Wayzgoose Pamphlet Number Two

The Dingbat: a Picaresque Etymology, with Examples

Spring 2023

The second Wayzgoose Pamphlet discusses the etymology of ‘dingbat’, which is both multifarious and somewhat baffling. The word has travelled in many guises, taking some time to make a home in the composing room of printing offices. This essay documents some of the more curious of them, although we have been unable to establish the reason behind many of the usages the word has accumulated. The text is based on a long endnote Crispin decided not to use in its entirety in Bordering on the Sublime – “Waste not, want not” being a recurring theme in the world of letterpress printing, especially at Barbarian Press.

Like most presses, we have acquired a large number of dingbats through the years, so several pages are devoted to a display of some of the more interesting and unusual examples from our cases, cunningly arranged. For well over a hundred years ‘stock cuts’ were used in advertising to designate dentists, ironmongers, livery stables, optometrists, butchers and so on, and these are still common in printers’ cases. However, the most interesting examples are more purely decorative: classical images of gods and drooping damsels with lyres, stylized floral arrangements, cityscapes, animals, holiday images, or elaborate borders with putti busy about this and that. We passed an enjoyable day making choices and laying out the pages. For many of them this pamphlet will obviously provide the only possibility of their making an appearance. A quick census taken during the process proved that to show all the dingbats we have in respectable condition would involve a tightly packed octavo of several score pages, so we have had to be selective.

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