Highly regarded group of skilled tradesmen and tradeswomen identified by their
typesetting and printing skills, observance of historical customs, long apprenticeships,
initiation rites, and use of peculiar trade jargon. The heyday of the journeymen printer
ended in the 1960s when the craft all but ceased to center around metal type. By the
1970s, computer-generated type had become the norm. The technological transition from
the physical production of metal-cast type to the electronic world of computer-mediated
type displaced coundess journeymen printers from their trade.
Hot-metal printers (compositors, stonehands, linotype operators) were craftspeople,
engaged in the physical composition of the printed word. Their occupation dated back to
the mid-15th century when Johannes Gutenberg perfected the use of movable type. As
wordsmiths, the printers’ command of language made them unique among labor
craftspeople. Membership in an intellectual craft was a point of pride. Many renowned
writers began their careers as printers’ apprentices—Walt Whitman, Mark Twain,
Erskine Caldwell, Joel Chandler Harris, Sherwood Anderson, and Benjamin Franklin,
among others. The latter is the personage most often cited by printers, proud of the
literary lineage associated wtih their trade.
Printers customarily entered the trade by completing a six-year apprenticeship.
Formally serving an apprenticeship qualified one to work at the printing trade as a
journeyman. The apprenticeship served as a practical education. Horace Greeley was
known to have said that “a Printer’s case is a better education than a high school or
college.” An apprentice was expected to learn by doing. In addition to gaining technical
knowledge under the wing of an experienced journeyman, the apprentice was
indoctrinated into the social traditions and customs of the trade.
As is commonplace in occupational life, journeyman printers observed the custom of
playing initiation pranks on gullible apprentices, also known as printer’s devils. One such
prank involved a search for “type lice.” A seasoned journeyman instructed an
unsuspecting apprentice to look for these nonexistent critters. The apprentice leaned over
a galley of loosely composed type, into which water had been poured. Not seeing
anything unusual, the apprentice attempted to get a closer look. Once his scrutinizing eye
was inches away from the galley, the journeyman printer slapped the lines of type
together, splashing water all over the apprentice’s face. The prank has been adapted to the
cold type world of late-20thcentury printing. In place of type lice, apprentices have been
asked to look for halftone dots.
Itinerant printers were known as tramp printers. A traveling card, issued by the
International Typographical Union, was their only credential. Tramp printers found
temporary work setting type throughout the United States and Canada until the 1960s,
when a decline in union membership put an end to tramp printing. Tramp printers
epitomized the journeyman printers’ jointly held values of respectability, reciprocity, and
independence.
Though the freedom of the traveling printer’s life is ro-manticized in oral and written
tradition, the working conditions of both the itinerant and the stationary printer were
harsh—excessive heat, noise, and the presence of burning lead took their toll on printers.
Stories abound about missing limbs, varicose veins, and tuberculosis.
Many phrases that have entered the mainstream of everyday speech have their source
in printer’s hot-metal terminology. For example, the phrase “out of sorts” derives from
the printer’s term for individual pieces of metal type, including those bought individually
to supplement a font. A font is a family of type in one single size and style. The quantity
of each letter varies with firequency of use. A font will come equipped with more A’s
than X’s. Even so, a particular job might require more A’s, in which case the printer
could supplement his font by purchasing “sorts.” If he came up short, he was literally out
of sorts, not to mention at his wits’ end.
Other hot-metal terms, such as leading (the metal slugs that form the space between
lines of metal type) have survived the transition into the computer type age, even though
leads no longer exist in the physical sense. Galleys no longer mean the brass or wooden
trays that held lines of composed type; they are the paper proofs of those lines, printed. In
printer’s terms, “30” means the end. A 30-point slug was used at the bottom of a galley to
indicate the end of an article. The only time one would see “30” in print was when a
newspaper folded and it ran its last issue. For printers who worked in hot metal, the
symbol “30” is coterminous with “the end.” But for the increasing majority of typesetters
working in a coldtype environment, “30” is just a number.
At one time, a newspaper editor had to rely on journeymen printers to read inked lines
of cast type, as they lay upside down and backward in the galley. Now, editors key in
their own copy, completely bypassing the composing room, where linotype operators
once composed the copy.
In just two decades, the craft of setting type was transformed from an age-old
handicraft to semiskilled labor. Just as printers attained mastery of their craft, computer
technology made hands-on application of their skills superfluous.
Maggie Holtzberg-Call
References
Brevier, Linafont (pseudonym). 1954. Trampography: Reminiscences of a Rovin’ Printer, 1913 to
1917, Glendale: n.p.
Holtzberg-Call, Maggie. 1992. The Lost World of the Craft Printer. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press.
Kelber, Harry, and Carl Schlesinger. 1967. Union Printers and Controlled Automation. New York:
Free Press.
Moxon, Joseph. [1683–1684] 1958. Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printingy ed. Herbert
Davis and Harry Carter. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Savage, William. [1841] 1967. A Dictionary of the Art of Printing. New York: Burt Franklin.