Last Monday, we finally got to set some of our type for our book up in the workshop, and once again, I was surprised at how hard it was to actually get the letters in the right spots without any major mishaps. I'm one of those people who is constantly checking and overlooking her work to make sure that there's nothing out of place, so I became really confused when I couldn't even read the words that I had spelled out so far. Normally, I can read all kinds of words in any kind of direction; backwards, forwards, upside down, even mirrored words make sense to me. However, It took a long time for me to get used to the words because not only were the letters mirrored, the letters were mirrored without flipping the location of the letters, making it backwards as well (from my perspective). I can't even imagine how hard it must be to set type for an entire novel without at least a few mistakes sprinkled somewhere in the pages.
I also thought that just getting the letters in the right order was confusing. Instead of being able to hand write everything or type everything on a computer (where we already have a basic understanding of where all the letters are located), we had to get used to an entire new position for all of the letters we needed, some of which were in really strange positions (You tend to notice these things when your last name starts with a "Z"). All in all, I've gained some healthy respect for anyone who used to set type before the age of computers and spell-check, not only is it confusing, but you also need to make sure that everything is set perfectly, or the pieces will literally fall around you.
I agree, at first looking at everything backwards muddled my mind a bit. I was expecting to put everything in forwards and right-side up, but clearly that wouldn't have come out the right way when we printed. Although, despite this, I got pretty "lazy" about checking my letters for mistakes after a while. I decided that I would put in everything as fast as I could and then go back and check. I almost had a mishap, too, where the bottom row of my letters tipped out and I had to rearrange all of them. Usually accident-prone, this time I actually didn't have a catastrophe.
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ReplyDeleteI thought I was doing a pretty good job of reading the words as I was lining them up. Unfortunately, I managed to use a 'u' for a 'n' and leave a letter out of my own major. Suffice it to say, I would not make a very good printer, but some practice would definitely help.
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