galley

The typographic galley takes its name from Old French galie or galée, itself from Medieval Latin galea, meaning a galley — the long, low, oar-powered ship of the ancient and medieval Mediterranean. The connection between vessel and printer's tray is one of those etymological transfers that requires seeing the object to understand: the galley tray used in metal-type composition was a long, shallow, three-sided metal or wooden tray into which set type was transferred from the composing stick and assembled into full columns before being made up into pages. Its elongated, shallow form, with three low walls and an open end, bore an apparent resemblance to the long narrow hull of a galley ship — or at least suggested it strongly enough to an early French printer that the name transferred. This kind of shape metaphor was common in early printing vocabulary, where many implements lacked established names and craftsmen borrowed from whatever familiar objects they resembled.

In the workflow of metal-type composition, the galley occupied a pivotal intermediate position. The compositor set individual characters into the composing stick (a small hand-held tool with an adjustable end for different line lengths), transferred each composed line into the galley, and assembled lines in the galley until a complete column or page was ready. From the galley, the type was inked and a proof impression taken on a long strip of paper — the galley proof, still called simply a 'galley' in editorial and publishing contexts today. The galley proof was the first printed representation of the typeset text, sent to authors and editors for correction before the type was made up into pages, imposed in the press form, and finally printed. It was the moment at which errors in the typesetting first became visible and correctable.

The galley proof was a crucial quality-control point in traditional publishing workflow because corrections made at the galley stage were far less expensive than corrections made at the page-proof stage. Resetting a line of type in a galley required only that the compositor locate the error, pull out the incorrect sorts, replace them with correct ones, and re-justify the line. Corrections made after the type had been made up into page form (the page proof) required adjustments to every subsequent line in the paragraph, since changing the line count in one paragraph shifted the position of everything that followed. Printers' charging practices reflected this: author's corrections made at the galley stage were relatively cheap; page-proof corrections were expensive; corrections made after printing was underway were almost prohibitively costly. The galley was where errors were supposed to be caught.

In the contemporary publishing workflow, where type is composed digitally and printed offset or digitally without any metal whatsoever, the word galley has survived as a term for the preliminary proof of a typeset text. Publishers still issue 'galley proofs' or simply 'galleys' of forthcoming books — now typically PDFs or bound advance reading copies rather than strips of paper — to reviewers, booksellers, and early readers before final publication. The word has traveled from the long narrow ship of the Mediterranean to the long narrow tray of the print shop to the long narrow strip of proof paper to the digital file distributed for advance review, each stage preserving the name while losing another layer of the original material reference. The galley ship has become a PDF, retaining only its word.