Appendix B: a glossary of the shop

The terms this manual leans on, each given its old meaning first and then the one it carries here.

Makeready. The hours spent packing, adjusting, and proofing a press before the run, so the ten-thousandth sheet would print as evenly as the first. In this shop: everything you build before the work begins in earnest; the checks, fixtures, and environment that make the first pull a fair test of the job.

Sorts. The individual pieces of type, one character to a piece; a compositor who ran short of a letter mid-job was out of sorts. In this shop: the small standard parts your build depends on. Out of sorts still means the job is stopped, or should have been, for want of something as small as a font.

The devil. The printer’s apprentice, named for the ink he wore and the mischief expected of him, trusted with real work under a journeyman’s eye. In this shop: the coding agent. It sets faster than any hand that ever lived. It is the apprentice all the same.

Titivillus. The demon medieval scribes blamed for the errors in their copying, said to gather every dropped word in a sack against the day of judgment. In this shop: the name for any defect blamed on the tools when nobody ran the check that would have caught it.

The hell box. The box under the frame where broken and battered type was thrown to await melting back into clean metal; nothing ever climbed out and back into the case. In this shop the box runs backwards: it is the kept collection of known-bad pages, fed to every proof-reader on every run. A reader that passes one of them is broken. Pages are added and not removed.

Galley proof. A rough proof pulled from type still standing in its long tray, read for errors before the pages were made up. In this shop: the diff, read while the work is still loose and a correction costs minutes instead of a rebuild.

Press proof. The sheet pulled on the actual press with the actual ink and paper, approved before the run was let go. In this shop: the built artifact itself, opened and read; a passing build is a promise, a press proof is evidence.

Foul case. A case with letters lying in the wrong boxes, so a careful compositor set errors with a clean conscience. In this shop: a corrupted environment or a stale instruction file, which lets the devil do careful work that is wrong.

Imposition. The arrangement of pages in the forme so that, once printed and folded, they fall into reading order. In this shop: the ordering of parts so the assembled whole comes out right, decided before the run and never patched by hand at the end.

The chapel. The self-governing body of journeymen in a printing house, with its own rules, its own fines, and a father to enforce them. In this shop: the written house rules that bind every hand, the devil included. They still apply on a bad morning.

The wayzgoose. The master’s annual feast for the whole shop, marking the turn of the season when work went on by candlelight, and the one day the master fed the shop. In this shop: the release. Before the feast, someone downloads one of the shipped files and opens it.

Colophon. The note at the end of a book naming the printer, the type, and the manner of its making. In this shop: the honest statement of how the work was produced, tools named, the devil among them, so the reader knows what manner of shop made it.

The plate. The engraved block that carried a book’s picture, cut by a craftsman who never met the author and reproduced the brief exactly, right or wrong, then named with its page in the front matter. In this shop: the commissioned illustration, briefed to the letter and verified against the list of plates the build assembles on every run.

The ledger. The book where every job, charge, and hour was entered as it happened, because the shop’s memory was worth money. In this shop: the version history, written as the work lands; an entry reconstructed a week later is fiction.