Writing for Print
On July 31, 1969, a man, who would later call himself the Zodiac, mailed three letters addressed to the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner and the Vallejo Times-Herald. The envelopes the letters were mailed in each contained 6-cent Franklin Delano Roosevelt stamps in carious quantities. Each letter sent was predominately the same letter with slight variations in sentence structure and all contained multiple uses of the word “cipher”. The San Francisco Chronicle letter was the only letter to include the phrase “In this cipher is my idenity”. All three letters mailed included 1/3 of a cipher.
When I first read the Zodiac letters there were four things that initially bugged me concerning the communications dated July 31, 1969:
1. The quantity of stamps the Zodiac used for mailing each letter, specifically, the letter addressed to the Vallejo Times-Herald.
2. The exclusion of the word “Herald” from the company name “Vallejo Times-Herald”, found in the San Francisco Chronicle letter, and the large gap marking its spot.
3. The inclusion of the phrase “In this cipher is my idenity” found in the San Francisco Chronicle letter.
4. The inclusion of the phrase “near the golf course in Vallejo” found in the San Francisco Chronicle letter.
My study into this letter, and the items addressed above, have resulted in the following:
When I first began reading the Zodiac’s letter dated July 31, 1868, I typed all three letters side by side into one, Microsoft Word document. What I wanted to do at this point was compare the three letters to see what words or phrases were different between the papers. When I did this the thought crossed my mind that the three letters, typed side by side, looked like columns in a newspaper. With that thought, it seemed to make sense why the Zodiac, inserted a line after talking about the two crimes he committed in two of his letters. Newspapers insert lines between articles in columns. The Zodiac’s writing was really no different. That line in his letters separated two different points of interest for the Zodiac; his killings/attack locations and the cipher.
I started wondering what the Zodiac might have known about newspapers altogether. Could he have known how columns worked or are prepared? This caused me to wonder about how wide a newspaper column was. I was curious if it were even possible that the Zodiac might have written his letter as if it would appear in a newspaper column, basically, doing the work for the papers he wrote to. So, I looked up column width and found column inches. A column inch is a unit of space one column wide by one inch high. All three newspapers the Zodiac wrote to were broadsheets. Broadsheet newspapers usually have between 6 and 9 columns. The San Francisco Chronicle appears to have had 8 columns, the Vallejo Times-Herald had 6 columns and The San Francisco Examiner had between 6 and 8 columns.
A common column width measurement for a broadsheet paper is 11 picas wide or 1.83 inches. The one-inch-high measurement above is paragraph size. From what I have read it is generally accepted that there are 25 to 35 words in a column inch paragraph or an overall average of 30 words per paragraph. I do not know if this was standard in 1969.
I tried to locate a specific font each of the papers might have used in 1969 but could find nothing on the subject. I did ultimately compare the font of a San Francisco Chronicle newspaper article of the time to various fonts and settled on the font being something of a “Times” or “Times New Roman”.
I also pulled up the advertising specs for a broadsheet on the San Francisco Chronicle website and noted the following:
1. Paper size 11 x 21
2. Left/right margins: .625 inches
3. Top/bottom margins: .375 inches
4. Column gutter width: .167 inches
At this point I opened a blank Microsoft Word document and first set the font to the only font of the two I had; Times New Roman. Since, I did not know the exact font size of the papers, I kept the standard size 11 that was there when I opened the document. From there I set the document to the 4 items I listed above, made 3 columns, and made sure to give a column width of 1.83 inches. I then typed the July 31, 1969, Vallejo Times-Herald letter into the first column, the San Francisco Chronicle letter into the second column, and then the San Francisco Examiner into the third column.
The Vallejo Times-Herald letter ended up having 16 errors, the San Francisco Chronicle 15 errors, and the San Francisco Examiner had 19 errors. Now when I say that there were errors, I am meaning that the lines of text I typed, didn’t match up exactly as the Zodiac had written it on paper. Part of the reason for the errors, I feel, is related to not knowing the exact font type and size the papers used in publication. Fonts come in various widths and heights and those measurements affect how much of the text appears per line. Depending upon, the font type, you may have more or less words per line. For example, the following, is what a portion of the Zodiac’s text would look like in a 1.83 inch column designated by the font type and size listed below:
When we look at the Zodiac’s letter(s) dated July 31, 1969, we see the following:
1. Increased/decreased spacing between words
2. Increased/decreased spacing between letters in words
3. Increased/decreased letter size in words
4. Improper capitalization
5. Bolded text
6. Addition/subtraction of letters in the spelling of words
While some may read the Zodiac’s letter and simply see the Zodiac’s flow and style of penmanship, his lack of knowledge in spelling, and in the case of the bold writing, how much ink may have been left in his pen at the time of writing, the fact of the matter is that the above items are very closely related to the art of typography. Typography is the arrangement of type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing to its viewers.
