Happy Mother's Day to all the Moms out there

To that I will say @PC7060, @pecmsg, and @pedmec have been behaving as far as I can tell, Andrew and as for @quack24, they have not been active since 2024 So those P's and Q's are fine.

Or did you mean "watch your p's and q's" ? which is what a printer would tell his apprentice who was not paying attention to the task at hand when placing all the letters back in the cases after a press job was completed. The lower case P looks like a "q" and the lower case Q looks like a "p", and can be confusing when type setting for a printing job.

I think I can infer that it was a literal upper and lower case that held the whatever-they're-calleds*.

Neat. I never thought about that before.

* edit: apparently they're called 'sorts'. TIL!

I took Printing in high school. We had the old press-type machine called a type or movable-type press. When I set the individual letters, called sorts, I would select the sorts from the case and place them in a frame that I would mount in the movable-type press, then roll the ink over the type face and press it onto the paper. Those sorts were usually made from lead, and there were lots of the letters E, A, S, W, R, and T in both uppercase and lowercase, while there were not nearly as many Xs or Zs.

The instructor would always tell us to “watch our p’s and q’s” after the print job was completed. He just couldn’t help himself.

We also had an offset printer. We used to type our text on a Linotype Company machine that would automatically justify each Slug. A Slug is one line of type, That machine looked like an overgrown typewriter. Then we would mount that Slug of text onto a layout table one slug at a time along with the photos. Once the layout was finished as "Camera Ready Copy" we could place it on the glass covered camera table, there was a vacuum pump that would press all the paragraphs, columns, and photos tightly against the glass.

From that point, we could flip the glass vertically and photograph the page with a huge camera where the other side of the focusing lens was inside the darkroom. We would place the film on the other side of the camera and shoot the image onto a 20" × 30" sheet of film to make the negative. From that negative, we could then make a printing plate that could be mounted on the offset press. That plate would pick up the ink and transfer the image onto the paper. That was a fun 6 months of high school.