# Make Ready.: sources and authorities

*Companion to Make Ready. by Clint Ecker, LGTM Publishing, First edition, 2026.*

Where the book states a matter of fact it did not invent, the
statement is listed here against the authority for it. Each claim is
checked against the text of the book on every build, so a citation
whose sentence has left the book fails the run and cannot rot here
unnoticed.

## In the preface

- "the sheets pulled and read before the full run went on": International Paper, Pocket Pal: A Graphic Arts Production Handbook (first pub. 1934; e.g. 2000 ed., International Paper Co., Memphis). The practice is genuine and standard: the trade's stock reference documents inspecting and signing off the first sheets off the press (the "OK sheet") before the run proceeds. Caveat: "press check" is offset-era press-room vocabulary; the hand-press period (Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, 1683) did the same work under other names (proof and revise pulled at press, stop-press correction), so in a list beside "copyholder" and "revise" the term is a mild anachronism even though the claim about the practice holds.

- "spent hours in makeready, packing tissue under the low spots": Craig R. Spicher, The Practice of Presswork, 1919 (Carnegie Institute of Technology; full text at Internet Archive, id practiceofpressw00spicrich). A period pressroom manual whose make-ready chapters describe exactly this: pulling trial impressions and pasting tissue patches into the packing where the print comes up light, until light and heavy areas of the form strike uniformly; the "spent hours" detail is corroborated by the British Letterpress makeready guide (britishletterpress.co.uk), which describes a skilled pressman spending hours building a tissue "contour map."

- "among the first mass-production crafts to make verification": Anthony Grafton, The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe (British Library, 2011); with Percy Simpson, Proof-Reading in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oxford, 1935) and Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683).. Grafton, Simpson, and Moxon firmly establish that early print shops built verification into the workflow as a paid, standing role (correctors, proofs, revises); Grafton calls the corrector "a new social type brought into the world by printing." But no source asserts printing was the FIRST such craft, and the superlative has a medieval counterexample: the Trial of the Pyx, an institutionalized sample assay of Royal Mint coinage (recorded 1248, formalized by writ 1282), plus precious-metal hallmarking (1300). Safer phrasings: "the first mass-production craft to make verification a salaried stage of the work," or drop "first."

- "A good compositor set type by the thousand ems": Ellic Howe (ed.), The London Compositor: Documents Relating to Wages, Working Conditions and Customs of the London Printing Trade, 1785-1900 (Oxford University Press for the Bibliographical Society, 1947; full text on Internet Archive).. Howe reproduces the London Scale of Prices (1785, 1805, 1810), under which compositors' piecework was priced per thousand ems, establishing the em-count as the trade's standard measure of a compositor's output; the "too fast to check letter by letter" clause is the book's gloss, but it squares with the documented reliance on proof and revise stages rather than live inspection.

- "the revise that showed each correction had actually been made": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, vol. 2 (London, 1683), p. 250; see also OED, "revise, n.". Moxon states the corrector "has a Revise, which is also a Proof-sheet: He examines in this Revise, Fault by Fault, if all the Faults he markt in the last Proof were carefully mended by the Compositer," which is precisely the claim; the OED records the trade noun (a proof taken after correction) from the late sixteenth century.

- "the copyholder reading the manuscript aloud against the galley": The Century Dictionary (1889-1891), s.v. "copyholder"; corroborated by American Heritage Dictionary, 5th ed. (2011). The Century Dictionary defines the copyholder as "a proof-reader's assistant, who reads the copy aloud or follows it while the proof is read, for the detection of deviations from it in the proof," which establishes exactly the two-person aloud-reading practice the preface describes; galley proofs were the standard stage for this first reading.

- "Once a year the shop kept the wayzgoose, the printers' feast": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, 1683-84; see also OED, s.v. "wayzgoose". Moxon, the earliest English printing manual, records the annual "Way-goose" feast the master printer gave his journeymen about Bartholomew-tide, exactly the custom the preface names; the "wayzgoose" spelling is a slightly later variant recorded by the OED.

- "usually the devil: the apprentice, black to the elbows": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises: Or, the Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing, 1683 (reprinted with notes by Theo. L. De Vinne, 1896; Internet Archive); corroborated by The Oxford Companion to the Book, Oxford University Press, 2010, s.v. "printer's devil".. Moxon records that print-shop boys "commonly black and bedaub themselves; whence the Workmen do Jocosely call them Devils," and the Oxford Companion confirms the devil as the apprentice doing the menial ink work (mixing ink, fetching type); the term remained standard trade usage through the Victorian era (Savage's Dictionary of the Art of Printing, 1841; Pasko, 1894). Only the "taking blame" clause rests on trade lore (errors blamed on the devil/Titivillus) rather than a duty list, but it is well attested in printing histories.

## In chapter 1

- "even a fast compositor got only a few columns from a long day at the frame": Walker Rumble, The Swifts: Printers in the Age of Typesetting Races (University of Virginia Press, 2003); figures restated by Rumble in "Ready, Go, Set!", Invention & Technology (1999), and in the Public Domain Review essay "Twilight of the Velocipede".. Rumble establishes that an average hand compositor set about 700 ems an hour, a fast one 1,200 to 1,400, and the 1870 world record was 2,064 ems (roughly 760 words) in a single hour; at those rates a long day yields on the order of two to three broadsheet columns, so "only a few columns from a long day" holds. The source gives rates in ems per hour, not columns per day; the columns figure is a routine conversion, not a direct quotation.

- "An operator at a keyboard set several times what a hand compositor set": The Skyscraper Museum, "Linotype Machine," Paper Spires exhibition (skyscraper.org): "A linotype operator could set type four to eight times faster than a hand compositor." Corroborated by Alex Wright, "Twilight of the Velocipede: Typesetting Races before the Age of the Linotype," The Public Domain Review (2026), which puts a typical 1870s hand compositor at roughly 700 ems per hour (2,000 a near-impossible record), against a union-scale Linotype day of 18,000 ems.. Documented multipliers run three to eight times depending on source and era, so "several times" is the safe, even conservative, phrasing; no source found puts machine composition at less than about triple hand speed.

- "Old law required the printer's name and address on everything that left the shop": Unlawful Societies Act 1799 (39 Geo. III c. 79), s. 27; imprint provisions preserved by the Newspapers, Printers, and Reading Rooms Repeal Act 1869 (32 & 33 Vict. c. 24, Schedule) and amended by the Printer's Imprint Act 1961 (c. 31), texts at legislation.gov.uk. English statute from 1799 onward required the printer's name and address on printed papers and books so anonymous or seditious matter could be traced to a responsible printer; the rule persisted into the twentieth century. Minor rounding: the acts listed exemptions (banknotes, deeds, parliamentary papers), so "everything" is casual shorthand, not literal.