In the early days of composition for printing, individual letters, or symbols, called sorts, were cast from lead and kept in a box according to their font style, size, weight and whether they were upper or lower case. This box would also contain wedges or blanks in various widths. A compositor or typesetter, composing a paragraph of text, would use a handheld device called a composite stick. They would take the individual cast letters and place them in the composite stick to form words of a line. Wedges or blanks are placed between the words and between lines to make the words appear readable.
The following image is of a smaller composition (composing) stick and the sorts within their boxes:
When the compositor or typesetter approaches the end of a line, they have decisions to make as to how many more words can be added to the given space allotted for printing. Maybe they have enough room to add one more word. Maybe they have to break up that word with a hyphen and place part of the word on the next line. Maybe they have to place the whole word on the next line. After that decision is made, whatever remaining space is left in a single line, the compositor or typesetter has decisions to make in terms of how best to redistribute the remaining empty space in that line to keep that line of text looking justified from margin to margin.
The compositor or typesetter will then place wedges between words, between letters of words, and in some cases, between pairs of letters. They may even have to increase/decrease the size of a font for the whole sentence, a word, or even just a single letter.
Capitalization of letters and the bolding of text work in similar fashion, in that they carry a much larger size than their counterpart and reduce the amount of empty space.
Adding in a letter or the taking out of a letter in a word does much the same thing in terms of space. This will all affect the number or words appearing per line.
In addition to this we also begin to see an explanation for why the Zodiac misspelled certain words; Christmas, patterned, cruise, front and Fri.
In the first paragraph of the Zodiac’s written letter, we see that “Christmas” ends a line and is misspelled as “Christmass”. When looking at the first two lines of text of the San Francisco Chronicle letter, if we placed one space in the word document I spoke of earlier where there is a larger visual appearance in spacing in the Zodiac’s written text (between this/is, murder/of, of/the, teenagers/last, and last/Christmass), the first two errors (the numeral 2 and at) clear up. If we then remove the added “s” to “Christmass” we see that the word “at” (seen on the next line) will appear on the same line as the word “Christmas”. By him, adding in the extra “s”, he is eliminating the extra space at the end of this line of text causing the word “at” to appear where he wants or needs it to be; the next line.
The same can be said for the words “paterned” and “cruse”. In both instances the words end a line, and both have a letter removed from its correct spelling.
When it comes to, the word “paterned”, the Zodiac has increased spacing between the numeral 1 and the word girl in his written text. Had he not given this increased spacing, the word “paterned”, could have been spelled correctly. It took three spaces between the numeral 1 and the word girl to cause the word “paterned” to appear on the next line if spelled correctly as “patterned”. The increased spacing left zero empty space to accommodate the correct spelling and have the words appear on the line he intended. The removal of the “t” in patterned places the word back to the original line he wrote and satisfies the spacing requirements as well as his intention.
The same can be said about the word “cruse”, however, there are additional steps he took. In the line of text where he uses the word “cruse”, and in the line before, you can visually see an increase spacing between words (Aug and 69), decrease in spacing between words (I will go on a), a reduction in letter size (ram-), an increase in word size (kill) and, bolding of text.
The abbreviation of Friday (Fri.) spelled as Fry is performed by the Zodiac in the same fashion as he used a capital letter or bolded text as described above. The letter “y” has a wider width than the letter “i” and this wider width takes up space.
The continuation of spelling “Christmas” as “Christmass” and spelling the word “front” as “frunt”, was simply to continue with the first observation illusion that he was an illiterate. In the case of the “o” in front and the “u” in frunt nothing changes but your opinion of him as a speller. The two letters are the same size.
Composition sticks I believe are the first thing that a typesetter learns, and if a typesetter didn’t learn this on the job as an inexperienced new hire, the typesetter learned it in high school. Those who learn typesetting in high school will be part of the high school paper and had a likely photo within the school yearbook.
Linotypes and Monotypes are machines that replaced hand composition. Linotypes were used in the newspaper business and Monotypes were used in the book making and printing fields that make up flyers and the like. Both work similar to hand composition but in mechanized form.
The following is an image of a Linotype machine built in 1965:
The biggest difference between hand composition and the above machines is in the sorts. Hand composition used individual letters to compose text. The machines had an operator sitting behind a keyboard who typed out the text. The machines would then produce lines of text that were solid metal, hence the term, linotype.
Hand composition, Linotype and Monotype machines all went out in the mid to late 70’s as computers then became the norm. If the Zodiac worked for the papers as a compositor or typesetter (hand, Linotype or Monotype), he would have continued in the area of Desktop Publishing.