A rather short­er arti­cle here (with a plea below for more infor­ma­tion!) but hope­ful­ly this adds some­thing to your under­stand­ing of print­ing, and offers some advice.

Using a Composing Stick

From John R Smith’s Tech­ni­cal Notes for Begin­ners shared in the OGP Newslet­ter and repro­duced with his per­mis­sion.

The text-books instruct one to set the com­pos­ing stick to the mea­sure (col­umn width) and fill it with noth­ing but type and spaces. For the dex­ter­ous Dick­en­sian comp, doing it five days a week, that’s fine. But, begin­ners invari­ably find the last few let­ters per line fall over when trans­ferred to stone or gal­ley. The method I shall out­line is less nerve-rack­ing and inter­line lead­ing gen­er­al­ly aids leg­i­bil­i­ty.

Set your stick to the designed mea­sure plus two em quads — (those which are the square of the type-size). Find a set of leads (strips of thin inter-line spac­ing) each longer than the mea­sure but slight­ly short­er than mea­sure plus 2ems. Put the first lead in the stick (use a set­ting rule if you have such rare antiques) then set your first line of type (nick fac­ing away from you and spelling nor­mal­ly). Start and fin­ish with an em quad — or put a wider quad at the end of a short line. Aim to use the mid­dle (mid) size of the spaces between words. Adjust the line with cop­per or nick­el hair-spaces (if you have such lux­u­ries) until it is firm — but not tight enough to strain the stick.

If you don’t have hair-spaces, cut a selec­tion of sliv­ers of vary­ing thick­ness of paper and card and use those. This will hor­ri­fy sur­viv­ing let­ter­press teach­ers, but needs must! Place the next lead and an em quad to begin die next line and car­ry on set­ting until you have filled the stick with a firm rec­tan­gle of type-mat­ter. If you have a set of set­ting rules, you should now put anoth­er in place, tie die whole lot
with page-cord and lift it from stick to gal­ley. I nev­er both­er to tie up, pre­fer­ring lay the stick on the gal­ley and, hold­ing the mat­ter tight, slide it onto the gal­ley where it sits between clumps (large hol­low quads) and strips of reglet (thick wood, plas­tic or met­al fur­ni­ture) until I’m ready to lock it in the chase. This way your type is less like­ly to fall apart — but I make no pre­tence of a guar­an­tee!

Compositors and Their Sticks

Rather than equip­ment of the print­ing works, com­pos­ing sticks were the pos­ses­sions of their com­pos­i­tors that used them.

Though every com­pos­i­tor by Cus­tom is to pro­vide him­self a Com­pos­ing-stick, yet our Mas­ter-Print­er ought to fur­nish his House with these Tools also [for appren­tices].

Joseph Mox­on, Mechan­ick Exer­cis­es on the Whole Art of Print­ing (1683–4)

Evolution

Sticks evolved — orig­i­nal com­pos­i­tors tools at the Plan­tin-Mor­tus muse­um were report­ed as sticks craft­ed to accom­mo­date one of two widths of work — one for the body of the text and anoth­er for the mar­gin­a­lia.

At the height of let­ter­press’ obses­sion with pre­ci­sion, sticks were cre­at­ed with microme­tre adjust­ment. To aid lock­up and the pit­falls of ​‘squeeze’ print­ing hous­es adopt­ed one of two approach­es — either cut leads very slight­ly short of the mea­sure (typ­i­cal­ly ¼ of a point), or expand the stick slight­ly beyond the mea­sure. The effect was the same — when locked up the forme would have a lit­tle give, just enough to com­press the air, dirt and bent types and so cre­at­ing a sol­id block of print­ing mate­r­i­al.

In addi­tion to the usu­al met­al sticks, enor­mous wood­en com­pos­ing sticks were made for poster types. These delight­ful con­trap­tions seem always to be patched up, and I can nev­er come to terms with how heavy the stick would have been with, per­haps, 30 inch­es of woodlet­ter in these.

More Information?

I’ve found a tan­ta­lis­ing ref­er­ence to a 1971 book, Mar­tin K. Speckter’s Dis­qui­si­tion on the Com­pos­ing Stick. The near­est copy to me is 200 miles away in Lon­don, and I won­der whether any­one has a copy they’d be will­ing to loan so I can add more here about these tools?

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Location

Tar­iff Road, Tot­ten­ham, as the home of Cef­mor-Brehmer Ltd., mak­er of my favourite com­pos­ing stick.

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“Mov­able type on com­pos­ing stick, The Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa, 1920s” flickr pho­to by The Uni­ver­si­ty of Iowa Libraries https://flickr.com/photos/uiowa/8054875851 shared under a Cre­ative Com­mons (BY-NC) license