grease

In letterpress printing, grease meant any job consisting largely of blank paper, pure white space with minimal type or image. The compositor could set such work quickly, using little metal type, yet charge standard rates for the entire printed sheet. It was profitable work that required minimal composition skill and produced fast turnaround.

Grease jobs typically included title pages, half-title pages, blank verso sides, and simple broadsides with sparse text. A compositor might spend an hour setting a page with two lines of centered type and white space filling the rest. The work felt effortless compared to dense tabular matter or intricate ornamental borders, yet the payment was the same. This made grease highly desirable in the shop.

The term's origins and trade culture

The name likely derived from the ease with which the work slid through the compositor's hands, unresisting as grease. It sat opposite to rough jobs like mathematics, tables, or foreign language matter, which demanded careful spacing and correction. Printers across English-speaking shops used the term as shop slang by at least the nineteenth century, though it appears in earlier printing records.

Grease disappeared as meaningful vocabulary after phototypesetting and digital composition replaced hand-set metal type in the mid-twentieth century. Modern production workflows do not distinguish between blank space and text in the same economic way, since composition is now divorced from physical metal and labor rates. The term survives mainly in printing history and in the memoirs of older compositors.