jeffing

Jeffing is a casual dice game played in print shops, historically using em quads (metal spacing blocks, typically 1/4 inch thick) as stakes. Compositors and press workers would roll dice, betting their quads against each other during breaks. The game required nothing more than dice and a handful of metal type furniture, making it a natural fit for idle moments in a shop floor.

The stakes were always small. A worker might risk one or two em quads, with the pot divided among winners. Since em quads were consumable materials in letterpress work, losing a few was an accepted cost of downtime gambling. The game appears in shop lore and union memorials from the early-to-mid twentieth century, when hand composition was still standard.

Why the name stuck

The origin of the term "jeffing" itself remains unclear in printed records, though it may derive from a shop nickname or regional dialect. Unlike terms such as "craps" or "hazard," which are anchored to specific dice combinations, jeffing is purely a game of the print trade, rarely documented outside shop gossip and oral history.

Jeffing disappeared as letterpress faded and offset lithography became dominant. Modern print shops have no em quads to spare and little downtime in the same sense. The term survives mainly in memoirs of older printers and vintage shop photographs where quads sit in shallow drawers. It marks a vanished culture of metal type work, where the material itself doubled as recreation.