A Love Letter

This post is my entry for May’s IndieWeb Carnival being hosted by Juhis. Dear Typesetting, While this love letter is to you, many folks reading this may not know you as well as I do, so I’ll start with a bit of explanation… Typesetting is the traditional craft of manually assembling individual metal or wood letters, punctuation marks, and spacing blocks to form words, paragraphs, and pages for letterpress printing. I remember meeting you when I was likely around 6 years old. Watching my grandfather spend hours sifting through wooden trays of lead letter slugs and spacers to assemble words that would press into the foil of the hot stamp ribbon machine. Sometimes after a job was done, and the slugs had cooled, I’d get to remove the tape and put each item back in the trays. For common words, there were slugs already made in Times New Roman, but that didn’t mean you weren’t there. The slugs still had to be put into the hot stamp chassis, lifted to the perfect angle to hold the slugs…