- "a boy to hold copy against him could keep pace with the whole floor": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, vol. 2 (1683), the corrector's office; with C. T. Jacobi, The Printers' Vocabulary (1888), s.vv. "Reading boy" and "Copyholder". Moxon establishes the arrangement and the staffing: his model printing house has one corrector, in a closet off the composing room, to whom the master appoints "some one that is well-skill'd in true and quick Reading, to Read the Copy to him," while the corrector follows the proof; Jacobi attests that the copy side of the pair was in trade fact a "reading boy." Two caveats: in Moxon the boy carries proofs while the appointed copy-reader is merely skilled, the lad-as-copy-holder being the later trade's usage; and Savage's Dictionary of the Art of Printing (1841), s.v. "Reader," shows the one-pair sufficiency was the classic house's arrangement, not a law: small shops let the overseer read, and large houses kept "several readers." Fine as an evocation of the old shop; do not lean on it as a universal ratio.

- "Type went into the composing stick by hand, letter by letter, out of a divided case": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (London, 1683-84); standard modern edition ed. Herbert Davis and Harry Carter (Oxford University Press, 1958); facsimile at archive.org/details/mechanickexercis00moxo_0. Moxon's compositor sections describe the stick held in one hand while the other picks single letters from the compartmented boxes of the upper and lower case, which is the claim exactly and is the origin of the practice as codified in English.

- "Setting turned cheap in a single generation": George E. Barnett, Chapters on Machinery and Labor, Harvard University Press, 1926 (ch. 1, "The Introduction of the Linotype"). Barnett's classic economic study documents that after the Linotype's 1886 debut, machine composition cut newspaper composing costs by roughly half and displaced hand compositors across the trade by about 1910 (some 25,000 machines in daily use by 1911), i.e., within a single working generation; corroborated by Library of Congress and printing-museum accounts of the adoption timeline.

## In chapter 2

- "follow copy though it fly out of the window": James Wood (ed.), Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources (Frederick Warne, 1893), which prints "Follow the copy though it fly out of the window" labeled "Printer's saying".. Wood 1893 records the saying verbatim as a printers' proverb, and it is corroborated twice over: Roget's International Thesaurus (Mawson eds.) lists the same line tagged "[Printers' Saying]", and The Story of the House of Cassell (Cassell, 1922) has printing manager John Farlow Wilson recalling "it used to be a jocular instruction... 'Follow your copy, even if it goes out of the window'" alongside a real anecdote of a compositor's copy blowing out a window. The chapter's fragment matches Wood's wording almost exactly, so the claim that this was a real, jokingly stretched trade saying stands.

- "The standing instruction in every shop was "follow copy,"": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises: or, the Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing, Vol. 2 (London, 1683), p. 198 (archive.org: mechanickexercis00moxo_0). Moxon states it as trade law, not shop custom: "by the Laws of Printing, a Compositer is strictly to follow his Copy... so that his Copy is to be his Rule and Authority." He immediately notes the customary exception (mending bad spelling and pointing), which the surrounding prose can absorb without weakening the claim; the rule's universality is also echoed in the later trade proverb "follow copy, even if it flies out of the window."

- "hung on a hook where the man could reach it": A. A. Stewart, The Printer's Dictionary of Technical Terms, 1912 (School of Printing, North End Union, Boston; scan at archive.org/details/printersdictiona00stew); corroborated by J. L. Ringwalt, American Encyclopaedia of Printing, 1871, s.v. "Take". Stewart defines both terms outright: "Take , When copy is divided among several compositors, each part is a take" and "Copy-hook , a filing-hook beside the copy-desk, upon which copy is placed for compositors in a newspaper office," with copy filed in order, face inward; Ringwalt (1871) adds the cutting itself ("an article a column long... cut into twenty parts... these parts are said to be takes"). One nuance: the attested hook stands beside the copy-desk where compositors come to lift their takes, a newspaper-office fixture, rather than at each man's frame, so "where the man could reach it" is fair but "within the compositor's reach" should not be pictured as arm's length from the case.

- "cut into takes by the overseer": John Southward, Practical Printing: A Handbook of the Art of Typography, 1882 (archive.org: practicalprintin00sout_0), with William Savage, A Dictionary of the Art of Printing, 1841 (archive.org: Gutenberg #77410). The two-step practice is real: Southward shows copy reaching the composing room already read and marked (type, headings, style), the overseer then taking it in hand, dividing it into takes, and dictating style; nothing went raw to the compositor. But the manuals assign the reading-and-marking to the editor, sub-editor, or printer's reader, not the overseer, whose documented duties (Hansard 1825, Savage 1841) are giving out copy and revising proofs; Savage adds that only "in small establishments" the overseer performs the reader's duties. Moxon (1683) is counterevidence for the hand-press era: the compositor read his own copy. Safest fix: credit the reader rather than the overseer, or soften to "read and marked before it reached him."

- "In the reading closet": William Savage, A Dictionary of the Art of Printing, 1841 (Longman; full text at Project Gutenberg, ebook 77410), "Rules and Regulations proper to be observed in a Printing Office," Compositors' rule 5.. Savage's model printing-office regulations direct that proofs, once pulled, be "given to the Reader, or carried into the reading closet" along with the copy or the foul proof, establishing the reading closet as the standard term for the room where the reader corrected proofs against copy.

- "the shop charged him for the alteration; he had departed from copy": William Savage, A Dictionary of the Art of Printing, London, 1841 (s.vv. "Author's Proof" and "Correcting"; reprints the London Scale of Prices, art. 23). Corroborated by Theodore Low De Vinne, Correct Composition (The Practice of Typography), 1901.. Savage documents the two-tier custom exactly as the chapter asserts: the compositor first "put[s] right the errors and mistakes he has made in the workmanship" at no charge, but on the Author's Proof, where the author "makes... such alterations and amendments as he may think proper," "the compositor is paid for the time occupied in making these alterations" under the scale provision "All Corrections to be paid 6d. per hour," time the shop billed onward; De Vinne states the author-facing side, that clean copy saves the writer "the expense of changes that must be made in proof." Moxon (1683) supplies the underlying rule that the compositor "is strictly to follow his Copy," so departures from copy were the author's cost, not the shop's.

- "the copyholder read the manuscript aloud while the reader followed the proof": "Proof-reading," Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th ed. (1911); full text on Wikisource.. The article states the standard trade procedure outright: "The manuscript is then read aloud by a copy-holder, while the proof-reader carefully follows the text before him letter by letter," which is exactly the two-person pairing the chapter asserts.

- "The marked proof then became the copy for the next pass": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, 1683-4 (literal reprint, 1896; full text at archive.org, moxonsmechanicke21683moxo). Moxon describes the corrector handing the marked proof back to the compositor "to Correct the Form by"; the compositor lays the folded marked proof against the page of type and works from its marks, and the revise is then read against that marked proof, making it the authoritative document for the next pass. (Strictly, printers reserved the word "copy" for the author's manuscript; the marked proof functioned as, rather than was called, the copy. Corroborated by the "Proof-reading" article in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica.)

## In chapter 3

- "in a letterpress shop was called the printer's devil": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683), vol. 2, dictionary entry "Devil" (Project Gutenberg ebook 78991). Moxon (1683) attests that the boys in a printing house, blackened with ink, were "jocosely" called Devils; the sense settled into the standard dictionary definition of printer's devil as the errand boy or youngest apprentice in a printing office (attested from the 1680s per the Online Etymology Dictionary). Moxon's original devil is strictly the press-room week-boy, but "youngest apprentice" is the established reference-work formulation, so the book's phrasing is safe.

