As distributing is a part of the compositor's business for which nothing is paid direct (the payment for that labour being included in the price of composition), it is necessary, before he can compose, that he should put type into his cases, as no one will have done this for him. This operation is a most beautiful process in the hands of an expert compositor ; and probably no act which is partly mental and partly mechanical offers a more remarkable example of the dexterity to be acquired by long practice. The workman, having prepared a quan tity of type which has been already printed from, either in a form or page (terms which will be described under making-up, &c.), loosens the lines sufficiently to allow them to be washed free from dirt. While the types are yet moist, in which state they adhere sufficiently to pre vent them with care from falling asunder, he lifts a portion of the type as it has been arranged in lines upon a slip of brass rule. This ho rests upon the middle finger of his left hand, supporting one side with his thumb, towards which be somewhat inclines the whole handful. In each letter there is a nick or nicks, to indicate the bottom edge of the letter. Keeping the face towards him, and the nick uppermost, ho takes up one or two words between the fore-finger and thumb of his right hand, and drops the letters, each into its proper place, with almost inconceivable rapidity. His mind has to follow the order of the letters in the words, and to select the box into which each is to be dropped, while his fingers have to separate one letter from another, taking care that only one letter is dropped at a time. This is a complicated act ; and yet a good compositor will distribute three or four times as fast as he composes—that is, he will, if necessary, return to their proper places 50,000 letters a day. The letters being inverted in printing, are not read as they arc read in a book, and thus " to know his p's from his q's " is a difficulty to a beginner.
Standing before the pair of cases which contain the Roman letter, he holds in his left hand what is milled a composing-stick. This is a little iron or brass frame, ono side of which is moveable, so that it may be adjusted to the required width of the page or column which the work man has to set up. It is made perfectly true and square; for without such accuracy the lines would be of unequal length. It is adapted to contain not more than about seventeen lines of the type of the present work.
The copy from which the compositor works rests upon the least-used part of the upper-case. The practised compositor takes in a lino or two at a glance, always provided the author writes an intelligible band —which virtue is by no means universal. One by one, then, the compositor puts the letters of each word and sentence into his stick, securing each letter with the thumb of his left hand, which is there fore continually travelling on from the beginning to the end of a line ; the letters being arranged on a thin slip of polished brass of the same height as the type, called a setting-rule, and which is shifted from behind each line to the front when completed, the roughness of the types being thus avoided. His right hand goes mechanically to the
box which he requires; but his eye is ready to accompany its move ments. In each letter, as we have stated, there is a nick or nicks, to indicate the bottom edge of the letter ; and the nick must be placed outwards in his composing-stick. Farther, the letter must also be placed with the face upwards, so that two right positions must be combined in the arrangement of the types. If the compositor were to pick up the letter at random, he would most probably have to turn it in les hand ; and as it is important to save every unnecessary move ment, his eye directs him to some one of the heap which lies in the right position, both as regards the face being upwards and the nick being outwards. This nick is one of those pretty contrivances for saving labour which experience has introduced into every art, and which are as valuable for diminishing the cost of production as the more elaborate inventions of machinery. When he arrives at the end of his line, the compositor has a task to perform in which the carefulness of the work man is greatly exhibited. The first letter and the last must be at tho extremities of the line : there can be no spaces left in some instances, and no crowding in others, as we see in the best manuscript. Each metal type is of a constant thickness, as far as regards that particular letter, though all the letters are not of the same thickness. The adjustments, therefore, to complete the line with a word, or at any rate with a syllable, must be made by varying the thickness of the spaces between each word. A good compositor is distinguished by uniformity of spacing : he will not allow the words to be very close together in some instances, or with a large gap between them in others. His duty is to equalise the spacing as much as he possibly can ; and this is, in some cases, very troublesome. When the workman has filled his stick, as it is called,—that is, has set up as many lines as his stick will conveniently hold,—he lifts them out into what is termed a galley, by grasping them with the fingers of each hand, the setting-rule supporting them in front, and thus taking them up as if they were a solid piece of metal. The facility with which some compositors can lift abont what is called a hatulful of moveable type, without deranging a single letter, is very remarkable. This sort of skill can only be attained by practice ; and one of the severest modifications which the printer's apprentice has to endure is, to toil for an hour or two in picking up several thousand letters, and then to see the fabric destroyed by his own clumsiness, leading him to mourn over his heap of broken type—technically called pye—as a child mourns over his fallen house of cards.