10 What the archives say about rates🔗ℹ

The program models no clock at all: a page is set, and no time passes. These are the figures it would need if it did, and they are worth recording because they are measured rather than assumed.

Composition. The obvious norm would be 1,000 ens an hour over a twelve-hour day and a six-day week — call it 12,000 ens a day. Actual daily averages at Cambridge run at about half that: Bertram 5,700, Knell 5,603. Pokins is the exception at some 10,600 ens a day over five weeks in 1702, and he stands out sharply from everyone else. McKenzie’s reading is that “each compositor’s output was conditioned more by what he was content to earn than by any sanctions that Crownfield might have imposed” (i. 119).

Presswork. A token is 250 sheets and was reckoned an hour’s work, which agrees with Moxon’s “if two men Work at the Press ten Quires is an Hour” (240 sheets). So roughly 250 impressions an hour at a press worked by two men — which is where run-press’s three or four impressions a minute comes from, and the one rate in this program that was right before it was checked.

Concurrency. A compositor did not work through a book to the exclusion of others: “normally he would be setting type for two or three concurrently”. Books were correspondingly slow — Bentley’s Horace was over eight years in the Press, Wasse’s Sallust exactly five.