- "the chapel, the journeymen's own body of standing rules": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, Vol. II (London, 1683), appendix "Ancient Customs used in a Printing-house," pp. 356-358; consulted in the literal De Vinne reprint (Typothetae of New York, 1896), Internet Archive id moxonsmechanicke21683moxo.. Moxon records that every printing-house was called a Chappel, all its workmen were members governed by customs and by-laws of their own making, breaches were fined as "solaces" decided by plurality of chapel votes, and even strangers entering the shop were subject to them. One pedantic nuance: strictly, the chapel is the body of workmen; the standing rules are the chapel's customs and by-laws, so the fragment's apposition compresses body and rulebook into one.

- "a bin the trade called the hell box": The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th ed. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), s.v. "hellbox" (ahdictionary.com). AHD defines hellbox as "a receptacle for broken or discarded type," which is the claim verbatim; the standard dictionaries spell it as one word ("hellbox"), and the older trade shorthand was simply "the hell," so "hell box" as two words is a legitimate but slightly informal rendering.

- "They named him Titivillus": Margaret Jennings, "Tutivillus: The Literary Career of the Recording Demon," Studies in Philology 74.5 (1977); see also Marc Drogin, Medieval Calligraphy: Its History and Technique (1980).. Jennings documents the demon, the sack of collected words, and their production at judgment, named Titivillus from John of Wales's Tractatus de Penitentia (c. 1285). Caveat: medieval sources have him collecting words clergy skipped or mumbled in the liturgy; his role as collector of scribes' copying errors is a later extension popularized by Drogin (1980), who calls him the "patron demon of scribes." The chapter's framing is the commonly repeated version, defensible if kept loose about "copying errors."

- "The compositor pulled a galley, and a different reader marked it against copy.": "Proof-reading," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., 1911 (text on Wikisource); corroborated by Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, 1683 (the Correcter's office).. The Britannica article states that after the compositor set the copy a proof was pulled and sent with the manuscript to a proof-reader, a separate reader who marked it against copy while a copy-holder read the original aloud; verified verbatim at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Proof-reading. Moxon's 1683 account of the Correcter is the classic primary description of the same division of labor.

- "kept a style book": A. A. Stewart, The Printer's Dictionary of Technical Terms (Boston: School of Printing, North End Union, 1912), s.v. "Style of the Office" ("A style-card or style-book may be prepared for this purpose"); corroborated by Theodore Low De Vinne, Correct Composition (The Practice of Typography), Century Co., 1901, on proof-readers' "rulings" recorded in an indexed memorandum-book, and C. T. Jacobi, The Printers' Vocabulary, 1888, s.v. "Style of the house". All three checked in full text via archive.org scans.. The institution is solid; the furniture is not. Trade sources amply attest the house style-book/style-card as the written accumulation of the shop's rulings (Stewart 1912; De Vinne 1901; Jacobi 1888; cf. Hart's Rules, Oxford, 1893), but none examined places it "at the stone": De Vinne locates the accumulated rulings in the proof-reader's indexed memorandum-book and in style proofs distributed to every compositor, and what the literature actually puts at the imposing stone is the chapel (Pasko, American Dictionary of Printing and Bookmaking, 1894, describes the chapel convened "at the imposing-stone") and the correction of formes. Recommend dropping or softening "at the stone" (e.g., "kept a style book in the shop" or "at the reader's desk"); the sentence's separate chapel claim is well supported by Pasko as written.

- "gave him a take, a few paragraphs": C. T. Jacobi, The Printers' Vocabulary (Chiswick Press, 1888), s.v. "Take" (Internet Archive, item cu31924029491499). Jacobi's period trade glossary defines the term verbatim: "Take. , Each portion of copy falling to the share of a compositor," confirming that copy was given out to compositors in small portions called takes; "a few paragraphs" is an accurate gloss of the customary size.

## In chapter 4

- "the compositor cannot inspect each sort as he sets": Arundell Esdaile, A Student's Manual of Bibliography, 1931 (Allen & Unwin / The Library Association; full text at archive.org, item studentsmanualof00esda). Esdaile states it outright, discussing foul case: "As the compositor does not look at the face of the letter as he sets it, he has no defence against this"; McKerrow's foul-case chapter (An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students, 1927, pp. 252-257) rests on the same fact, so the claim is standard bibliographic doctrine, not folklore.

- "the metal came back cast fresh": Theodore Low De Vinne, The Practice of Typography: Plain Printing Types, 1900, pp. 42-43; corroborated by W. W. Pasko, American Dictionary of Printing and Bookmaking, 1894, s.v. "Hell" and its type-founding article (both on archive.org). De Vinne records printers bartering or selling old type back to the founder as old metal, and Pasko both defines the hell box as "the old-metal box" for broken and battered letters and describes founders charging the casting kettle with "the old metal (that is, old type, leads, &c.)"; the one nuance is that in the later Linotype era shops remelted hellbox metal in their own pots rather than sending it to a founder.

- "he called that work makeready": John Southward, Practical Printing: A Handbook of the Art of Typography, 1884 (Internet Archive, identifier practicalprintin00sout_0). Southward's standard Victorian trade manual treats "making ready" as the established name for the pressman's preparatory work at press (overlays, packing, regulating impression) in its Press Work chapters, so the term and the activity match the book's claim; modern letterpress references (Letterpress Commons) define makeready identically. Minor nuance: makeready also covered register and form correction, not only packing and easing the impression, but the fragment's usage is squarely within the term's core sense.

- "sorts worn so round they printed grey": Theodore Low De Vinne, The Practice of Typography: Plain Printing Types, Century Co., 1900 (Internet Archive, identifier practicetypograp00devi), esp. pp. 36-52 on the durability of type faces.. De Vinne states that press impression wears down and flattens the hair-lines and body-marks of type until the face shows "muddiness or illegibility," with badly worn sorts identifiable only by their stems; this establishes that use-worn type prints smudged, non-crisp impressions. Caveat on wording only: the classic trade adjectives are "muddy" and "illegible" rather than "grey," so the fragment's "printed grey" is a fair paraphrase, not a quotation.

- "Broken type went into it: letters with cracked shoulders": Charles Thomas Jacobi, The Printers' Vocabulary, Chiswick Press, 1888, p. 59 (Internet Archive, identifier cu31924029491499); corroborated by The American Heritage Dictionary, s.v. "hellbox".. Jacobi's 1888 trade glossary defines "Hell box" as "a receptacle for battered or broken letters , in olden times a boot was used", establishing both the name and the practice; verified against the full scanned text, not a secondhand quote. Minor context: the compound is nineteenth-century usage , Moxon (1683) and Savage (1841) lack the term, so avoid implying it reaches back to the handpress era's earliest days.

- "Nothing ever climbed out of the hell box and back into the case": C. T. Jacobi, The Printers' Vocabulary (London: Chiswick Press, 1888), s.v. "Hell box"; corroborated by John Southward, A Dictionary of Typography and its Accessory Arts, 2nd ed. (1875), s.v. "Hell". Both on the Internet Archive (cu31924029491499; dictionaryoftypo00soutuoft).. The trade glossaries define the hell box solely as the receptacle for battered or broken letters, whose contents went to the melting pot; no source describes any route from hell box back to case, so the book's "never" states the custom the definitions encode rather than quoting an explicit rule.

