About the shop

Setwidth started in 2019 in a rented half-basement with one badly seized proof press and a cabinet bought sight unseen. Both have since been persuaded to work.

The shop runs on the assumption that limits are useful. There is one press, one ink slab, and a fixed quantity of every sort. When a job needs more capitals than the case holds, the job changes — not the case. Most of what appears in the notes came out of that friction.

Equipment

Vandercook No. 4

Cylinder proof press, 1953. Rebuilt rollers, original grippers, a persistent low spot at the tail.

Foundry type

Caslon 8–24 pt, Bembo 10–18 pt, a partial Grotesque in 12 and 18, and one drawer of ornaments whose origin nobody has established.

Furniture and spacing

Wood furniture in the usual lengths, brass and copper thins, and never quite enough 3-to-em spaces.

Paper

Mould-made cotton rag, dampened in a stack under a board. Anything coated is politely declined.

How the notes work

Each note is written after a job is finished and the type is back in the case, which is late enough to be honest about what went wrong. Nothing is edited afterwards except for outright errors of fact. The dates are the dates the sheets came off the press, not the dates of writing.

Set it, lock it up, pull a proof, and then argue with it. In that order, and not before.

The site is deliberately plain: static files, one stylesheet, no scripts worth the name. It is meant to load on a bad connection in a cold building, which is where most of it gets read.