Grease: A Typesetter's Gold

In everyday speech, grease is a slippery, oily substance. You find it on machinery, on food, on your hands after an engine repair. It lubricates moving parts and resists water. Its industrial meaning in printing has nothing to do with any of that.

In a printing shop, grease was blank space on a page. Compositors set type by hand, letter by letter, filling a metal frame called a chase. When a job contained large areas of white space, wide margins, or simple layouts with few words, the typesetter had less work to do. Less work meant the job could be done quickly, and the compositor could move on to the next one. That blank space was grease, and it was profitable.

A page of poetry with wide margins and large gaps between stanzas was gravy. A broadside advertisement with three lines of type in the middle of a blank sheet was pure grease. The compositor earned a set rate per page regardless of how much type actually appeared on it. Grease meant the same money for easier labor.

The term drew its meaning from an older sense of fat as profit or gain, a metaphor that also produced the word fat itself when applied to lucrative business. A fat contract was a profitable one. Grease followed the same logic, though it stuck to printing. By the early 20th century, the term was standard in the compositor's vocabulary, a bit of shop slang that revealed how the trade measured value: not by complexity of work, but by time and effort saved.