- "stood a wooden box, and the box had a name": W. W. Pasko, American Dictionary of Printing and Bookmaking, 1894, s.v. "Hell" (Howard Lockwood & Co.; scan at archive.org, americandiction00paskgoog). Pasko establishes the hell box itself ("the receptacle for broken and battered letters... sometimes spoken of as the hell box"), and Jacobi's Printers' Vocabulary (1888) concurs; but no classic authority places it under the compositor's frame. Savage's Dictionary of the Art of Printing (1841, s.v. "Shoe") hangs the receptacle on a nail at the end of the imposing stone, Moxon (1683) has no "Hell" entry, and full-text searches find no source pairing the hell box with "under the frame"; the "wooden box" detail is likewise unattested (sources say shoe, boot, or metal bin). Recommend softening the location and material or citing only the receptacle itself.

## In chapter 5

- "borrows its type from whatever machine opens it will look different": ISO 19005-1:2005 (PDF/A-1), Document management , Electronic document file format for long-term preservation; described in the Library of Congress Sustainability of Digital Formats entry fdd000125 (loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd000125.shtml). The archival PDF standard mandates that "all necessary fonts must be embedded" precisely because its stated purpose is rendering the same visual appearance independent of the system that opens the file; the PDF specification itself (ISO 32000-1, clause 9) defines the substitution behavior, with viewers swapping in local typefaces when fonts are absent.

- "a rough pull marked against copy in the reading closet": C. T. Jacobi, The Printers' Vocabulary, Chiswick Press, 1888 (archive.org, identifier cu31924029491499). Jacobi defines "Reading closet" ("a small compartment within the reading room" where each reader works), "Reader" ("compares and reads the proof by copy"), and "First proof" ("the first pull... read for the first time by the copy"), together establishing the rough pull read against copy in the reading closet; note the closet is strictly the reader's compartment within the reading room, not the whole room.

- "a fraction of an inch taller than the text block": Frank Mittelbach, "How to influence the position of float environments like figure and table in LaTeX?", TUGboat 35:3 (2014), pp. 248-254.. Establishes that LaTeX's float algorithm silently defers any float that cannot satisfy its placement constraints, and with it every later float of the same class, until the next clearpage, with no error raised; an image taller than the text block can never satisfy those constraints, so the run completes as a success while the output goes wrong from that plate onward. The blank-leaves symptom itself is the shop's own observed consequence; the source documents the silent mechanism behind it, not that exact phrasing.

- "The master passed that sheet before he let the run begin": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises... Applied to the Art of Printing, 1683 (pp. 294, 308: the Revise examined "Fault by Fault" before the form is worked off); William Savage, A Dictionary of the Art of Printing, 1841, s.vv. "Press proof" p. 613 and "Revise" p. 717 (both on archive.org: mechanickexercis00moxo_0, dictionaryofarto00sava).. The practice is real and classic: a sheet pulled at the press was examined and every correction verified "previously to the impression being worked off." Caveat: the sources assign that examination to the corrector, reader, or overseer, not the master printer personally; masters often filled that office in small shops, so "the master studied that sheet" is defensible shorthand but not the sources' literal wording. Consider "the corrector" or "the master's reader" if exactness matters.

- "the knife takes half of any line that kisses the trim": Matt T. Roberts and Don Etherington, Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books: A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology (Library of Congress, 1982), s.vv. "bled", "cropped" (online at cool.culturalheritage.org/don/). The trade's own dictionary defines "bled" as printed matter "cut into during trimming" and "cropped" as over-trimmed margins short of bleeding; the vocabulary exists because the knife takes part of anything printed at the trim edge. "Half of any line" is rhetorical color, not a measured fraction, but the mechanism is trade fact.

- "the pressman pulled a sheet at the press itself": C. T. Jacobi, Printing: A Practical Treatise on the Art of Typography, 1890 (full text on archive.org, id printingpractica00jaco_0), pp. 179-180 and 230; with Jacobi, The Printers' Vocabulary, 1888, p. 104, and W. W. Pasko, American Dictionary of Printing and Bookmaking, 1894, s.v. Press-Proof / Press-Revise.. The workflow is genuine: Jacobi 1890 shows imposition, then making-ready, then a sheet pulled and passed at the press before the run, by the pressman or machine-minder. But in strict period vocabulary that pulled sheet was the "press revise" (or colour-sheet/OK sheet); "press proof" then meant the author's or publisher's final proof passed for press (Jacobi 1888; Pasko 1894). Calling the pressman's post-makeready pull a "press proof" is modern usage (cf. Kipphan, Handbook of Print Media, 2001), so keep the sentence if the book speaks in today's terms, or swap in "revise" if it claims period diction.

- "proved its work twice, and never by asking the man who set it": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, Vol. 2, 1683 (sections on Correcting and the Office of the Correcter; archive.org id mechanickexercis00moxo_0); corroborated by "Proof-Reading," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., 1911.. Moxon establishes both halves from inside the trade: the pulled proof went to the Correcter, a distinct officer who read it against copy ("the Compositer gives the Correcter the Proof and his Copy to Correct it by"), and after correction a second stage followed ("After the Second or Third Proof he has a Revise... He examines in this Revise, Fault by Fault, if all the Faults he markt in the last Proof were carefully mended by the Compositer"). Minor terminology caveat for the surrounding prose only: "galley proof" as the first stage's name is nineteenth-century usage; Moxon's first proofs were pulled from the imposed form.

- "the actual sheet, on the job's own paper and ink": Mark Beach and Eric Kenly, Getting It Printed, rev. ed., North Light Books, 1993, glossary s.v. "press proof"; corroborated by Frank J. Romano and Richard M. Romano, The GATF Encyclopedia of Graphic Communications, GATF Press, 1998 (s.v. "press proof", reproduced at printwiki.org/Press_Proof).. Both references establish the fragment as written: a press proof is "made on press using the plates, ink and paper specified for the job" (Beach), i.e. an actual printed sheet on the job's own stock and ink. Caveat on the wider claim only: the GATF encyclopedia notes the press "may or may not be that which will be used for the actual press run, and may be a proof press," so "the very press that would print the run" is the common case, not a defining requirement. The book's exact wording is safe; avoid hardening it into "always on the production press."

## In chapter 6

- "Eight pages of set type go onto the imposing stone": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing (1683); with the octavo scheme (8 pages per forme, 16 per sheet) standard in Ronald B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (1927) and Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (1972). Moxon describes the compositor laying pages of set type on the stone to impose a forme and treats octavo as one of the formats so imposed; an octavo sheet folds three times into eight leaves, so each side carries eight pages. Minor terminology point only: Moxon calls the slab the correcting stone; "imposing stone" is the later standard trade name for the same surface.

- "locks the pages in the chase with furniture and quoins": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises: or, The Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing, vol. 2, London, 1683 (Internet Archive, id mechanickexercis00moxo_0). Moxon, the first English printing manual, states it directly: furniture ("Head-sticks, Foot-sticks, Side-sticks, Gutter-sticks... and Quoyns") surrounds the imposed pages in the iron chase, and "the Office of these Quoyns are to Lock up the Form," wedging it so tight the whole forme can rise and go to press.

