page_title: Robert Smail's Printing Works
section_title: Paper store and caseroom
hierarchical_section_title: Robert Smail's Printing Works / The Printing Works / Paper store and caseroom
caption_attribution_description: English: Note: the plate says - "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog and feels as if he were in the seventh heaven of typography together with Hermann Zapf, the most famous artist of the" Français&#160;: Caractères mobiles d’imprimerie. On peut lire en anglais&#160;: «&#160;Le renard rapide saute par dessus le chien paresseux (équivalent anglophone de «&#160;Portez ce vieux whisky au juge blond qui fume&#160;»), comme s’il était dans le septième ciel de la typographie avec Herman Zapf, l’artiste le plus célèbre du&#160;» Deutsch: Bewegliche Lettern, die zu einem englischen Text zusammengesetzt sind: »Der schnelle braune Fuchs springt über den faulen Hund und fühlt sich als wäre er im siebten Himmel der Typographie zusammen mit Hermann Zapf dem berühmtesten Künstler der«. Dies ist ein Satz, in dem alle Buchstaben vorkommen.
context_page_description: Robert Smail's Printing Works is a fully functional Victorian era letterpress printing works in the small Scottish Borders town of Innerleithen, now preserved by The National Trust for Scotland as an Industrial Heritage museum showing visitors the operation of a local printer around 1900 while still carrying out orders for printing and stationery.
  The firm was established in 1866, carrying out print jobs for the local community as well as operating a stationer's shop, and between 1893 and 1916 published a weekly newspaper. It remained in the ownership of the Smail family, who made little effort to keep up with twentieth-century advances in technology, and, through an initiative from Innerleithen Community Council, led by Iain Henderson and Nettie Watson, was run by the third-generation owner Cowan Smail until he retired and the property was acquired by the National Trust for Scotland in 1986 and opened to the public in 1990. Visitors are given a one-hour tour showing the various stages of the process as well as a chance to try hand typesetting, and at certain times the opportunity to print their own work. The building is protected as a category C listed building.
context_section_description: A door leads out the back to the paper store, a large room now housing an archive of nearly every printed job for a century. At one end the undershot water wheel which originally powered the works has been reconstructed.
  Stairs lead up to the caseroom, a large rooflet room for typesetting with racks around the perimeter of drawer-like letter cases. The racks are up to a worktop height, with the pairs of cases in use by the compositors on top so that the case of minuscule (lower-case) letters is at a shallow angle, and the case of majuscule (capital or upper-case) letters stands above and behind it at a steep angle leaning against the wall. The letters are cast metal sorts, and visitors are shown by the compositor how to set this movable type by hand into a metal composing stick. He then binds the type forme set by each visitor in a galley, and (time permitting) prints these using a hand-operated printing press to make a galley proof of each for the visitor. The room also has many galleys which were made up and set aside for possible future use, including the last job set by Cowan Smail, "Closing Down Sale from Today".
caption: A composing stick on top of a lower letter case of movable type (image is not of the museum)
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