Banging Out the News
South Pass City, Wyoming
2022
Some miscellaneous typesetter’s tools and equipment. The amount of work it took to put together a couple of paragraphs for a newspaper with this kind of equipment suggests there was an incentive to be parsimonious with one’s words back in those days.
I have set hand type in my long distant pass. The chase is very heavy, it took two people to pick it up and move it. The chase is the frame that holds all of the type.
You’re showing your age there Allan! With all the lead and steel involved, I imagine heavy was a good default descriptor of about every piece of equipment involved in the printing trade back then!
Yet all that weight and effort seemed to do little to reduce the amount of words people wrote in the 18th and 19th centuries. For reference see any of the newspapers that Ben Franklin printed!! 🙂 The prose styles of the era were much more “flowery”, not withstanding the effort it took to print them.
You are right of course and I thought of that contradiction when I wrote that post. It suggests that verbosity rules at any cost!