“I finished putting the manuscript together today,” I write to Hugh early in March. “I am weak-kneed with delight that you are publishing these little fictions. I love them dearly.”
When I finally send Hugh the finished manuscript, it is almost a year to the day since he first approached me with an offer to publish the book. I’m embarrassed, but he makes a joke:
“I can’t wait to dine out on my story of having to wrench your ‘child’ from your bosom after being obliged to wait a year. I can see the remains of the umbilical cord still attached. Please be assured that your ‘baby’ will be safe in my hands.”
SLOW READING
Before the Linotype machine, an army of people set the type for the world’s books by hand one letter at a time. For 250 years, from the time of Gutenberg until the late nineteenth century, this was how it was done, and it is how I am about to set a page of The Paradise Project.
Hugh has rerun his calculations: he has to work eight hours a day, Sunday to Sunday, to meet a June launch.
“It will be tight,” he says.
“I can help,” I offer, thinking of something Hugh said to me shortly after we met: “I love setting type because it’s slow reading—it gives me an opportunity to think.”
I read too fast. Twenty years ago, I strode into my local daily newspaper office and asked to review a book. I was fed up with my tendency to skip over a page like a stone in search of a horizon, splashing up a sentence here and there. “I want to read every word,” I said to the books editor, and for a while I slowed down. Terrified of making a fool of myself, I read every word.
I blame my speed habit on school, university in general, and my nineteenth-century novel course in particular, which demanded I plough through thousands of pages every week. Now it occurs to me that people who lived at the time those novels were published must have read them differently. How long would it have taken my great-great-great grandmother to read Proust? And if I were a friar reading an illuminated manuscript, each word drawn by hand, surely I would read that differently yet, the words traced in my mind as slowly as a scribing pen.
I rarely review books now, and my reading has resumed its breakneck speed. There are times when this seems like a good thing. Along with making an ebook of The Paradise Project, I am bringing two out-of-print works—The Convict Lover and The Lion in the Room Next Door—back as ebooks. I don’t have Word docs of the final, edited manuscripts of these two works, so I have to read my digital file alongside the printed book, making corrections as I go. The work is demanding; I can’t make any mistakes. I set a time limit as a kind of marathon challenge.
This is how my onscreen days unfold: shifting from file to file to email to browser like a cross-country runner clearing hurdles, striving for agility and efficiency but, above all, speed. At the end of the day, I open a paper book, panting.
I need the slow reading lessons that typesetting will teach.
HAND TRAVEL
Hugh slides a drawer out of the type cabinet and sets it on the table in front of me.
“California Job Case,” he says as if introducing me to a friend.
The wooden tray with its dozens of compartments looks familiar. I have one just like it, sloped in my closet to display my motley collection of earrings, bracelets, and other baubles.
“Historically, the common letters and the capitals were kept in two separate cases,” Hugh says. He never misses an opportunity for instruction. “The capitals were in an upper case, which explains the name. The other letters were in the lower case—you’re smart, you get the idea. When typesetters started moving around, shop to shop, the capitals and common letters were combined into one case for easier carrying.”
I peer into the compartments. “But the letters aren’t in alphabetical order,” I exclaim, shocked. “How is a person supposed to find them?”
“That would be too much work.” Hugh grins devilishly. “Look: the letters most often used are the handiest.”
Over four centuries of manual typesetting, dozens of different cases were developed as printers tried to find the configuration that was easiest and speediest to work from. Eventually, the California Job Case, developed by printers in San Francisco, became the standard. Its proponents claimed it would reduce “hand travel” by more than half a mile a day.
The California, as Hugh calls it, has eighty-nine compartments of varying sizes. Numerals and symbols are across the top. Lowercase letters are on the left; capitals on the right. The most frequently used lowercase letters—u, m, c, d, e, i, s, o, a, r—have the biggest bins, arranged roughly in a semi-circle directly in front of the typesetter. Less frequently used letters—such as j, z, x, q, w, f, g—are farther away, tucked in the smallest compartments.
Only the capitals are in alphabetical order, with two exceptions. J and U were not used by early English printers so their compartments were tacked on later, after Z. Spacers of various widths are scattered about, some on the upper left, some on the lower right. Spacers—known in the trade as quads, short for quadrats—are square blocks of blank type, with the printing face inset so it doesn’t take any ink. Quads are used to create paragraph indents and the spaces between words and to fill out a line of type. The most common is the em quad. The em quad gets its name from the letter M, which in most typefaces is as wide as it is tall. For example, if the type is 10 point, the em quad will be 10 points high and 10 points wide. The other spacers are based on the em quad. There is a five-to-the-em spacer, a piece of lead a fifth as wide as the M; four-to-the-em; three-to-the-em; and the en-spacer, which is half as wide as it is tall, the dimensions of the letter N. Hugh uses three-to-the-em spacers between words and four-to-the-em spacers between sentences.
