Just a Sci-Fi Kid Like Me

The First Outlander Printing Post No One Wanted.

All screencaps are from 3x07 "Creme de Menthe." So, remember how the last post was about everything they got right about printing? Well, this one is about everything they got wrong.

So the big plot point in both the books and the show is the excisemen connecting "Jamie Roy's" smuggling business to "A. Malcolm's" printing operation. In the books this involved a lot more off-screen discussion of the excisemen going around Edinburgh taverns tasting brandy to locate the stuff Jamie's smuggling and then getting to the print-shop where they also find his seditious pamphlet trade. As happens.



Step one to seditious printing: Don't put your fucking name on it, for one thing.

And in fact, most seditious material would have neither a name nor an address on it, which would be illegal because 17th c. printing ordinances actually REQUIRED all printing to have physical addresses on it for these reasons. If you had a "press in a hole" it meant you were moving your press around pretty regularly to avoid the authorities, and often doing shitty printing as a result. When you look at something dodgy in the 18th c., though, what you see is printing with FAKE addresses and imprints on them instead. There's actually some neat scholarship on this topic, because it turns out, it's easy to put a fake address on something....but you can look at the type, ornaments, composition (which is to say, how the compositors placed page numbers, assigned gathering signatures and catch words, etc) and successfully identify true origins of these things.

But anyway. Lemme show you a scene that has bugged me for YEARS. So Young Ian confronts the exciseman in Jamie's printshop and a fight scene ensues. The exciseman pulls a gun and tries to shoot him, hitting a wall of clear jars behind him, the liquid of which falls down and starts a fire. In the books, Gabaldon says this is alcohol for making printing ink, except you don't use alcohol in printing ink, you use oil varnish. (Oil varnish is pretty flameable though. Fun fact: There were in fact laws requiring ink makers to not do so within five miles of city limits because you make oil varnish by boiling oil which has a tendency to combust when oxygen hits it, so you have to try to control the boil by leaving the lid on the cauldron and adding bread and onions to mitigate the temperature and make a nice luncheon. Anyway.)

Okay, so the "alcohol' drops down onto the banked stove-looking set-up which we also saw last week. In the book, this is described as the little "forge" where damaged type could be melted down and recast. You'll see here that young Ian grabs the small ladle of lead (and tin and antimony) and throws it into the face of the baddie which is enough for him to drop to the ground writhing in pain and then falling unconscious like he's Prince Viserys or something.



LOL, no.

Okay, so, small things first: The lovely thing about type metal is that it has a low melting point (about 800 degrees F) and a high cooling point. If you throw the tablespoon of molten metal at someone's face, they are going to yell "Ow! Motherfucker!" and that's about it. I've seriously gotten worse heat blisters from pot handles or hot tea than with molten type metal. To really damage someone, you'd need to pick up that WHOLE POT YOU GOT THERE and dump it on someone, but it would be pretty heavy, so you'd have to ask said someone to hold still while you poured it. Basically this is just a dumb dramatic scene, which is also ahistorical, because by the 18th century, no one was really doing this anymore.



Now, this is probably the scene Gabaldon had in mind; this is a woodcut by Jost Amman, Frankfurt, 1568. In the early days of printing, there was a closer relationship between printers and typecutters/typefounders, so you COULD do this in your shop. by the 18th c., however, the professions had diverged significantly. Typefounding, making type and the matrices for the fonts, required a very different skill set and what is basically a proprietary technology. Think of it like you working at your computer--sure, you use Microsoft Office all the damn time, but can you write to code for it? Nope. That's why you download updates and buy new software packages and so on. Although fun fact: Ben Franklin managed an early "hack" when he was working as an apprentice in his brother's print shop, rigging some matrices to cast some type (likely from sand moulds) until he was able to make the NECESSARY TRIP to Europe to buy some.

Anyway, the one thing the show got right with this whole sequence is a scene not in the book, where Jamie physically moves a press so they can escape.



That's right: one big dude, moving a press by himself. I like this bit because there's some conventional wisdom by non-printing scholars that presses were ~so heavy, and especially ~so heavy that the womens couldn't use their feeble women strength to work them. LOL, NO. A wooden press is lighter than my beat-up Ikea couch, man.

Anyways, then the printshop burns down and then the other plots have to be set in motion. We won't see a printing press again until they adapt book 6, assuming they do so. *sighs wistfully* In which case....see you in three years for more rants?

 I have waited three years to make this post, ISTFG.

