Hell-Box

The Century Dictionary of 1914 defined “hell-box” as “the box provided for the bruised or condemned types of a printer’s house (Printer’s slang).” The Oxford English Dictionary cites 1852 as the first published use of the word, and Google’s Ngram indicates that the term reached its peak usage in 1941. The famous American printer, writer, and humorist Samuel Clemens (as Mark Twain) mentioned the hell-box in speaking about his boyhood job as a printer’s devil in a speech before the Typothetae of the City of New York on January 18, 1886: “I picked up his type in his case and the broken ones among the “hell matter” [in the hell-box]; and if he wasn’t there to see, I dumped it all with the “pi” on the imposing stone.”

The collection has a number of orphaned types that were included in the original set of materials that came to the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) with the acquisition of the collection in 1966. Another set of orphaned types was donated to the university by Kelly’s children in late 2014. A few items from the hell-box were printed in Kelly’s 1964 folio (plates 46, 49, 57, 63, and 107) but were not described in the written catalog that accompanied the folio. None of this orphaned material was shown in American Wood Type 1828–1900.

The orphaned types included in the collection exhibit various states of wear, but all are an active part of the study collection. The Rob Roy Kelly Collection at RIT also houses a set of orphaned types and image cuts that Kelly organized into an empty type case for display purposes.