In reply to:
VER-ry in-ter-es-ting! (Sgt. Schultz) Thanks Father Steve. It's been awhile since I actually saw a type case. By the way, the well made, wooden boxes even when ink-stained are highly collectable...and handy, too. Wish I had one of the old ones that were thrown on rubbish heaps when papers went, wholesale, to Linotypes. Sigh, WOW
My trip to parts north kept me out of a very interesting exchange of views, obviously.
I actually have a drawer from a california type case (the "C" in california was never capitalised to my knowledge). And since the california cases held both upper and lower case for anything under (from memory) about 30pt type, "upper case" and "lower case" must have a much older lineage, although the general idea is correct.
The bane of any printing apprentice's existence was having to "dis" the handset type back into the type cases ("dis" being a highly technical contraction of "disassemble"). I did it as an apprentice and journeyman for, ooh, two years on and off. One of my fellow apprentices found it much more convenient to throw the lot out of one of the windows into the scrub behind the building.
Interestingly (perhaps), the linotype moulds for each letter were always called "mats", short for "matrices". I never did work out why. Maybe Merganthaler wanted them to sound more grand than they were. They were always kept in "mat cases". "Dissing" had a slightly different meaning when applied to linotypes - it referred to the mechanical redistribution of the mats back into the mat cases from the disser bar. Damned bar jammed every five minutes on older machines, and the poor muggins operator was constantly getting up and down to clear the jam, the front and back splashes (molten type metal does make a mess) and, in one memorable case, to bash the cam gears (massive, cast iron wheels rotating on a central shaft) back into synch with a piece of four by two ...
Them were the days, all right!
