Preface: the shop door

The first person you met inside a Victorian printing office was usually the devil: the apprentice, black to the elbows, who fetched type, pulled proofs, mixed ink, and took the blame. Before a serious run the pressman spent hours in makeready, packing tissue under the low spots and easing the impression until the lightest hairline and the heaviest capital printed with the same even bite. Once a year the shop kept the wayzgoose, the printers’ feast.

I keep a small press now. One proprietor, no staff, several machines that compose, impose, proof, and bind without getting tired. When I started working this way I went looking for new words for it. I did not need any. The thing that sets my pages works fast and gets things wrong in ways I have learned to expect. That is the devil. The box where the shop keeps every page that has ever lied, so the proof-readers can be made to catch each one again before they read anything real, is the hell box. The hours before a run, when nothing ships, are still makeready. Even the wayzgoose survives, because a shop this small forgets to celebrate unless the feast is on the calendar.

The old vocabulary fits because the old problem is the same. Printing was among the first mass-production crafts to make verification a standing, salaried stage of the work.¹ A good compositor set type by the thousand ems, far too fast for anyone to check him letter by letter. So the trade built the proof, the copyholder reading the manuscript aloud against the galley, the revise that showed each correction had actually been made, the sheets pulled and read before the full run went on. Fast, fallible labor at every stage, and a second pair of eyes after it. The trade never solved the compositor; it surrounded him.

This is a working manual, not a history. Each chapter teaches one practice of the modern shop: how to write the copy the devil composes from, how to work the devil without trusting it, how to make ready the hell box that proves the proof-readers before they read, how to pull a proof you did not set, how to impose the sheets and brief the plates, how to know when the forme may be locked and the run declared good. Where the old trade had a rule, I give the rule and then what it looks like at my bench today. Every practice here has been paid for in my own shop, usually by skipping it first and paying for the reprint. Anything I have not paid for myself I left out.

You already know how to build software. What changed is the shop. You direct labor that is faster and cheaper than you and wrong often enough to matter. The printers organized their whole trade around labor like that. They did not slow the compositor down, and they did not stand over his case watching every sort he lifted. They made someone read the sheets before the customer could.

So the door is open. The whole book is commentary on one rule: every page deserves a witness that could have said no.