Before a word was a word it was a lump of lead, an inch and a half tall, with the letter reversed on the end of it. Everything in this page is a study of that: what a letter looks like when it is cut, when it is inked, and when it is pressed into damp paper.
Set at 96 point on a 12 pica measure, this line runs to thirty-one characters and breaks twice. The impression slider controls how far the type sinks into the damp sheet: at zero the paper is merely inked, at full the type has pushed the fibres aside and the sheet will need to be pressed again before it is cut.
Each letter began as a cut in steel, driven with a hammer and a letter-punch into a copper matrix, which was then adjusted by hand with a proof of the letter on paper. Only then was the type cast, in an alloy of lead, tin and antimony that expands slightly as it cools — which is why type faces come out of the mould perfectly sharp and slightly larger than the punch.
By the time a case was full, the compositor set sixteen thousand pieces of lead in a galley, and the whole thing was locked up in a chase and pulled under a platen at two hundred impressions an hour.