Yes, another holiday. This time I find no evidence that it was invented by the printers, but we sure have embraced it.

As efficient as written language is at preserving information across great spans of time, it is amazing how poor it is at encapsulating the origins and first meanings of words. It is so poor that it requires college educated linguists many years of researching, arguing, publishing, and holding symposiums to suss out the etymology of language. And even then, we are often left with just wild guesses at why the hip teenagers of the day decided to use a new phoneme in some abstract way to differentiate themselves from the older, less- cool generation. Just think, the language we are using today, which we complain ceaselessly about being sacred and immutable, was at one time the disdained jargon of teenagers.

I lead with this because today is another holiday, not only for aficionados of mathematics, and fans of pastries, but it is also a printers’ holiday. Yes, we have holidays, and there are two of them, almost exactly* six months apart.

In the letterpress shop, when someone, often a printer’s devil, spills a case of type or drops a forme,** the result is a pile of type, accompanied by many unprofessional curse words. That pile has been, presumably for as long as there has been handset type, referred to as pied type, or pie, or pi.

I have heard at least three possible origins for the term, and they fall into the categories of: the most likely, the most common, and my most favorite.

The most likely explanation is that this mixed-up pile of type has become pied, as in something that is patchy, splotchy, or spotted in color. A word barely used outside of reference to the folk tale of the Pied Piper or Hamelin.

The most common explanation that I have heard from other printers, is that the resulting calamity of letters, now resembles the seemingly random order*** of the mathematical constant pi (3.141592653589793….etc.). This convenient definition is what ties it today’s holiday of March 14 (3/14).

But my favorite, and in my opinion the most obvious origin, is related to my first experience seeing pied type; it was literally in a pie tin. And that wasn’t the last time I saw a pie of type. Nearly every print shop that I have been in has had pie tins of type. Once-in-a-while there will be a coffee can of type, and another shop had dozens of cigar boxes of pied type. But every other shop: pie tins. Pies of spilled type waiting for a slow day, an entire day, when someone has time to distribute this abomination back into the beautiful order of a type case.

And yes, in an attempt to keep the main body somewhat cleaner, I have moved some of my asides and clarifications to a footnotes section. This newsletter now has footnotes.

* I love that oxymoron, “almost exactly”
** The locked-up layout of type used in the printing press
*** Another oxymoron, “random order”