The Printer Was A Devil

Proudly the sober Philadelphia type foundry of MacKellar, Smiths & Jordan issued the new 1869 edition of their Bog-page, eighteen-pound quarto book of type faces and commercial printing cuts. “We have aimed to give it a becoming artistical appearance,” they announced, “so that its multitudinous Specimens of Types and Ornaments may captivate at first sight …” But it was at second sight, studying the samples, that customers noticed that the usual dummy type and alphabetical gibberish were missing, and that instead some mid-Nineteenth-Century amateur humorist had got loose, terribly loose, in the empty white spaces.