Typesetters composing stick

This little metal doo-hickey is used to set metal type. I got this one with the first press I ever owned, a Chandler and Price 10x15 that a retired printer had in his basement. His widow sold me the press, some Stymie Light in a mason jar, and three composing sticks for $400 - my parents loaned me the money - and Hugh Merrill, Printmaking professor at KCAI helped me winch it up her garden steps (nearly killed Hugh twice when the press started tipping, but he stopped the slide just in time).

I wasn't much interested in type to start out with; I wanted to print artists books, portfolios of images, and posters. The press wasn't to easy to run at first, without a treadle or a working motor, but my roommate at the time was Tom Novosad, a man who never backed down from a challenge. We printed The Royal Brand Portfolio by spinning the press wheel by hand, and didn't do too bad a job on the 40+ 5x7 relief prints in the set.

A sense of the utility and beauty of type developed slowly, and never as fully as some folks, but I got pretty good at setting type by hand. One of the tricks is to hold the stick with your left hand palm down, so your thumb is braced against the side of the stick and your forefinger can hold the individual pieces of type as you add them.