Then there are the ligatures. The word comes from legat, which means to bind. In a ligature, two or more letters are joined as a single glyph. “Glyph,” I have to admit, is one of my favourite words. I discovered it while accompanying an expedition of archeologists to the Mayan ruins at Bonampak and Yaxchilan on the border of Mexico and Guatemala. The code for the Mayan system of writing, which consists of pictorial glyphs carved in soft stone, had just been broken. I learned to read the blocky images of jaguars, serpents, and hook-nosed women with ropes piercing their tongues. When Hugh says “glyph” in his tiny garage-studio in Kingston, the small word reverberates from the metal letters in their bins across continents and millennia to the Mayans, to Asia, and to ancient Egypt, binding the world in seconds.
For me, ligatures are delightful, subtle reminders of how mechanical printing is linked to handwriting, a kind of human-machine meld. What is cursive writing, after all, but word after word of ligatured letters? Medieval scribes, in an attempt to speed up the copying of manuscripts, started combining characters in what we now call “scribal abbreviation.” For example, if letters with bowls (c, o, e, a, b, d, g, q, and p) followed each other, the facing edges of the two bowls would be superimposed, as in œ or æ. Similarly, the verticals of characters such as h, m, and n might also be combined. One of the most common ligatures, the ampersand (&), was originally made by joining e and t, which spelled et, Latin for “and.”
At the time Gutenberg was developing movable type, a manuscript might have hundreds of these scribal abbreviations. Because his movable type was based on handwriting, it also included many ligatures, which made mechanical printing easier, since one block could replace two or three. In the twentieth century, ligatures fell out of favour as designers and printers leaned towards cleaner, more modern lines. When computers came along in the 1980s, ligatures all but disappeared. Early software couldn’t produce ligatures on command, and most of the new digital fonts didn’t include them.
As hand compositors went the way of the dodo, so too did ligatures. But there is a happy ending to this story. The rise of book artists and bookwrights, a revived interest among young designers in classic alphabets and old books, and the increasing support of computers for
languages other than English, many of which still include ligatures, have restored to life the lovely tradition of hooking letters together the way we used to hook our little fingers together to make a wish.
Poking in the ligature bin, I remind Hugh of the first time we met, when he waved his ligatured bookmark under my nose.
“I couldn’t believe it!” he says, still stunned by what he sees as an unforgivable designer’s oversight. “The typeface they chose for your book didn’t have a single ligature. I’m not sure how many people in the world would pick that out.”
To correct the error, he had set the Convict Lover bookmark in Caslon, named for William Caslon, an early eighteenth-century gunsmith and typeface designer famous for his ability to carve his perfect punches freehand. Caslon established the first English national style in typeface. Ironically, the first version of the United States Declaration of Independence was printed in Caslon. Hugh chose it for my bookmark because the c and t in words like convict were joined.
“Like manacles!” he’d grinned as he dropped a pile of bookmarks on my signing podium at the Penitentiary Museum.
ct is a common ligature, as are Th, st, and fl. In fact, f is the most commonly ligatured letter. On the wall of his studio, Hugh has a limited-edition poster called Ligatures, which he printed with wooden type to celebrate the anniversary of the Abecedarian Project, now more than forty years old. (It promotes early childhood education as a way of overcoming the disadvantages of poverty.) Hugh used lowercase letters to spell out a lovely aphorism that contains three double ligatures followed by two triples. Just so everyone gets it, Hugh printed the five ligatures in red.
A hundred years ago, a skilled typesetter would have been able to “read” such a text as it was being set by a fellow typesetter, simply by watching where he reached for his letters. I suppose a sharp observer could tell what I’m typing, in much the same way. My computer keyboard, like my typewriter keyboard, is not laid out in alphabetical order: it uses the standard QWERTY format, with letters arranged according to principles of speed and efficiency, just like the California case.
When I prepare The Paradise Project manuscript for ebook publication, I simply type the words into a Word document that Erik pours into an EPUB file. The program automatically justifies the margins and sets the spacing between words. It adds hyphens in exactly the right places. If I misspell a word, it underlines my error with a squiggly red line. I am cosseted and corrected and jollied along by a technology that makes me better than I am, stripping away every mistake, every evidence that I am all too human.
The hand no longer travels very far to typeset a book. But I wonder, what is lost in giving up the journey?
OUT OF SORTS
My head hurts. I feel as though I’ve been dropped onto another planet, one where the citizens speak a language I recognize, although the words all have unfamiliar meanings.
“This is a clean case,” says Hugh.
Not very, I think, surveying the messy heaps of metal letters. The heaps are called “sorts.” When a typesetter runs out of a particular letter, he is “out of sorts.” I have lots of letters and, still, I’m out of sorts.
“In a ‘dirty’ case, the letters are mixed up. If I spill a case, I’ve ‘pied the case.’”
I prop one of The Paradise Project stories in front of me. My job today is to set “Shoot,” a story based on a scene I witnessed one spring sitting by the window of the restaurant where Hugh and I like to meet. When we began this project, Hugh offered me an 1827 apprenticeship contract that demands I start at six thirty every morning, chopping wood to build a fire to warm the shop by the time the journeymen and the Master (that would be Hugh) arrive at eight o’clock. The contract guarantees long hours and poor pay. I’m a writer, I told him, I’m used to that.
