run upon sorts
To use or require a greater number of some particular letters or symbols than the regular proportion, as, for example, when making an index.
run upon sorts: depleting letter stocks unevenly
In letterpress printing, to run upon sorts means to exhaust certain individual characters or symbols faster than others during a job, creating a supply imbalance in the compositor's type case. An index heavy with page numbers starting with 1, 2, or 3 will consume far more of those numerals than a typical text would; similarly, a technical manual needing many instances of a particular symbol or abbreviation will strip the sorts faster than the standard character distribution allows.
The term emerges directly from the physical reality of metal type. A printer's type case held finite quantities of each letter, numeral, and symbol, arranged in compartments called sorts. The distribution reflected average word frequency in English text: more e's and a's, fewer q's and z's. But when a job's content deviated sharply from this norm, the compositor would deplete certain sorts while others remained abundant, leaving unusual leftovers after the job finished.
Managing uneven depletion
Compositors anticipated this problem. A preliminary scan of copy revealed which characters would be needed in unusual quantity. The printer might borrow extra sorts of those characters from another case, request additional sets from the foundry before beginning work, or resort to casting substitutes if time allowed. Running out of a critical sort mid-job meant either halting work, hunting through finished galleys for recycled type, or settling for inferior spacing solutions.
The problem intensified for specialized printing: mathematical texts, foreign-language indexes, catalogs of scientific nomenclature. A botanist's reference needing hundreds of accented vowels or Greek letters would run upon sorts heavily. Legal printing citing statute numbers or patent classifications faced similar constraints. The compositor's skill lay partly in anticipating these imbalances before composition began.
The term belongs firmly to hot-metal printing and has become archaic alongside Linotype and foundry type itself. Digital typography eliminated the constraint entirely: a font file contains unlimited instances of each character. Yet the underlying problem remains conceptually relevant wherever fixed resources must serve variable demand, and older printing literature frequently references it when discussing job planning and type economics.