- "folded in half three times, yields a gathering of sixteen pages": Matt T. Roberts and Don Etherington, Bookbinding and the Conservation of Books: A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology (Library of Congress, 1982), s.v. "octavo"; online at Conservation OnLine, cool.culturalheritage.org/don/dt/dt2355.html. The entry defines octavo as a sheet given three right-angle folds, producing a leaf one-eighth the sheet and a 16-page section, which establishes the fragment exactly; the "every head at the top" clause is the standard imposition condition (cf. Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, 1972) rather than part of the dictionary definition.

- "the compositor stops thinking in pages and starts thinking in sheets": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises: or, the Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing, 1683-84, sect. 7 "Of Imposing" (1896 reprint, Internet Archive id moxonsmechanicke21683moxo). Moxon defines imposing as the compositor's placing of a sheet's pages, with chase and furniture, "in such an order as when the Sheet is wrought off at the Press, all the Pages may be Folded into an orderly succession", i.e. arranged by sheet layout per format (folio, quarto, octavo, twelves), not reading order.

- "the first page beside the last, half of them upside down": Theodore Low De Vinne, The Practice of Typography: Modern Methods of Book Composition, Century Co., 1904, ch. IX "Imposition," pp. 331-343 (archive.org: practiceoftypogr1904devi). De Vinne states the rules outright: pages on the stone look laid out of order to the novice yet fall in order when folded (p. 331); "the last page of every section is always nearest to and is the mate of its first page" (p. 337); and following pages sit "in a contrary direction" from page 1 (p. 342), his printed schemes setting half the page numbers upside down. All three particulars are exact for the octavo forme the chapter describes; only a plain folio, which the chapter does not invoke, lacks the inverted half.

- "standing type could reprint a title years later, line for line": American Dictionary of Printing and Bookmaking (New York: Howard Lockwood & Co., 1894), entries "Keep Standing" and "Good Matter"; see also Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Clarendon Press, 1972) on reimpression from standing type.. The 1894 trade dictionary (verified in the archive.org scan, americandiction00paskgoog) defines "Keep Standing" as "type kept in abeyance pending possibility of use or reprint" and "Good Matter" as type "kept standing with a view to reprinting," and records Mathew Carey and Hugh Gaine keeping entire Bibles standing in type for years of reprints; identical, line-for-line reimpression is inherent to printing from an undistributed setting. Minor nuance: in the hand-press era the practice was costly and (in England, per the 1587 Stationers' ordinance) restricted, so years-long standing type was the province of steady sellers, which the chapter's "could" accommodates.

- "meets it in the bindery": Ronald B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927), appendix "Errors in Imposition, Perfecting, and Folding" (pp. 258-261); with Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, vol. 2 (1683), sections on the corrector's duties. Both full texts on archive.org (introductiontobi0000mcke; mechanickexercis00moxo_0).. Half supported. McKerrow documents real transposed-page errors that survived entire editions and show only in bound copies (Heywood's Hercules Furens, Sutton 1561; Hooper's Declaration, Jugge 1550), and the imposed forme genuinely cannot be read as a book at the stone. But the strong framing "typically discovered only in the bindery" conflicts with both sources: Moxon shows the corrector explicitly re-verifying imposition on the printed proof (turning the pages in order, checking direction words, signatures, and folios), and McKerrow says wrong imposition was "extremely rare" and "would almost certainly be corrected in proof." Accurate version: invisible at the stone, checked by folding/turning a proof, and an error that slips past the proof announces itself in the bindery. Suggest softening the surrounding sentence ("appear only after the sheet is printed, folded, gathered, sewn, and trimmed") to admit the proof-stage check, or recasting as errors that survive the proof.

- "set a turned letter as a placeholder": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, vol. 2 (London, 1683), trade-terms dictionary entries "Sorts," "Case is Low," and "Turn for a Letter" (modern edition: Davis and Carter, Oxford, 1958; 1683 first edition scanned at archive.org, identifier mechanickexercis00moxo_0). Moxon establishes the mechanical core: sorts are the letters in each box of the case, and an empty box cannot be set from. Caveat: he also documents that a compositor short of a sort did not always halt outright; he could set a turned letter (foot up, "easie to be seen") as a placeholder printing as a black mark until the right sort arrived. So "stopped setting" slightly overstates uniform practice, but the run-out was always physically blocking or loudly visible in the proof, never silent, which is the contrast the sentence draws. Unrelated: the idiom "out of sorts" as printing-derived is disputed (earliest use predates printers' "sorts"); the chapter does not lean on it, so no change needed there.

## In chapter 7

- "he cut the letters in mirror image, exactly as written": William A. Chatto and John Jackson, A Treatise on Wood Engraving, Historical and Practical (London: Charles Knight, 1839; 2nd ed. Bohn, 1861; full text at Project Gutenberg #42719). The standard trade history states that wood engravers "have to execute their work reversed" (with a block-book letter Z printed backwards because it was not drawn reversed as the cautionary example), and its Canticum Canticorum discussion shows Latin inscription errors carried on blocks by cutters who traced the characters exactly without reading them, Chatto adding from experience that an engraver deviates less from his copy than a scribe does; both halves of the claim, reversed lettering and faithful reproduction of supplied errors, are documented there.

- "every line is an edge, nothing repeats, and the files swell": Greg Roelofs, PNG: The Definitive Guide, O'Reilly, 1999 (full text archived at libpng.org/pub/png/book/), chs. 1 and 9.. The standard reference on the format states PNG suits images with few colors and sharp edges (cartoons, bitmapped text) while JPEG runs three to ten times smaller on continuous-tone images with acceptable quality; scanned engraving grain is continuous-tone high-frequency detail, so the passage covers the claim as a direct instance rather than naming engravings.

- "The engraver never met the author": Mason Jackson, The Pictorial Press: Its Origin and Progress (Hurst and Blackett, 1885), pp. 315-321; full text at archive.org, identifier pictorialpressit00jackrich.. Jackson, thirty years art editor of the Illustrated London News, documents the remote mediated workflow first-hand: sketches from distant correspondents and amateurs "came to hand" at the office, were redrawn on the block by a separate staff draughtsman ("it is not often that the drawing on the block is made by the same person who supplies the sketch"), and the bolted block was then "separated and placed in the hands of different engravers" who cut only what they were given. This firmly supports engravers working at several removes from the originator, but the absolute "never met the author" is the book's own compression, and the written-description parcels properly reached the draughtsman or news office rather than the engraver's bench; in fine book work (e.g. the Dalziel firm) engravers did correspond and sometimes deal directly with artists, though rarely with authors of the text.

- "a list of plates stood in the front matter": Joseph W. Zaehnsdorf, The Art of Bookbinding, 1890 (ch. III, "Collating"); corroborated by Douglas Cockerell, Bookbinding, and the Care of Books, 1901. Zaehnsdorf instructs the binder to check plates against "the 'List of Plates,' printed generally after the contents," and Cockerell adds that the printed list gives the page each plate faces; together they establish the front-matter plate list, with page numbers, as standard trade practice (Gutenberg #51213, #26672).

