Hellbox: A Printer's Waste Bin With Dark Poetry

In everyday speech, hell belongs to religion and superstition. It is the underworld, the place of punishment, the opposite of heaven. But in the printing shop of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hell was something you could kick across the floor. A hellbox was a receptacle, usually wooden or metal, into which a printer would throw broken or worn-out sorts: individual pieces of cast metal type that had become bent, cracked, splintered, or otherwise useless for setting a page.

The technical purpose was straightforward recycling. Lead type wears down through repeated impression against paper and ink roller. Sorts get dropped and damaged. Broken characters cannot be set with precision; they will not lock tight in the chase, or will print unevenly, or worse, will break the press itself. Rather than cull these pieces back into the font, the printer simply heaved them into the hellbox. Later, when the box was full, the type metal would be melted down and recast into fresh sorts, completing the cycle.

The name is a pun on damnation. In Christian tradition, hell is where the damned are cast. In the print shop, damaged sorts are cast into the hellbox. The metaphor appealed to printers because their daily work was saturated with religious language: sorts themselves came from the Latin sortire, meaning to distribute or allot by fate. A font carried the sense of a fountainhead or origin. The act of casting type connected the physical metal with the theological concept of casting out the wicked. The hellbox made that language literal, a joke darkened by real metal and real waste.

Other trades have used the term, though rarely with the same precision. In general book and paper work, any bin for spoiled or rejected material might be called a hellbox, but the term never sank deep roots outside the printing shop. Letterpress printing is now nearly extinct, and the hellbox along with it. What remains is a scrap bin with a name that carried the metaphor of damnation inside a craft that turned language, sacred and profane, into metal every day.