Klang (Not a popular typeface these days)

Jan 09, 2006 11:52

One of the odder things I did at big school (other than turn up regularly) was work at the school press. This was an ex-book cupboard (ex-cupboard, rather than store for things that had once been books and were now embarking on second careers as rocket salesmen or wing-loss adjusters) that ponged of printing ink, paraffin, cardstock and teenage boys and filled with things like Adana 8-5s, leads, woods, quoins, founts and compositing sticks.

The worst things to try and print are traditional wedding invitations. The scalloped cards with the gold bits on were well expensive, the cursive typefaces are a bastard to read upside-down and backwards and getting the platen pressure right so as to ensure even printing is a nightmare if you don't do it regularly. Which you don't, because... And people really get a strop on if they're invited to a 'receptron'.

Anyway. The two worst non-printing jobs were dissing old jobs (not in the 'Yo! Typeface! Etc! sense, but in the 'dismembering badly-cleaned type and trying to work out if that's an 8-point Times New Roman 0 or TNR italic O') and cleaning out the dregs-bin.

Letterpress printing gives a chap a terrible thirst, thus we swilled tea like Tony Benn on a building site in the middle of August. However, there was no sink, so the tea-leaves, rancid milk and remnants from mugs (and indeed careful hot-water swillings in the mugs to 'clean' them on a Monday) were deposited in a large ice-cream tub. When this became over-full, some poor sod would have to carefully lever it out of its nest of congealed mank and walk it round at arm's length to the lower forms changing-rooms where it could be disposed of.

cavitation, barnstaple, futility

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