This one is from 3x05 "Freedom and Whiskey." Apparently they made two common presses and sent Sam Heughan to "printing school" so he could operate them properly. (They had a consultant at Reading University, so I wonder if they sent him there?) Apparently a lot of the prints you see onscreen he actually did himself. Good job, boyo.

Anyway, this is a nice set-up here. My only complaint is piling that much stuff onto the closed tympan; that much printing paper is **heavy.**



This next series of 'caps are all from 3x06 "A. Malcolm." Here's Jamie checking his prints first thing in the morning, probably to see if they dried properly. Note the combination of wooden dowels and hanging ropes to hold all the printed sheets. Absolutely correct.



Jamie's got his apron on (and I covet that beautiful leather apron that is....absolutely spotless. *thinks about the distressed aprons in my 'shop* *sighs*) A minor blooper here; when we see the bed of the press the chase is totally empty, but when he gets to work a few minutes later the type is locked up. 



This is a shot from the "Inside the World" featurette after the episode. Note that they did the lock-up properly with all wooden quoins and furniture rather than cheating and using modern (metal) speed quoins. My one hiccup here is that the bed is half-empty, and he's shown printing small bi-folios rather than quartos. It just wouldn't make any sense to print that way when you're doing pamphlets. Anyway, I think they may have done proper handset type here instead of cheating and using zinc plates, which is what you ordinarily see in print scenes in movies and whatnot. Although minor complaint: Throughout the shop you see all the equipment, all the paper stock, etc. etc., but you don't see any typecases or cabinets. And fwiw I have a small hobby operation and I have four type cabinets, so. They take up space.



Now what impressed me here is they got almost all of the inking correct! However, Jamie grabs the pair of prepped inkballs off the cheek of the press, where....they shouldn't be first thing in the morning, or they should be capped with a damp rag if they are. Why? Turns out the leather pelts used can dry out over night and makes it harder for them to pick up the ink; really you should start up first thing in the morning by taking the pelts out of a bucket of water where they would sit over night, wringing them out, then freshly stuffing the ink pelts with carded wool, then nailing them to the stock, and THEN prepping your ink. 

You do see Jamie working the ink with an ink knife from a jar on the inking stone. However, when they cut back to it its all spread out properly, which means someone likely worked it over with a modern brayer to get it perfectly ready to go. But he applies the ink to the ink balls correctly, then applies them to the press correctly. My heart went bat-bat-bat-bat just like the ink on that type, I tell ya.



Okay, here we see him pulling the bar:



My one hiccup here is--he doesn't pull back at an angle, which means he's not using a footbrace. Contrast with my bro Todd at work: 



See how he's got his knees bent just a bit? You got to make the press's leverage work for you when you're doing your pulls.Now, both Sam/Jamie and Todd are big guys, so they don't really need to. But back in the day, people were shorter. So, there's that. Now, back to Jamie:



Jamie checks his impression. Nice and even, particularly given he was using undampened paper from the post behind him. A couple more nitpicks: We don't see tables for the fresh paper OR the stack of prints that they would be producing (and you wouldn't hang them straight away--they need to dry off a bit). You also need to dampen your paper overnight because printing ink is incredibly thick stuff, and the wet paper picks it up much more easily and evenly than dry paper does. But as I said in my live-blogging, It's okay, Jamie. I've fucked that up too!

I didn't get a decent screencap of it, but he's also printing using "duckbills" or small folded bits of paper attached to the tympan to hold the paper in place, rather than "points" (thumb-tacks, basically). As far as I know the duckbills are a 19th or early 20th c. thing rather than 18th, but I've also never been able to confirm this, so who knows. 

Anyways then Claire comes in and drama ensues and he never cleans the type or anything, which is totally gonna bite him the next day if this were real life, but whatever. Also, he has a 2 press shop with like 1 dude working for him, which is INSANE. A 1 press shop would have 10 people at a minimum (overseer who can double as corrector, 2-4 pressmen, 2-4 compositors, 1-2 apprentice minions for cleaning, gophering, etc.), so really Jamie have like 19 dudes & ladies going full-time, but whatever. (Gabaldon fudged her research on the printing in ways that totally went over my head the first time I read the books TWENTY FUCKING YEARS AGO, JESUS, but now I'm just like, "where did you even GET that?!" when rereading. For instance, she consistently claims that printing ink consists of powder and alcohol, which, no. That would get you some writing ink, though mostly you'd use water instead because alcohol was expensive. She also does some funny stuff with typecasting which I can comment on next week, assuming they do that scene.)

Anyways, there's my feels. SORRY NOT SORRY.

