The Backwards 'Q' That Corrected My Course

It was a Tuesday, I think, during my brief, ill-fated stint as an apprentice typesetter. The shop was a cluttered sanctuary of lead and ink, smelling of metal dust and old paper. My job, a largely thankless one, was to redistribute used type back into the California Job Case after a print run. For hours, I’d stand at the tall, slanted cabinet, my fingers blackened, picking tiny metal letters from a ‘pie’—the jumbled mess of a dissolved form—and dropping each one into its correct compartment. A for A, B for B, et cetera. It was meditative, until it was maddening.

The foreman, a man named Arthur who had ink perpetually ground into the lines of his hands, was a creature of few words and impeccable standards. He moved through the shop with a quiet purpose that I, in my early twenties and full of literary ambition, mistook for a lack of imagination. I was there to ‘get close to the text,’ to understand the physicality of words. He was there to make sure the Tuesday flyers for the local butcher were printed on time.

My moment of reckoning came over the letter ‘q’. The California Job Case has a specific, non-alphabetical layout designed for efficiency. The ‘q’ sits in the lower left, a lonely outpost. For days, I had been diligently returning the 'q's to their home. But on this Tuesday, Arthur paused behind me, his shadow falling over the case. He didn’t speak for a full minute, just watched. I grew nervous, my movements becoming clumsy. Finally, he reached over my shoulder, his calloused finger hovering above my most recently placed ‘q’.

“It’s backwards,” he said, his voice flat.

I stared. To me, it looked like a ‘q’. The bowl was on the right, the tail swooping left. It was the shape I’d known since childhood. Arthur gently plucked the piece of type from its compartment, turned it 180 degrees in his palm, and slotted it back in. Suddenly, it was different. The tail now had a more confident slant, the curve of the bowl was more elegant. It was subtle, but undeniable. The type I had been placing for a week was inverted. I had been looking at, and handling, the mirror image of the letter.

I started to stammer an apology, but he cut me off. “You’re reading it,” he said, not unkindly. “You have to feel it.” He tapped the type. “The nick.” He showed me the small, almost imperceptible groove filed into the side of the metal block. The nicks all face one way, so a typesetter can set a line of text by touch, reading the nicks upside down and backwards in the composing stick, ensuring the finished page will print correctly. I had been relying on my eyes, on my abstract knowledge of the alphabet, while the true craft was happening at my fingertips, just outside my perception.

That backwards ‘q’ was a small, silent teacher. It dismantled my romantic, literary notion of the craft and replaced it with something more profound: humility. Bookmaking, typography, the whole tactile dance of putting words onto a page, isn’t about seeing the words as a reader does. It’s about understanding the system from the inside out, about the hidden logic that makes the beauty possible. I never became a typesetter. But I became a different kind of reader and writer. Now, when I hold a small-press book, I sometimes run a finger along the edge of the text block, feeling the impression of the type, remembering that the real magic isn't just in the story, but in the countless, correct, and perfectly nicked letters that hold it up.

Aside: a reference I keep going back to.

Aside: the entry I checked for this.