A drawer of wood type in a Belfast basement

A friend who deals in salvage rang me in March about a basement off a street I will not name. A printer’s widow was clearing it, and there were four cabinets nobody wanted. Three held metal type, badly stored, most of it pied beyond saving. The fourth held wood type, and the basement, by some miracle of the building, had stayed dry.

I went that afternoon and I have not quite recovered.

What was there

Wood type is display type: large letters cut on the end grain of maple or holly, for posters, bills and the headlines of provincial newspapers. The sizes in the drawer ran from about four line to twenty line, which is to say from a letter an inch and a half tall to a letter roughly three and a half inches tall.¹

There were parts of nine fonts. Parts, not fonts. The letters used most are the ones that wear out, split, and get lost, so an old drawer is heavy on Q, X and Z and short of E, A and T. One font had seven Zs and a single E.

Two of the nine were the same design at different sizes, which is worth noticing. In that period each size was cut separately, by hand or on a pantograph from a separate pattern, and the twelve line had heavier serifs in proportion than the six line. The same face, measured like a relative: you could tell they were family, and you could tell they had grown up apart.

Footnotes

1. A “line” is a pica, one-sixth of an inch, so twenty line is twenty picas or about 85 millimetres. Wood type was sized in lines because it was set alongside metal type, which was measured the same way. ↩