- "Publishers learned to write every word out fair": R. John Beedham, Wood Engraving, with introduction and appendix by Eric Gill (Ditchling: S. Dominic's Press, 1921), p. 32.. Beedham confirms the mechanism only: "All lettering must be reversed," with a mirror check needed to catch errors, i.e. lettering was cut mirror-wise from supplied copy and mistakes escaped notice. But the publisher-side practice as asserted ("Publishers learned to write every word out fair") has no found source: full-text searches of Chatto & Jackson (1839), Linton (1879), Mason Jackson's Pictorial Press (1885), and Beedham (1921) yield nothing, and broader search was blocked (WebSearch budget exhausted; Bing/DDG/HathiTrust/Google Books all refused automated queries). Treat the sentence as plausible trade color, not a documented practice; either soften it to the engraver-side fact Beedham supports or keep hunting (Vizetelly's memoirs and Ordnance Survey engraving instructions are the likeliest homes for a real citation).

- "Text left implicit will be misspelled or invented": Rosanne Liu, Dan Garrette, Chitwan Saharia, et al., "Character-Aware Models Improve Visual Text Rendering," Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2023; arXiv:2212.10562.. Peer-reviewed study establishing that image-generation models "struggle to reliably produce well-formed visual text," producing misspelled and invented lettering because character-blind text encoders never see individual glyphs; it supports the fragment as written, with the minor reservation that the same paper shows era-typical models also misspelled text that was dictated verbatim, so explicit dictation reduces rather than eliminates the failure.

- "cut what he was given into the endgrain of a boxwood block": Tate, "Wood engraving," Art Terms glossary (tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/w/wood-engraving); classic trade history: W. A. Chatto and J. Jackson, A Treatise on Wood Engraving, Historical and Practical, 1839 (repr. 1881, archive.org/details/treatiseonwooden00chat). Tate states verbatim that wood engraving "is a relief form of printmaking," "usually done on the end grain of a block of boxwood," and "became widely used in the nineteenth century as a method of reproducing pictures in books, newspapers and journals," which covers every element of the sentence; Chatto and Jackson is the standard nineteenth-century treatise on the same practice if a period source is wanted.

- "Photographic compression was tuned for exactly this kind of continuous texture": ITU-T Recommendation T.81 (09/1992), "Information technology - Digital compression and coding of continuous-tone still images - Requirements and guidelines" (identical to ISO/IEC 10918-1); see also G. K. Wallace, "The JPEG Still Picture Compression Standard," Communications of the ACM, 1991.. The JPEG standard's own title states it was designed for continuous-tone still images, which directly supports "photographic compression was tuned for continuous texture"; that scanned engraving grain behaves as continuous-tone texture rather than line art is the book's own (reasonable) empirical extension, not asserted by the standard.

## In chapter 8

- "the master gave his men a dinner. They called it the wayzgoose": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises: Or, the Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing, vol. 2 (London, 1683), "Ancient Customs used in a Printing-house" (Customs of the Chappel); archive.org copy of the 1896 De Vinne/Typothetae literal reprint, https://archive.org/details/moxonsmechanicke21683moxo. Moxon states verbatim that once a year "the Master Printer gives them a Way-goose; that is, he makes them a good Feast," kept about Bartholomew-tide, after which the men begin working by candlelight; this is the classic primary attestation. Minor caveat: Moxon spells it "Way-goose"; the "wayzgoose" spelling first appears in Bailey's dictionary (1731).

- "around Bartholomew-tide in late August": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, 1683 (vol. 2; modern ed. Davis and Carter, Oxford, 1962). Moxon states the feast was "always kept about Bartholomew-tide" and that journeymen did not work by candlelight until the master gave it, which fixes the date to the season in the period the chapter describes; but no source asserts the specific negative that it was never moved for a visitor or an occasion, and by the nineteenth century wayzgoose outings commonly shifted to July, so the absolute phrasing is the book's inference from Moxon's "always" rather than a documented fact.

- "The old shops kept one feast a year": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises: Or, the Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing, vol. 2 (1683), "Ancient Customs used in a Printing-house" (literal reprint, De Vinne, 1896; archive.org id moxonsmechanicke21683moxo); corroborated by Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed. (1911), s.v. "Wayzgoose".. Moxon records that once "every Year," about Bartholomew-tide, the master printer gave the journeymen a Way-goose, "a good Feast" at his own house, before candle-light work resumed; his customs list names no other annual shop feast, and the 1911 Britannica likewise defines the wayzgoose as "the annual dinner" of printers. Moxon establishes the single yearly master-paid feast rather than formally asserting exclusivity, which is as close as the record comes.

- "the compositors would soon be setting type by candlelight": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, vol. 2 (London, 1683), the "Ancient Customs used in a Printing-house" section.. Moxon records that the way-goose was "always kept about Bartholomew-tide" (late August) and that "till the Master-Printer have given this Way-goose, the Journey-men do not use to Work by Candle Light," which directly ties the feast to the start of the candlelit working season. One caveat of phrasing: Moxon says journeymen generally, not compositors specifically, though compositors were among them.

- "Late in August, around Bartholomew-tide": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises: or, the Doctrine of Handy-Works, Applied to the Art of Printing (London, 1683), "Ancient Customs used in a Printing-house" (vol. 2; full text at archive.org, item mechanickexercis00moxo_0). Moxon states the master printer's way-goose feasts "are always kept about Bartholomew-tide" (St. Bartholomew's Day, August 24), after which journeymen began working by candlelight; this 1683 passage is the classic first-hand authority (and the OED's earliest citation) for the late-August dating.

- "A shop tagged a release candidate with the season's notes still sitting": Olivier Lacan, "Keep a Changelog," v1.1.0, 2019 (keepachangelog.com). The standard establishes the Unreleased-section convention and the release-time step of rolling it into a dated version section, i.e. the exact ordering trap the anecdote describes. The incident itself is first-hand: the author's own repo (2389-research/mostly-done, .github/workflows/book.yml) carries the verbatim guard ("no CHANGELOG section for $version; roll [Unreleased] before tagging" then exit 1), but the visible CI history shows tag-run failures from other causes (git dubious-ownership, missing gh CLI), not a recorded firing of the empty-notice guard. No published external source can attest the specific event; cite the standard for the practice and treat the incident as the shop's own testimony.

- "The manuals that record the custom cannot settle where the word came from": Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. "wayzgoose, n." (entry first published 1926); with Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises on the Whole Art of Printing, 1683, and Nathan Bailey, Universal Etymological English Dictionary, 1731.. Moxon, the first printing manual to record the custom, gives the form "way-goose" with no derivation; Bailey's 1731 "wayz = stubble goose" story is the source of the modern spelling but the OED finds no evidence for any such word and records the origin as obscure, while the 1911 Britannica backed a rival Dutch "weghuis" theory. The authorities that record the custom genuinely cannot settle the etymology, which is exactly what the sentence claims. (OED entry is paywalled; corroborated via Michael Quinion, World Wide Words, "Wayzgoose", worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-way1.htm, which rehearses Moxon 1683 and Bailey 1731 and calls Bailey's account unsupported conjecture.)

