-point roman and its italic look identical in a heap under bad light. I sort under the window in the afternoon with a loupe, four or five hundred sorts at a sitting, and then I stop, because past that point I start putting letters in the wrong compartment.

From the make-ready sheet

Height to paper first: short sorts print nothing, tall sorts bruise
Read the nicks; sorts from one casting share a pattern
Separate roman from italic under daylight, not under a bulb
Five hundred sorts at a sitting, then stop

Cleaning without ruining the face

Metal type cleans with white spirit, a soft brush and patience. The brush has to be soft; a brass one will take the film off in a minute and take the sharp corners of the face with it, and a rounded serif prints as a blot for the rest of its life. I work over a tray, brush along the length of the letter rather than across it, and dry each handful on newspaper before it goes anywhere near a case. Sorts that come out of the tray still grey usually stay grey, and grey prints perfectly well.

Wood is the opposite problem and I learned it by ruining a lovely sans capital R. Wood type is end-grain maple with a shellac or varnish finish, and it must never soak. Water swells the grain and lifts the face above type height within a day; solvent left standing dissolves the finish and leaves the wood open to everything afterwards. What works is a rag barely damp with spirit, one letter at a time, wiped and immediately dried, with old hard ink in the counters left alone. A trace of somebody else's black in the counter of an M has never cost me a print.

Which fonts earn a drawer

Space in this room is the real constraint, not money. A case of type takes a drawer whether it is complete or not, and an incomplete font is a trap: you set four lines happily and then discover there is no second lowercase e in the box. My rule is that a text face has to arrive with enough of the common letters to set a paragraph, and I count them before the crate leaves the table. Display faces are judged differently, because a wood alphabet with a missing Q still sets almost any short line I am likely to want.

The other thing I count is accented sorts, and this is where printing in Lithuanian gets expensive in patience. A font cast for a shop that set Lithuanian will have the ogoneks and the caron and the macron in it; a font that came from somewhere else will not, and no amount of wishing produces an e with a tail. I have set a name three times with a hand-filed accent laid in beside the letter, and it always looks like exactly what it is. Two of my four text cases can set the language properly. The other two are for English and for ornament, and I have stopped pretending otherwise.

From the make-ready sheet

Count the common lowercase before you agree to anything
A text face without accents is an English-only face here
Display alphabets can be incomplete and still earn their space
Spacing material is worth as much as the letters are