When I was a kid I helped my dad sometimes during boring summer holidays. He was an engineer for a large sales company in envelope printing presses. In the early days they also had a small hall with some presses for taking small local orders, nothing big. In the early days their line of presses still had an old press with the lead letters. Big drawers full of lead letters with a label showing the typeface of the letters. I watched with complete amazement how fast these dudes grab the letters and place them in the tray (mirrored, obviously!). They have to use a lot of spacers too to justify alineas. They also had many different drawers, with different type faces, roman, arial, even written text.
When that machine finally got replaced, my dad brought some of these letter drawers home. We had those for a long time but eventually trashed them. I guess he hoped it would be worth something some day lol.
