Grandpa’s Printshop (2 of 4)

The bulk of the printing operations were done on the letter press, with movable type. Along some of the walls of the basement were racks and racks of the old lead type. There were all kinds, sizes, and styles, since when an old print shop would close down, my grandpa would go in and acquire all the type. Sometimes the people had thrown all the type in buckets and Grandpa had to go through and sort the letters out.
The printing process began here, with the movable type. Grandpa would sit on a stool in front of a rack of type. He would choose the style and size and then pull out the appropriate type case. Each case was made of wood and was big and wide, but shallow with lots of little rectangular compartments in it for upper- and lowercase letters, and numbers. Some compartments were bigger than others, since some letters were used more often and more letters were needed. Each section was filled with little long and skinny pieces of lead. Close inspection reveled that a backwards letter was on one end of each lead piece.
After my grandpa selected each piece of type he placed it in “the stick”, a small metal holder for the type which he held in his hand. He spelled out by hand each word of the text to be printed, selecting the individual letters. When he had set one line of type, he placed a lead strip that separated the lines, and then started on the next line. I have tried this process many times myself. My grandpa made this long and tedious process look easy and fast.