## In chapter 9

- "a good edition drew counterfeits within the season": Martin Lowry, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice, 1979 (Cornell University Press); primary witness: Aldus Manutius, Monitum in Lyonnenses typographos, 16 March 1503.. Aldus launched his italic octavo classics in April 1501; Lyonnese counterfeits imitating his type and format circulated fast enough that by March 1503 he printed a public warning naming them, the era's best-documented proof that a successful edition drew prompt counterfeits (Adrian Johns, Piracy, 2009, shows the pattern was general). "Within the season" slightly compresses a months-to-two-years record.

- "The earliest printed books had no title page": Alfred W. Pollard, An Essay on Colophons, with Specimens and Translations (Caxton Club, 1905). Pollard, the standard authority on the subject, states the first title page appeared only some twenty years after the invention of printing (title pages becoming the rule about 1490), the printer's name being "hitherto buried in the colophon" at the end, which alone identified printer, place, and often date.

- "A printer who ran off two hundred copies said so in the colophon": Alfred W. Pollard, An Essay on Colophons, with Specimens and Translations (Caxton Club, Chicago, 1905); on Project Gutenberg, ebook 56628.. Pollard documents genuine cases of early colophons stating small print runs plainly: Johann of Speyer's Venice colophons of 1469 record that his first Cicero, Epistolae ad Familiares, ran to one hundred copies, and the second edition's colophon states its own run in verse (Pollard reads "tercentenum bis" as three hundred, perhaps doubled). So the sentence is true in kind, though "two hundred" is an illustrative number and Pollard treats such statements as exceptional rather than customary; most incunable edition sizes are known from archives, and routine "limited to N copies" colophons belong to the later fine-press tradition. If the sentence is meant as a general habit of the old trade, soften it toward "could say so"; as an emblematic example it stands.

- "named their compositors in the colophon": Colophon of Robert Browning, Men & Women, Doves Press, 1908 ("Compositor: J. H. Mason. Pressmen: H. Gage-Cole, and Albert Lewis."), digitized at the Internet Archive (identifier menwomen185500brow); likewise Goethe, Die Leiden des jungen Werther, Doves Press, 1911 ("Compositor: William Jenkins"), Internet Archive (dieleidendesjung00goet_0). Trade history: Marianne Tidcombe, The Doves Press, British Library / Oak Knoll Press, 2002.. Primary evidence establishes that colophons really did name human compositors, but the custom belongs to the private-press movement and fine or limited editions (Doves Press, 1900-1916, and its heirs), not to printed books generally; hand-press-era colophons customarily named the master printer and publisher, and the compositor usually went unrecorded. The sentence holds if it invokes the fine-press colophon tradition; it overstates if read as a custom of the whole trade.

- "The dolphin wound around the anchor, the orb under the double cross": W. Roberts, Printers' Marks: A Chapter in the History of Typography, London: George Bell & Sons, 1893 (Project Gutenberg ebook 25663). Roberts documents both devices named in the fragment: the Aldine anchor-and-dolphin (Aldus Manutius's device, copied by imitators such as Antoine Tardif of Lyons) and the globe surmounted by a double cross (e.g., the St. Albans press mark, a common early form), and states that such a mark "is usually a sufficient proof that the book in which it occurs is the work of a particular craftsman," adopted to deter piracy; that is precisely the origin-certifying function the chapter claims.

- "his name, his city, the year, and often a word of thanks": Alfred W. Pollard, An Essay on Colophons, with Specimens and Translations (Caxton Club, 1905). Pollard documents exactly these customary elements: the 1457 Fust and Schoeffer Psalter colophon gives printer names, Mainz, and the year; the 1460 Catholicon colophon ends "Deo gracias"; and Pollard states that wherever a colophon exists "the question of place and printer, and frequently the question of date, is entirely solved." Full text freely checkable at Project Gutenberg ebook 56628 and on Archive.org.

## In appendix A

- "stalls for several minutes at full effort while it catalogues its founts": Robert Hoffmann, Khaled Hosny, Philipp Gesang, et al., "The luaotfload package" (reference manual), sec. "luaotfload-tool / The names database", CTAN (macros/luatex/generic/luaotfload; also texdoc.org/serve/luaotfload/0).. The official manual for LuaLaTeX's font loader states that generating the font-names database the first time "may take a while since it inspects every font file on your computer" and is "particularly noticeable if it occurs during a typesetting run," with subsequent runs fast; it establishes the silent, whole-system first-run fount catalogue, though the "several minutes" figure is the author's machine-dependent observation, not a documented number.

- "asterisks framing the words they were meant to dress": S. Hambridge, RFC 1855 "Netiquette Guidelines," IETF, 1995 (rfc-editor.org); corroborated by John Gruber, "Markdown: Syntax," Daring Fireball, 2004.. RFC 1855 prescribes asterisks framing a word as the plain-text form of emphasis ("That *is* what I meant"), and Gruber's Markdown spec defines emphasis markup as those same asterisks in a format meant to be publishable as-is as plain text; together they establish that an edition with no italic or bold emits emphasis as literal asterisks around the affected words.

- "In the old shops the lessons lived in the foreman": John Southward, Practical Printing: A Handbook of the Art of Typography, 1884 (Internet Archive, practicalprintin00sout_0); supplemented by F. W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911, ch. 2.. Southward attests the first half directly: the overseer personally superintends the whole office, "should know all about the work" though he does not work himself, is the employer's deputy who tells each hand "the rules of the house," and "a good overseer, firm, just, and judicious, is a necessary adjunct to any code of regulations" because written rules fail without him. The second half, that the shop relearned every lesson at full cost when he left, is the book's own inference; no period printing source states it, though Taylor 1911 supports it generically ("this mass of rule-of-thumb or traditional knowledge may be said to be the principal asset or possession of every tradesman," held by workmen and foremen, "not in the possession of the management"). Safe as written if the departure clause reads as commentary rather than cited fact.

- "the search's exit stood in for the check's": IEEE Std 1003.1-2017 (POSIX.1-2017), Shell Command Language, sec. 2.9.2 "Pipelines", The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7 (2018 edition).. The standard states "the exit status shall be the exit status of the last command specified in the pipeline," which is exactly the mechanism the text describes: pipe a check through a search and the search's exit status stands in for the check's. (Shells offer pipefail as the opt-in remedy, standardized in POSIX.1-2024.)

- "an engraving taller than the 7.5 inch text block": Frank Mittelbach, "How to influence the position of float environments like figure and table in LaTeX?", TUGboat 35:3 (2014), pp. 248-254 (free PDF at latex-project.org/publications).. Mittelbach documents the mechanism exactly: a float too large for any permitted area "will get deferred and with it all other floats of the same class... all your floats stay deferred until the next clearpage", and the algorithm never backtracks or raises an error while doing so (oversize placement produces at most a log warning, never a halt). What the literature establishes is a silent, indefinite stall of the float queue; the book's "ships blank pages forever" is the observed symptom of that documented behavior under pandoc/LuaLaTeX, not a phrase any source states verbatim. Supported in mechanism, project-specific in symptom.

