apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I just saw one of these in an antique shop last weekend. I love old drawers and wine crates reused as new shelving. http://tiny.cc/ZrGrt It's my idea of character. :)

My wife uses one of these to store all her rubber stamps in her craft room. We actually want to find a couple more - she has a lot of stamps.

THATS what these are?! I have two and never knew what they were used to store! Thanks for the post! :)

When I was a kid, I used one of these as an apartment complex for my dollhouse dolls. Does anyone have any ideas about where to buy these online?

my father in law made a couple of these into end tables. he attached the drawer to 4 legs, then attached a framed piece of glass to it with hinges so you can open the top of the table and use the drawer to display things. i have all sorts of stuff in ours, like coins from countries we have visited, one of our wedding favors, antique minatures inheirited from my grandmother, etc. great conversation piece!

My great-grandpa stained and sealed a bunch of these for his granddaughters. Years later I ended up with one; but I don't really collect anything, so I use it to store office supplies, like jars with paperclips, staples and mini-staplers, batteries, etc. My mom uses her gigantic one for a massive thread collection.

I have one hanging vertically on the wall and don't put anything in it. I think its shape, along with the worn handle, makes it beautiful enough to stand on its own.

I used to make a fair bit of artwork and limited run designs using a lead type press and can't help wincing a little hearing people say, "Oh that's what these are." Not out of snobbery, but because they're full of interesting history and I wished people did know about them.

Some interesting points about movable type printing presses:

The cases seen in the first two images are arranged in the conventional standard, which is called the California job case. The larger compartments at the front of the drawer store commonly used letters like e and s, while smaller compartments around the sides and back house q, z, k, etc. Small compartments on the side (the bottom of the second photo) hold capital letters since they are used much more sparingly than lowercase. Learning to typeset from this case is a bit like learning to type: the letters have a standard position at any press and your fingers must make a physical memory of each letter's location.

The terms lowercase and uppercase originate from type cases that predate the California job case. Capital letters were stored in the upper drawer, or case, and miniscule letters were stored in the lower case.

The wood type on display in the first and second image would never actually be stored in these drawers at a working press. As you can see, only one to three letterforms would fit in each compartment. In reality, each compartment here would house 20 or more lead letters with separate cases dedicated to sizes anywhere between 8 and 40 points. Wood type was used for larger fonts -- 72 points, or 1 inch, and up -- because lead is expensive and heavy at this size. The drawers for wood type would have much larger compartments.

People probably envision Guttenburg utilizing these letters, but any press equipment that old is assuredly in a museum or library collection. Many are surprised to learn that electric movable type presses were the standard up until the middle of the previous century. It's very likely that the examples here were made in the 1940's or later. In the 1950's, offset lithography -- the same technique used in today's industrial presses -- gained dominance over movable type printing.

I use the typeset drawers to display my thimble collections....

I've had a crush on using these as shadowboxes since I was a wee lass. Now I have three of my own hung on a massive wall in my house and storing most of my knick-knack treasures, and resist the temptation to pick up more from the local antique shop.

Thanks, akay for the enlightening comment -- awesome!

so am i correct when i say: "what granny used to call a whatnot shelf is actually a typeset drawer?!" cool!

wow, really? my grandparents had one of these (i knew what it was) filled with knick knacks growing up, and i would never expect it to be considered "hip" -- though i guess when you fill it with chips of a broken set of plates it is? huh?

Call me crazy, but the ones I own actually hold type...

Very interestng, akay.

The coffee-table idea is fantastic. If only I were the slightest bit handy...

The ones I own hold type, as well. Because I'm an old newspaper person and a letterpress fanatic, I've hung them on my home office wall -- with glass fronts to hold in the type. The shapes of the wooden letters and numbers feel very organic and soothing to me. Thanks very much to akay for filling everybody in on the history...

i would love a few and the type that comes with them. the antique store here had a couple but there were beat to hell and wanted way too much for them. I have been trying to locate a few for awhile. Not a normal garage sale item though.