The Monotype Space Maker (Sidney E. Berger).

I know what it means to be out of sorts. As a young printer in the 1970s I was setting up my own press. I ordered Bembo in two sizes and the spacing material and got started. One of my first projects was a wonderful poem by Thom Gunn, Lament, that I turned into a small book. It was about 150 lines, and I ran out of word spaces—3-to-ems. I tried 4-to-ems, but that set the words too tightly, and I didn’t want to have to use thins (like a brass or two coppers) to make up the added space. The only solution was to call the foundry from whom I had bought the type and get some more spaces. It took time for my check to get to them, and time for the spacing matter to get to me, and in the meantime I walked past my press a dozen times wishing I could get to work. [Read more]