Letters to Hell

Once a week, I go have a course called History of the Book. This week, the lecture was about the spread of the printing press, it's basic workings, and interesting aspects of the press or results of the printing press - for example, the decision to use Latin fonts instead of Gothic ones.

During the break, we ran upstairs to get a look at the printing room they keep for our department.

What a nice room! Some tables, several bookshelves, piles of papers and all sorts of odds and ends, including a surprisingly high number of beer bottles.

In the center was a printing press - not the original kind, but the rolling kind, which is a later development - and nearby, the typecase - the divided box, resembling what people use to store fishing flies or beads, containing the letters according to frequency of use. One corner was labeled "Hel" (Dutch for "Hell").

The type, made of lead, damage easy. If you drop a letter, it becomes useless - so the typecasters put them in the little box (which must really be more like Purgatory) before they gathered them all and sent them to "Hell" - that is, back to the pot, to be melted and recast as new letters.

On our way out, the instructor said we could all take a letter from a box. I just reached in and grabbed one, opting to be surprised rather than to dig around for something I liked. One girl got a nice capital g, and another girl, a lower-case e in some sort of helvetica font. A friend of mine got a sort of stamp spelling out the words, "The Netherlands".

I got this teeny B. How teeny? In this picture, it is lying on a stack of post-it notes.