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Surface design for Tower Lane based around phrases that would have been used by Everards letterpress printers, but now used for a second meaning in common use. All founts are ones that would have been common in a letterpress print shop such as Everards. This design is a homage to the tens of thousands people in Bristol who worked in the printing trade, Hot off the press and in particular letterpress printers. The Old City was the centre of this skilled industry. Everards in Newspapers used to be made by the ‘hot metal printing’ process from pouring molten lead into the Broad Street was right at the heart of the trade. printing block moulds. The hot newspapers were then distributed, with the first readers grasping the juicy stories before anyone else, leading to its more common meaning of breaking news stories. Every few paces you will see a phrase that came from letterpress, but which has come into common Typeset in Gill Sans Bold (see Stereotype). everyday use, through it’s original meaning being adapted to an everyday event. The fonts are chosen from the fonts that would have been used by Everards who printed timetables for the tram company Mind your p’s and q’s and technical manuals for BAC (The Bristol Aeroplane Company) as well as many items in common use Now denoting to minding your manners, the origins though are from the fact that in releif printing that would be printed by a jobbing printer such as Everards. letters are back to front, so a p looks like a q and vice versa. Printers had to warn their apprentices when distinguishing between the backward facing lowercase p’s and q’s which often led to confusion Stereotype and errors. Typeset in Consort another lead display font designed by Stephenson Blake in 1902. It A stereotype was the copy of a piece of handset type, so that something could easily be reprinted at a belongs to the block serif family. later date. It is used nowadays as a way of describing someone who is very similar to a particular group of people. In our brass letters on Tower Lane, the word is set in Gill Sans rugular capitals. The letters Upper and lower case are from a set of wood type and then digitised. Gill Sans was first used in Bristol in the late 1920s when Now used to describe capital and small letters, the term comes from a time when lead type was put Eric Gill hand painted the lettering of a book shop and published friend just off Park Street. into two cases. These would be positioned for the type compositor on a frame so that the capital case would sit immediately about the lower case. Typeset in Monotype Garamond. Claude Garamont’s A dab hand famous humanist typefaces from the mid-16th century. Redesigned by the Monotype foundry for lead Printers used a ‘dab’ to apply ink onto the letter blocks until they were ready to be applied. Whoever type and very popular in the 1900s in both the UK and America. had the job to make sure there was even coverage of the letters with the mushroom shaped instrument was thus graced the title of ‘dab hand’, hence our common use of someone skilled at a certain ability. Out of sorts The typeface used on the road surface is called Playbill, which was designed in France in the 1800s as For those moving in the printing world, a sort is another name for a single letter of type withing the a wood display face, named as it was designed for posters advertising plays of the time. type case. When you run out of lead type for that letter, you’re literally, out of sorts. This of course is very frustrating for compositers who would have been setting type by hand for several hours and now Make a good impression had to think about starting again with a new more full case of type. Nowadays, when we feel under the Good letterpress printers have a different idea of what a ‘good impression’ might be. For them it is weather or a bit grumpy, we’re ‘out of sorts’. Typeset in Gill Sans (see Stereotype). kissing the paper with lead or wood type evenly and lightly so that ink is evenly and perfectly applied. You can see how ‘Make a good impression’ has come into common parlance as a definition of being Come a Cropper the best you can be. The fount used is called Grot Condensed which came out of use in the industrial Come a Cropper is wildly held in the public’s imagination as derived from the very popular treadle revolution. This display typeface was made by the English type foundry Stephenson Blake. It would platen press, the Cropper, which was very popular in Victorian times. Any printer who was unfortunate have been widely seen in Bristol, and came in a variety of weights and various forms of more extreme enough to catch his fingers painfully in the moving platen would come a cropper. Hence adopting the condensed versions. The word grot is short for grotesque, describing the extreme nature of the design phrase is associated with an accident or unfortunate occurance. Typeset in Grot Condensed (see Make to fit into ever narrower space. a good impression). STEREO TYPE A DAB HAND Upper and lower case .

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