If it works, it's obsolete.
— Marshall McLuhan
Books, newspapers, broadsides and pamphlets were the 18th century's social media platforms; and printers, the century's Zuckerbergs.
To operate a press, printers would first assemble blocks of type inside a wooden frame, known as a coffin. They'd then place the coffin on a stone bed, add a page of paper on top, and crank the lever beside the bed to slide it under the press. Lastly, they'd screw the press down onto the paper, imprinting an image on the page.
When not pressing pages, 18th-century printers set type, the labor-intensive process preparatory to printing. To save some of that labor, they borrowed the Ancient Roman practice of substituting a graphic for the word "and" in written documents. ("And" is the third most common word in the English language.) Printers called their graphic—&—the ampersand, a corruption of "per se and," which was teachers' name for the graphic. (Eighteenth-century teachers insisted students pronounce the one-letter words "a" and "I" as "per se a" and "per se I" and demanded all students pronounce "&" as "per se and." Per se, as it still does, meant "by itself.")
Used type in the 18th century was tossed into a wooden box called a hell, often by an apprentice called a devil. (The printer's art, three centuries earlier, was considered black magic, because the pages were uncannily uniform. Many demonic terms stuck.)
Such thrift was common among 18th-century printers. So was piracy. The printer of James Granger's Biographical History of England included blank pages throughout, to encourage artists to "extra-illustrate" the 35-volume work. Artists would interleave original drawings and paintings alongside the parts of the text their patrons found intriguing, adding "extra illustrations" to otherwise plain books. Enterprising printers—smelling money to be made—soon began to swipe images from other books and add them to copies of Granger's Biographical History, a practice they named grangerizing.