Hugh is eager to get started. Erik hasn’t finished the lino blocks—the images have to be printed first, with the words printed over top—but he has sent a map of the book, so we can typeset the pages that have no illustrations.
Hugh brings me a galley tray, an open-ended metal tray that looks like a small cookie sheet. On it are the tools of the trade I’m about to learn.
“This is a composing stick,” he says, handing me what looks a bit like a Scrabble rack with a fixed barricade on the right and a sliding one on the left, near the handle. “Note that the stick’s name has its origin in early newspapers, where the owner would compose the stories.” Hugh winks at me, always happy to take me down a notch or two. “Who needs these pesky writers anyway?”
He adjusts the left side of the composing stick to the length of the line he has decided on for the inside pages, then he lays down a thin length of lead called a 2-point line spacer. A spacer like this will separate each line of type.
To create the first paragraph indent, he sets an em spacer into the stick. Holding the stick in his left hand, he picks out the letters of the first word with his right.
“See this notch?” he says, upending the letter I. “There’s a nick in the bottom edge of each piece of type. That lets you know by touch that you’ve got the bottom. You can feel the notch when you pick the type out of the case. Turn the nick down, keep the face up.” His right hand feeds type to his left thumb, which slides the letter or spacer into place and holds it fast. His hands glide and swirl over the California case in a dance, right hand leading, left hand following a heartbeat behind.
He makes it look simple, even with his gnarled knuckles and his perpetual hitchhiker’s thumbs, bent by arthritis. Read a line of text; pick out the letters one by one; drop them into the composing stick. How hard can that be?
What isn’t clear to me until he hands me the stick is that I will be working upside down, right to left. I squint at the text, then squint at the case of letters, spelling each word standing on its head. How on earth did da Vinci do this, writing 13,000 pages of notes in that mirror script?
I can’t figure out why Hugh calls this slow reading. It’s slow all right, but it sure isn’t reading. The words in reverse dissolve into indiscriminate letters, devoid of meaning.
Twenty minutes later, I’m finally at the end of the first line. It wasn’t as hard as I thought. The trick of reading upside down has come back to me from my days as a journalist, when I used to read the notes on a person’s desk while sitting opposite them in an interview. But I have a problem. Hugh has designed the text to be justified both right and left, which means the words have to fill out the line on both sides, with a three-to-the-em spacer at the beginning and another at the end. These are the immovable stops and starts of every line, and there simply isn’t room for the final r in the word “outdoor.” If I remove the entire word, or even half of it, the letters will slosh in their trough. If the text was ragged right, I could drop “door,” put in a hyphen, and add spacers to the end of the line, but that’s not an option.
“This is the fun part!” Hugh exclaims.
I was wondering when that would start.
“You are using a three-to-the-em spacer between words and a four-to-the-em after a period or a comma, right? But we have five-to the-em and even narrower spacers. So take out some of those three-ems and four-ems, and set in thinner or thicker spacers, whatever you need to make the line look good. Be creative! You know about that, right?” He winks.
I put an extra space between each word. It’s too much. I backtrack. I’ve read the damn line so often it feels trampled and torn. And what a lousy line it is! I hate it. I wish I could rewrite the whole thing, but I’ve already invested an hour getting these twenty-eight letters into place.
“Keep going! Keep going! We don’t have all day! Well,” says Hugh, “we do have all day, but let’s get at least another line out of you.”
Finally, the first line is tight. Hugh hands me the long, thin 2-point spacer to separate the lines, and I start on the next one. I’m getting used to where the common letters are in the California case. I can
almost imagine a time when my fingers will reach for them as blindly as they reach for computer keys. Then, at the end of the second line, another crisis: a long, unsplittable word, one that can’t possibly fit, and if I push it to the next line, this one will be as gap-toothed as a second-grader.
“This is where I invoke Barclay’s Law #46. I think that’s the number,” says Hugh with a grin. He has been hovering at my back, clearly waiting for me to arrive at this impasse. A cruel teacher, he delights in not warning me of the obstacles littering the path ahead. “Law #46 states that, to take up slack in a line, a pressmark matching the weight of the type will be inserted between words, usually following a comma or period. I have been known to use two or three pressmarks on a page.”
Hugh’s pressmark is a stylized image of a turtle. Thirty-five years ago, he and Verla visited the petroglyphs near Peterborough, Ontario, the largest concentration of aboriginal rock carvings in Canada. At the time, the carvings were at the end of an unmarked dirt road: over 900 images carved more than a thousand years ago into a limestone shelf. Figures writhe across the surface, a fanciful bestiary of turtles, fish, leaping and browsing four-legged creatures, shamans, solar symbols, boats, humans, and geometric shapes. The site is sacred to the Ojibway people, who call it KinoomaageWaapkong, “the rocks that teach.”
Now the site is part of Petroglyphs Provincial Park. A protective building has been built over the carvings, but when Hugh and Verla saw them, the carvings were part of the landscape, the sun shining down on the rocks, the wind rushing, an underground stream burbling up now and then, the four elements of earth, fire, air, and water all stroking the senses. Among the glyphs, Hugh noticed a stylized turtle.
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