TheChandler & Vane Register

From the Workshop

The Escapement Reconsidered

By E. M. Chandler, Master Horologist

Seventeen winters have passed since the Fenwick Yard workshop first set a detent escapement into a domestic mantel case, and the objection raised then is the objection raised now: that delicacy has no business in a parlour. We have never accepted this. A mechanism that keeps honest time in a ship's cabin will keep honest time above a coal fire, provided the maker respects the metal.

Our correspondent in Sheffield reports a variance of four seconds across a fortnight in the Number Nine movement — a figure we publish plainly because we intend to better it before Michaelmas.

Upon the matter of oils, we continue to prefer refined neat's-foot over the mineral compounds now advertised so freely in the London papers. The mineral holds its body in July and fails you in January; the animal oil is the reverse, and the reverse is the lesser sin.

Subscribers wishing to inspect the bench may present this page at the Yard gate on any Thursday between ten and four o'clock.

The Leading Article

On the Ornament of Useful Things

Wherein the Editor argues that decoration is not the enemy of function, but its manners — and that a plain thing may be rude as easily as a carved one may be honest.

The Editor · Set in the House Didot · Column the First

There is a fashion abroad this season for the unadorned. Cabinetmakers strip their mouldings, printers strip their borders, and a gentleman of our acquaintance has lately removed every fillet from the frontage of a perfectly agreeable bank. We are told this is progress. We are told the ornament was a lie told by the joiner to conceal a poor joint.

We answer that a poor joint is concealed just as readily by a flat surface, and rather more successfully, since nobody thinks to look. The ornament, properly used, does not hide the construction — it announces it. The bead marks where two boards meet. The double rule marks where one argument ends and another begins. Strip these away and you have not achieved honesty; you have achieved silence, and silence in a printed page is merely the reader's confusion made economical.

Consider the humble rule. A single hairline says: pause. A double rule says: this matter is concluded. A rule with a fleuron at its centre says: what follows is of a different order altogether. Three marks, three meanings, and no word spent. The compositor who knows them commands a vocabulary the plain-setter has thrown into the melting pot.

Our own pages are set in five sizes of type and no more, and every one of those sizes is doing work. The kicker is smaller than the byline because it is read first and remembered least. The deck is italic because it speaks in the Editor's voice rather than the reporter's. These are not flourishes. They are the grammar of the page, and a page without grammar must be read twice.

To the correspondent from Leeds who writes that our borders cost him a shilling in candles: we reply that he has read us for eleven years and has yet to write to us about anything we printed inside them.

The question, then, is not whether to decorate but whether the decoration is load-bearing. Ours is. Remove a rule from this column and the eye falls through three paragraphs before it finds purchase. That is the whole of our argument, and we shall not make it again until next season.