Typographia, or The Printer's Instructor
The third edition, 1845, of an American printer's manual by Thomas F. Adams, a Philadelphia typographer, published by James Kay, Jun. & Brother and dedicated to the Philadelphia Typographical Society.
What it is
The third edition, 1845, of an American printer's manual by Thomas F. Adams, a Philadelphia typographer, published by James Kay, Jun. & Brother and dedicated to the Philadelphia Typographical Society. Part I is a history: early printing in China, the rival claims of Haarlem, Mainz and Strasbourg, the press in England and America, including the Boston News-Letter of 1704 and the Franklins' New England Courant, and Senefelder's discovery of lithography. Part II walks through a working office department by department: the shapes and sizes of type, what a fount holds sort by sort, casting off copy to estimate a book's length, composing, imposition schemes from folios to sheets of 128 pages, correcting and proof marks, the overseer's duties and 15 office rules, presswork, fine, card and gold printing, inking rollers, presses, the warehouse, and a glossary of trade terms.
Why read it now
Most of the machinery here is gone, but the book is a working model of a production line, and several of its habits transfer straight to content and design teams. The corrector is told to fix one way of spelling doubtful words and keep a written list of them. That is a style guide, and it is still the cheapest fix for inconsistent brand copy, above all in Arabic, where hamza, taa marbuta and transliterated brand names vary from writer to writer. Casting off copy, estimating length before setting, is the ancestor of fitting copy to a layout before design starts. The overseer's rules on clearing finished work and returning tools read like a studio's file and handover rules. The preface's opening move, calling rival manuals reprints of a 1755 London grammar, is plain competitor positioning. What has dated: the hand press, a history that weighs contested legends, and a glossary few will need. Use: before the next campaign, write one page fixing how your brand spells its name, products, numbers and dates in Arabic and English, and make every writer and designer work from it.
Passages worth keeping
Very many of the works heretofore published on this subject, in a practical point of view, have been little else than reprints of old Grammars
المؤلف يبدأ بنقد الكتب المنافسة، فيصفها بأنها إعادة طبع لكتب قديمة، ليقدم كتابه على أنه خلاصة تجربة عملية.
To cast off manuscript with accuracy and precision, is a task of a disagreeable nature, which requires great attention and mature deliberation.
تقدير عدد الصفحات التي سيشغلها النص قبل صفه عمل ثقيل يحتاج إلى انتباه وتأنٍّ، لكنه يحدد شكل الكتاب كله.
every corrector ought to fix upon a method to spell ambiguous words and compounds always the same way.
على المصحح أن يختار طريقة واحدة لكتابة الكلمات التي تحتمل أكثر من رسم، ويلتزم بها في العمل كله.
In seeking, therefore, after that which peculiarly belongs to another art, we are liable to a neglect of those excellencies which exclusively characterize our own
من يحاول تقليد مظهر وسيط آخر يضيّع المزايا التي ينفرد بها وسيطه، فالأولى أن يتقن ما يحسنه هو.
GOLD PRINTING, like most other novelties, has had its day, but is now more sparingly used
المؤثرات اللافتة تنتشر ثم يخفت بريقها، فالطباعة بالذهب صارت تُستعمل بقدر بعد أن كانت موضة.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
Read the original archive.org
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