- ""recommended" will not pull in what the page depends on": Debian Policy Manual v4.7.4.1, sec. 7.2 (Debian Project); with Knuth, The TeXbook, 1984 ( tracinglostchars), as restated in LaTeX2e News no. 33, LaTeX Project, June 2021.. Policy sec. 7.2 defines Recommends as a strong but not absolute dependency that apt's --no-install-recommends lawfully skips ("Do not consider recommended packages as a dependency for installing," apt-get(8)), so a needed font package is simply never installed; and TeX's tracinglostchars default means characters absent from the current font are omitted from the output silently, LaTeX2e News 33 confirming the missing-character notice went only to the log until the 2021 extension.

- "The list of plates gathers its entries over several runs": Leslie Lamport, LaTeX: A Document Preparation System, 2nd ed., 1994 (Addison-Wesley); confirmed in the LaTeX2e unofficial reference manual, "Table of contents etc." (latexref.xyz). Both document that listoffigures (a list of plates is a retitled one) is written to a .lof auxiliary file on one run and typeset from it on the next, so a single successful pass leaves only the heading over an empty list; "you must run LaTeX twice, once to store the information and the second time to retrieve it."

- "Links anchor at the caption, not the picture": Heiko Oberdiek, "The hypcap package" (CTAN package documentation, v1.13, 2024; first released 1999). The package abstract states the problem exactly: with hyperref, "links to floats points below the caption and not at the beginning of the float," which is why list-of-plates links overshoot the image and why hypcap exists to move the anchor to the float's start.

## In appendix B

- "a compositor who ran short of a letter mid-job was out of sorts": C. T. Jacobi, The Printers' Vocabulary, 1888 (Chiswick Press), s.v. "Out of sorts"; with Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, 1683, s.v. "Sorts". Jacobi's entry ("Out of sorts. , When there is a run on any particular letter or letters, and these become scarce") establishes the exact trade usage the fragment states, and Moxon 1683 establishes "sorts" as pieces of type. Caveat: the stronger claim that the everyday idiom ORIGINATES in printing is a folk etymology; the figurative sense is attested by 1562 (Heywood), while the OED's earliest printing citation is Franklin, 1784 (per Quinion, World Wide Words). Keep the sentence as trade usage; do not imply it is the idiom's origin.

- "where broken and battered type was thrown to await melting": C. T. Jacobi, The Printers' Vocabulary, 1888 (Chiswick Press; scan at archive.org): "Hell box: A receptacle for battered or broken letters." Corroborated by the Century Dictionary (1889-91), "hell-box: The box provided for the bruised or condemned types of a printing-house.". A working printer's own trade glossary defines the hell box exactly as the fragment uses it, and standard dictionaries (Century; Random House, which dates the word to 1885-90) add that the condemned type was destined for remelting. The only detail the dictionaries do not fix is the "under the frame" placement, which attaches to the older bare term "hell" rather than to the box itself.

- "pulled from type still standing in its long tray": "Proof-reading," Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., 1911 (Wikisource); with the tray sense of "galley" (oblong tray holding set type, 1650s, from French galée) per the Online Etymology Dictionary, s.v. "galley".. The 1911 Britannica describes the standard sequence: a slip (galley) proof is pulled from the freshly set type and read for errors, and only after corrections is the type made up into pages for a further proof; Etymonline confirms the galley is the long tray holding the standing type.

- "The printer's apprentice, named for the ink he wore": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises: or, the Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing, vol. 2, 1683 (glossary entry "Devil"; full text at Project Gutenberg, ebook 78991). Moxon's own dictionary of press terms says the boys who take sheets off the tympan "commonly black and Dawb themselves; whence the Workmen do Jocosely call them Devils," which is exactly the ink derivation the fragment asserts. The mischief half of the wider legend is later folklore Moxon does not mention, but the printed text only claims the ink.

- "The master's annual feast for the whole shop": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises: Or, the Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing, vol. 2 (London, 1683), "Ancient Customs used in a Printing-house" (Internet Archive, identifier mechanickexercis00moxo_0). Moxon states the master printer yearly "gives them a Way-goose; that is, he makes them a good Feast," kept "about Bartholomew-tide," and until it is given "the Journey-men do not use to Work by Candle Light" , establishing the annual feast, the giver, and the candlelight turning point exactly as the glossary claims.

- "The self-governing body of journeymen in a printing house": Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises: or, the Doctrine of Handy-Works Applied to the Art of Printing, vol. 2 (London, 1683), appendix "Ancient Customs used in a Printing-house" (Internet Archive, identifier mechanickexercis00moxo_0).. Moxon, writing from inside the trade in 1683, states that every printing house is "by the Custom of Time out of mind, called a Chappel," its workmen "Members of the Chappel," the oldest freeman its "Father," governed by by-laws enforced through fines called "Solaces" and decided by plurality of votes; the only quibble is that Moxon says "all the Workmen," with the chapel's identification specifically with journeymen firming up in later trade custom.

- "packing, adjusting, and proofing a press before the run": Charles Thomas Jacobi, The Printers' Vocabulary, Chiswick Press, 1888 (Internet Archive, identifier cu31924029491499). Jacobi's 1888 trade glossary defines "Making ready" as preparing for printing by patching up or cutting away, with companion entries tying packing and overlays to the process; modern references (PrintWiki) extend the term to all press setup through proofing and the OK sheet, so the book's gloss of packing, adjusting, and proofing before the run is a fair compression of standard trade usage.

- "The demon medieval scribes blamed for the errors in their copying": Margaret Jennings, "Tutivillus: The Literary Career of the Recording Demon," Studies in Philology 74.5 (1977): 1-95; see also Marc Drogin, Medieval Calligraphy: Its History and Technique (1980).. Jennings documents the demon from John of Wales's Tractatus de Penitentia (c. 1285) onward, including the sack of dropped words carried off as evidence for judgment day; Drogin supplies the familiar "patron demon of scribes" framing. The medieval core is mumbled liturgy, with copying errors a later, standard extension of the tradition.

## In appendix Z

- "He has written software for a long time": GitHub public record for "clintecker" (Clint Ecker, Chicago), account created 30 September 2008; github.com/clintecker, confirmed via api.github.com/users/clintecker.. A continuously active public repository archive dating to 2008, with 57 public repositories and an Arctic Code Vault Contributor badge, establishes roughly eighteen years of verifiable software authorship; "a long time" is, if anything, understated.

- "He can be reached at clint@lgtm.systems": Public DNS zone for lgtm.systems (queried 2026-07-17): MX records at aspmx.l.google.com and alternates (Google Workspace).. Live MX records confirm the domain accepts mail via Google Workspace, so the address is plausibly working; but no published source can attest the specific mailbox exists or is the author's, and none should be invented. Author's self-attestation is the only, and customary, authority for a contact line.

- "An earlier volume from the same bench": Clint Ecker, Mostly Done. OR, A Brief Treatise on the Several Conditions Under Which Software May Be Declared Finished (2389 Research Press, Chicago, first edition 2026); published at https://2389-research.github.io/mostly-done/ with release artifacts at github.com/2389-research/mostly-done/releases (v1.0, July 2026).. The earlier volume is real and publicly published; its subtitle states the exact subject the claim asserts, and the public chapter edition names Clint Ecker as author, so the same bench did in fact produce it first.