California Job Case

A California job case is a kind of type case: a compartmentalized wooden box used to store movable type used in letterpress printing. It was the most popular and accepted of the job case designs in America. The California job case took its name from the Pacific Coast location of the foundries that made the case popular.

The defining characteristic of the California job case is the layout, documented by J. L. Ringwalt in the American Encyclopaedia of Printing in 1871, as used by San Francisco printers. This modification of a previously popular case, the Italic, it was claimed reduced the compositor's hand travel as he set the pieces of type into his composing stick by more than half a mile per day. In the previous convention, upper- and lower-case type were kept in separate cases, or trays. This is why capital letters are called upper-case and the minuscules are lower-case. The combined case became popular during the western expansion of the United States in the 19th century.

A California job case consists of eighty-nine compartments, most of which are assigned to specific letters, spacers, ligatures and quads. In variations on the layout, additional symbols are sorted in the unassigned compartments at the top of the case.

Minuscule (lower-case) letters, punctuation and spaces of various widths are on the left; capital (upper-case) letters are on the right, and numerals and some other symbols are at the top. The position and size of the compartments for lower-case letters vary according to the frequency of occurrence of the letters. The compartments for upper-case letters are uniform in size and ordered from A to Z except for J and U, which were not used by early English printers, so they are assigned compartments following Z.

This organization keeps larger quantities of the more frequently used letters in convenient reach of the typesetter, with ligatures and spaces of different widths nearby to improve efficiency.

A type case with every character and space in its proper place is clean, while a dirty case has characters mixed up, generally by careless distribution as they were returned to the case. A spilled case is pied.

Each size and style of typeface is kept in its own tray (case), and trays are kept in a cabinet with slots making each tray a removable drawer. The cabinet may offer the typesetter a work surface at a convenient height, such as in a composer's work stand.

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