THE OLD SCHOOL PRESS

Moments in the making of The Daniel Press in Frome

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Everything should now go smoothly of course. Having set up the skeleton forme on the bed of the press, it's just a matter of bringing four pages off galleys into the forme, printing off 190 copies, and moving the type back onto the galleys ready for the next lot.

However, I was shuffling some pages and wasn't concentrating as I pulled this one off the bed onto a galley: a gap opened up between galley lip and bed and - whoosh - type on the floor (carpeted of course). At this moment you have to decide whether it can be salvaged or, as I have done in the past, you just sweep it into the hell-box and get the page recast.

Fortunately the lines were not justified so the spacing between the words was a constant width, which made the idea of reconstructing from the pie a little less ghastly. First I had to salvage what was still in place, and then rework each line in turn to rebuild the page.