The Printers’ International Specimen Exchange
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If you are a respectable person, you’d be a member of a printers’ guild. Printing books. Boring, reliable and informed by 400 years of tradition. After all, a single printed book transmits ideas down the generations.
Job Printers were the hacks and hustlers of the age. Their enterprise would look like 3 friends, an old-model printing press and a whole lot of metal type. They would set raised metal letters into frames (called “formes”), ink them up and make hundreds of paper impressions. Job Printers made things that were commercial, loud and disposable: advertisements, business cards, restaurant menus and posters. The opposite of books.
You’d be puttering along, printing posters that had the same basic layout as books did. But what if you had a niggling feeling that there was something more noble in your craft? Something that those snooty book-printers were missing?
