California Job Case | Hacker News Reader

California Job Case

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43 pointssamclemens27 comments

I entered junior high school in Southern California in 1969. At that time, all of the girls took home economics and all of the boys took shop classes: about eight weeks each for woodcraft, metalworking, electricity, drafting, and print shop. In print shop, we had to memorize the layout of the job cases and be able to sort the type back into the proper locations without referring to a chart. The final project was to set a few lines of type and print it on a small rotary press.

I don’t remember the layout of those job cases anymore, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t this California job case. I don’t think the capital letters were laid out in alphabetical order.

The good people at The Alembic Press have compiled an extensive list of typecase layouts (lays) [1].

The hundreds of variations accomodate different alphabets, languages, countries, cabinet sizes, measurement systems, contents (upper case, lower case, both, etc.), and other factors. All are shallow wood drawers with "egg crate" interlocking dividers, easily constructed by craftsmen (and later factories) for over five centuries.

[1] http://www.alembicpress.co.uk/Alembicprs/SELCASE.HTM

Here's a real pic: https://amusetoibien.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/3013112362_...

Source: https://amusetoibien.wordpress.com/2010/01/12/california-job...

> In the previous convention, upper- and lowercase type were kept in separate cases, or trays. This is why capital letters are called uppercase and the minuscules are lowercase.

I had heard of the California case, but never seen the layout. It is odd that the U and J should be sent to the outskirts based on the practice of early English printers: the earliest English printers had worked a good three hundred years before anyone was setting English text in California.

I don't understand the point you're making.

What would English printers' practices in the 1500s have to do with (a specific subset of) American printers in the 1800s? They're working off of the same subject language, that doesn't necessarily mean they're informed by the former.

It could be differences in Standard American and Queen's English, changes in the general language over 300 years, differences in lexicography, etc.

> What would English printers' practices in the 1500s have to do with (a specific subset of) American printers in the 1800s? They're working off of the same subject language, that doesn't necessarily mean they're informed by the former.

According to the article, it's a "modification of a previously popular case, the Italic..." It's plausible that decisions made in the 1500s carried forward. Sort of like how we all type on QUERTY keyboards, even though we're using machines without hammers that can jam if we type too fast.

>> It is odd that the U and J should be sent to the outskirts based on the practice of early English printers: the earliest English printers had worked a good three hundred years before anyone was setting English text in California.

> It could be differences in Standard American and Queen's English, changes in the general language over 300 years, differences in lexicography, etc.

I'm speculating, but I'm pretty sure it's changes in orthography.

I think this is what happened:

1) The order of the capitals in the case (without U/J) was carried over from a 1500s-era case.

2) They were missing from that case because 1500s-era printers probably didn't use capital U/J at all. They probably followed the convention of using I for J and V for U (because Latin, e.g. CORPVS IVRIS CIVILIS for CORPUS JURIS CIVILIS, http://www.cyclopaedia.org/1612/1612corpvs.html).

3) American printers used capital U/J so the designer of this case incorporated them in an unobtrusive spot, that wouldn't disrupt the overall flow. Sort of like how newly-invented keys are never inserted in the middle of a keyboard, only around the edges.

Edit: the placement of U/J after Z appears to date back to at least 1683: http://www.alembicpress.co.uk/Alembicprs/MXUCASE.HTM.

Between 1500 and 1845, James I and II had reigned over Scotland, England, and Ireland, Samuel Johnson had published his dictionary, and the United States had formed a "more perfect union". The changes in orthography had taken place well before the California case.

> The changes in orthography had taken place well before the California case.

Yes. I'd imagine there were lots of steps in between. I mean, it's not like a modern computer QWERTY keyboard is directly based on the original typewriter. They're based off an IBM PC keyboard, which was probably based off of some IBM typewriter, .... and then eventually you trace back to the original, but QWERTY carried through all of them.

> According to the article, it's a "modification of a previously popular case, the Italic..." It's plausible that decisions made in the 1500s carried forward. Sort of like how we all type on QUERTY keyboards, even though we're using machines without hammers that can jam if we type too fast.

There were literally hundreds of typecase configurations:

http://www.alembicpress.co.uk/Alembicprs/SELBLNK.HTM

The English was neither the first, nor the direct ancestor to the California Job Case. I'm not an expert on the subject, but just from quick research, it would seem the American cases extend from the Germanic and Romantic cases, not the English ones.

So again, what would a 1500s typecase have to do with a late 1800s case developed in a completely different nation? Other than a shared lingua, that is.

Hint: the oblique point trying to be made here is....by the 1800s, the US had long diverged from England/the UK and so it's a weird assumption to be made that they would inherently do something "the English way"; let alone in a far archaic manner.

I did not understand this sentence:

> The arrangement of the letters in the California job case became so common that a skilled typesetter could "read" the text set by another typesetter, just by watching the typesetter remove type from the case, seeing from which compartments the letters were taken.

Does anyone else understand this? Could you explain, please?

You could watch someone work and know what words they were putting down by where they were reaching, even if you were too far away to make out the letters themselves.

If you pick the letters strictly in order, it spells out the words. If you pick the letters by word, you can guess what word as there are only so many words. It'd be like watching a touch typist on a unlabeled keyboard for another example.

The letters are in specific spots inside the case. Because the case layout is a standard, someone very skilled with the standard could read the word being typeset because they could see which spots were being pulled from for different words... since the spot in the case is the letter... you can know the letters of the word. This might assume that the letters were being pulled in order (or reasonably ordered).

it's like if you watched someone typing on a qwerty keyboard with no letters printed on it but you could still make out the words because you know where the keys are.

Type setting has become popular again, except it's known as keycaps on a mechanical keyboard

I thought about this parallel also. Kind of the modern equivalent i guess

Any other fans of the Kelsey Printing Press Company here ? Is it even possible to buy the rollers any more ? Have there been any technological advances that make them more durable, less subject to long-term drying out ? What the heck were they even made of ?

The Monks and Friars Chapel [1], an organization in Detroit, Michigan dedicated to preserving the knowledge and craft of Letterpress printing, lists sources [2] for rollers and other consumables.

[1] https://monksandfriars.org/

[2] https://monksandfriars.org/Rollers-Consumables

Thank you for this!

My dad must have had to memorize the order of the boxes when he took a printing class in high school because I can remember he would recite it to me when I was a little kid. Thanks for the memory!

Did these layouts influence the eventual keyboard layouts we use nowadays?

No. CJ cases make the most common letters have larger compartments* (because you'll use more of those letters) and be easy to find. The QWERTY keyboard was designed to decrease typing speed to avoid jamming the mechanism.

*For lowercase letters only. All CJ capital compartments are the same size, in alphabetical order because capitals are much more rarely used.

It's curious that 'c' and 'u' are in such large compartments, especially compared to 'e' and 't'

From the picture linked in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36990987, it's an artifacting of Wikipedia's table layout. It looks like you should count all of the cells in the top row as being equal width, save the 'e' box's extension into the top row, which is two cells wide. So 'c'/'m'/'u' are the same size as 'd'/'n'/'t' and 'h'/3-em spaces, 'i'/'o'/'a', 's'/'r', and 2-3em quads, with 'e' being larger by the size of 2 digit spaces.

Seems like the Wikipedia illustration is not to scale. They've just used an HTML table and let it determine the sizes.

If you look at some photos, the "m" compartment isn't actually wider than the others. See https://reflexletterpress.com/updated-info-sheets-typesettin... and https://amusetoibien.wordpress.com/2010/01/12/california-job... .

somebody made a keyboard using a type case layout: https://youtu.be/vdP_sTMOWYo

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