http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_243a.html
OK, wise guy, how did they do it *before * computers?
Mechanical typesetting machines were invented in the 1880’s-Ottmar megethaler’s design 9the “Linotype” machine) became the staddard. It mechanically justified the type, by shrinking the spacing between letters. mark Tawin lost a fortune, backing an inventor who had a rival machine. The machine (financed by Twain) was actually better than the Linotype machine, but was too complex. You can see it in the basement of the Mark Twain House, in Hartford, CT.
Linotype machines used small wedges in the spaces. After the compositor had completed a line, and before the hot type-metal was poured onto the line of type, the machine pushed the wedges so that all the spaces in the line expanded an equal amount. (And it all happened incredibly quickly, and with a great amount of noise, especially with the letters going back and being sorted into the right bins, so that the same letters could be used again a few minutes later).
Before Linotype, justification was done by hand. The compositor would have had fractional spaces to fill out the line. A relatively inexperienced one would have completed a ine, then gone back and added fractional spaces; a more experienced one might have been able to predict what spaces were needed before the line was finished.
And in the early days of printing, compositors could use other tricks, like abbreviating words if the lines were too long. You can see some of this in the original printed editions of Shakespeare’s plays.
You’re not talking about such things as “was from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d” are you? - because this was done to preserve the iambic pentameter of the line (‘ripped’ would sometimes otherwise be spoken as two syllables; ripp-ed)
The first printed text of Macbeth (the First Folio) actually has:
Tell thee, Macduffe was from his Mothers womb
Vntimely ript.
Macb. Accursed be that tongue that tels mee so;
(Act V in this e-text)
so in that case, the short form “ript” was not caused by typesetting issues, because the line was already short. (And since the lines before and after are the full iambic pentameter, perhaps something’s been cut here, or perhaps the line is short fdor dramatic effect)
Not only were the lines a problem, but they set up the type four pages at a time, and sometimes overestimated or underestimated how much would fit on the pages, leading to fourth pages that were remarkably sparse or remarkably crowded.
They also didn’t pull proofs. They did proofread, but the bad pages and the good ones alike were sent to the bindery. As a result, no two copies of the First Folio are exactly alike. That’s why the Folger Library in Washington has so very many copies – so they can be collated with blink comparators.
Thanks for the clarification. Please could you provide an example of the sort of truncation for space consideration that you originally mentioned?
I’ll have to wait till I get home and look at my copy of the First Folio: it’s easier to find that sort of scrunched-up-ness when you look at the original.
(And, no, I don’t have a copy of the original – just a cheap facsimile)
Thanks, it sounds really interesting.
And it was truly a marvel to behold. I still have vivid memories of a class trip to a small printing company; we were allowed to type out our names on the Linotype and take the resulting lead bar home as a souvenir. (Here, kid, have a hunk of warm lead! Different times, different times.)
I’m not a Luddite by any means, but I do feel a bit sad when I think that kids today will never witness such marvelous monsters at work 
Right, I’ve found a prtty clear example of the compositor scrunching things up to fit, at the end of Much Ado About Nothing:
In the first line, you have “y” as a word twice, the first time for “thou”, and the second for “that”. In the third line, there is a tilde over the “o” in “questio” (which by medieval manuscript conventon represents an “n” after the vowel). And in lines 11 and 12, “Messenger” is abbreviated inconsistently, as “Mes.” and “Messen.” – the shorter form so that it would just fit on the line.
(If there hadn’t been this kind of abbreviating, the text would have gone onto the the next pge by a line or two, thus wasting most of a page.)
In hindsight, I see I was a bit vague in my above explanation.
What they did was print pages 1 and 4 on one side of a sheet of paper, then pages 2 and 3 on the other side. Then pages 5 and 8, and 6 and 7, and so on. The result was that, if they guessed wrong about where pages 4, 8, etc., should begin, pages 3, 7, etc., would be either overcrowded or sparse.
Printing of plays, in particular, continued to be sloppy and – well, let’s call it whimsical – well into the 19th century. They don’t seem to have any notion of a stylesheet.
I thnk I’ve found another one ;).
Yup – there are typos everywhere, both here and in the First Folio :smack:
Thanks for the info, Giles. I think I get it now, but I’m assuming the abbreviation you’re describing is easier to spot in the actual document than it is in plain text transcriptions, where it is hard to differentiate between abbreviations and simple lack of spelling consistency.