[Max Goodman]

How could I be offended with you, Jayne? Forgive me for missing your joke. It's funny now that I know you were joking.

>Considering that limericks are funny, you seem to be taking this very seriously

Limericks are funny, but graphic design is a pain. And what's wrong with being serious about funny stuff?

Thank you for your help, Martin.

[Brian Allgar]

I'm still puzzled, Max, since a limerick line can't have more than eleven syllables as an absolute maximum, the same as a line of IP, so it must be a VERY small book to have a line-overflow problem.

I entirely agree with your remark "And what's wrong with being serious about funny stuff?" The only thing I'm really serious about in this life is humour.

[Max Goodman]

The book will be 5.5 in. wide in a fun 13-pt. font that maximizes the space given to most of the limericks. In a couple of places a line goes a little long.

Thanks again to everyone who expressed an opinion. The decision's now been made and the opinions helped.

[Max Goodman]

Speaking of taking funny/silly things too seriously:

I'm surprised that people who write such imaginative verse imply such a strong conviction that line length possibilities in limericks are limited. Before I became a typesetter, I probably had that blind spot myself, so I offer the following as a public service. (I hope posting partial poems does not run afoul of the rules here.)

A dissatisfied Mrs. in Wichita,
Said of sex with her husband, "Let's ditch it." "Aw,

Right away we've got one line that has more than 150% as many characters as the other. Of course, that's not a problem. The problem comes in joining in a book limericks like that one and limericks without long lines. Both of the following are the longest lines of their respective limericks:

Will intone Monteverdi and peal.

Found her orgasm tricky to reach

And the ditch-it-aw line above is not one of the three lines in the book that is too long to fit.

Of course, I could have made the font small enough to handle the book's longest line, but that would have made the vast majority of the limericks smaller than they needed to be and the book less attractive.

It might make an interesting Speccie or Oldie comp: poems with metrically identical lines of vastly different character counts. (Maybe not.)

[Allen Tice]

Max, do you use the “California case” to hand set type, or linotype? If the former, what is your view of distributing used type? It’s a fascinating thing, all in all.

[Max Goodman]

Allen, I probably misused the term "typesetter." Apologies to you and other real typesetters; I didn't mean to claim a false credential. I'm putting the book together electronically.

[Allen Tice]

You are forgiven by this real typesetter. So, I am full of news about m dashes, quads, and one piece ligatures like s-t and f-l.

[Brian Allgar]

Allen, although I've forgotten all the terminology, I learnt "real" typesetting at school, back in 1955, and was so taken with it that I bought my own small hand-printing press, with which I made a substantial amount of pocket-money printing headed note-paper and Christmas cards for people who lived in my street. That is no doubt the reason why I can still (somewhat) read text upside-down.

[Allen Tice]

Yes, I like it too. Each different typeface requires its own large flat drawer, called a California job case in the US. Italics and boldface, script and small caps, each has a job case, properly set in a cabinet as a drawer. And different type sizes: another set of job cases. I didn’t make much money, but it’s fun to “curate” small messages, and see one’s work all sharp and inky.

[Julie Steiner]

My favorite class ever:
https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/librari...-library-press

For me, my wonderment at discovering that none of my classmates could read upside down and backwards, as I could, with no extra effort on my part, was like Harry Potter's wonderment that he had the rare talent of being able to understand and speak Parseltongue.

Good luck with the limericks, Max!