GEORGE R. R. MARTIN’S SISTER: THE ECONOMICS OF BEING A WRITER

These economic realities are a huge challenge to both fairness and diversity for authors. Yet, while the debate on diversity and representation rages in the genre – in particularly in the US – almost no one is discussing the how economics of being an author silences the working class. ...

This leads us to the question of George R. R. Martin’s sister. In Virginia Woolf’s classic feminist essay ‘A Room of One’s Own,’ Woolf invents a woman called Judith Shakespeare. In essence, while Judith possessed all the talents of her brother William, because she was a woman she couldn’t got to school, and because she had no education her talents went to waste, unexpressed.

In this vein we will take GRRM’s imaginary sister, Georgia – a woman, we will assume, with all the talent of her brother. The answer to the question of whether Georgia would have made it as a writer in today’s economic climate is simple: she very likely wouldn’t. Women in the US have a higher risk of being downwardly mobile and working class women find it harder than men to escape their social class (and it is bloody hard for men).

Imagine Georgia working long hours in the service industry for minimum wage – a wage that has declined in real terms over the past twenty years – coming home exhausted, barely able to cover the cost of food and rent. No spare money, no spare time, a university education beyond reach, and not even a public library nearby. The itch to write never scratched between six-day working weeks, raising children, and the moment head touches pillow. ...

Modern inequality, social immobility and an inability to talk about class means that at least half of the population are close to being locked out of the profession. They are the silent majority, a rare and disappearing breed, and their stories are not being told. While this endures, the breadth and perspectives of the fiction coming out of the genre will be diminished.


This Old-Fashioned Printing Shop Knows Where It’s @: Fans of Movable Type Buy Up Symbols for Modern Era; ‘#great bargain’

“There is something magical, almost mystical, in creating the printed word,” says Mr. Barrett of Letterpress Things, “When a person sees something that has been letterpress printed there’s a dimensionalism there, there’s a depth. You’re not just seeing a flat surface like a page out of a magazine, you are now…looking into a space.”

A fun, light video and article, but NGL, I am, er, out of sorts (see what I did there?) that they interviewed an old white dude to talk about letterpress printing--especially when it opens up with, "I had no idea what a 'hashtag' was, and then golly, I saw it as a pound sign!"

In contrast, note that Ladies of the Press features younger women as printers and artists. Just sayin'.

It's still in storage but I took Scott out to visit it today, because it is lonely and wants attention.

Me: "I've been thinking about a name for my imprint. What do you think of Common Grounds Press?"

Scott (completely unknowing): "It sounds like a coffeeshop. I want coffee. Can a printer make coffee?"

I shouldn't be this entertained by the conversation, but I am anyway.

So yeah, hi, been a while. Here's a wicked round-up of lots of things.

marthawells's new book is out!! Go get it!!

reena_jenkins did an awesome podfic of one of my Avengers fics. Give it a listen and feel holidaysey!!!!

A friend has a tutorial on woodcutting and letterpress printing holiday cards that is exceedingly cool. I added a link to Jen's blog for Anise Press over to the left, but if you find you need some holiday prezzies let me recommend her shop; she and Todd have a cool selection of broadside posters, prints, and cards!

Uh, what else. Oh! So my next exhibit at work is coming along. The official page of Deeper Than Swords is up and running, and I have a resource page with bonus info at the AggieScifi blog. gadgetorious is doing some of the artwork for us, so you should also go scope out her tumblr. If you're a local, help us get the word out!!

So it's break. I survived the semester. Yay! Next term I'm signed up for Translating Beowulf, Early Modern Lit and Culture: 17th Century Religious Radicalism, and Conflict in Creative Writing.

Has everyone seen the Trek trailer? The Japanese version made me lose my shit, no lie. There was some intense feels last week, let me say.

Okay, that's all for now. I think. Maybe. I LOVE YOU ALL!!!!!!

But I think it would have been better with a couple more fonts. Just sayin'.

I'm trying to work on my talk for my conference but I want to be doing ANYTHING ELSE. But some of you guys asked for pictures of the exhibit, and I forgot about it Friday, but here's a couple of cases I took this morning:



This case shows the proof title page for This Bitterly Beautiful Land along with manuscript drafts, the a woodblock engraving and a zinc engraving, both of which were used in the final book.



This is one of the main cases. Each case has a printed broadside as well as other printed material.

Basically, for everyone who has ever wondered what Printer!Jim was talking about, here you go. ;)

I'll be printing in the workshop later this afternoon with Todd's class. We're going to be making a chapbook for their final project. I'll see about putting a scan or two of that up when it's done.