BLAINESPEAKING

There is a pica rule on my desk. It has a" mushroom" head so you could "hook" it over an engraving or a line of type to measure it in points or picas. The metal rule was a freebie from the Mono-Lino Typesetting Co., a powerhouse Canadian type setting business that supplied beautiful proof sheets of black type on glossy white paper arranged to match my carefully marked copy specifications. Using rubber cement you carefully cut and pasted together the type elements from the proof sheets to make a...... Whoa! That was in the mid-twentieth century. The Mono-Lino company is long gone. Google the name and you will find an empty brick hulk of a building in Toronto. (Actually they recently filmed the movie, "Hairspray" in front of the building.) The Pica lives on. Actually, PICA is still the word for standard measurement used in desktop publishing, graphic design and the printing business.