Gauge

A piece of reglet on which the length of a page is marked, for the compositor to make wp by. Clickers, in addition, use gauges showing the length of one hundred lines of any type in use by his companionship, and its division in tens. It is a ready mode of ascertaining the amount of each taking of copy as he makes it up, and saves a deal of time in counting the lines. When the quoin-drawer overseer has made up the furniture for the first sheet of a work, he takes a card and cuts it to the size of the heads, backs, and gutters, marking it accordingly, so that the margins of all succeeding sheets may be made the same. This is termed a Furniture Gauge. Card furniture guages serve very well for small volumes, but for hmg works and periodicals it is better to use pieces of four-to-pica lead cut to the sizes, and kept together by boring holes through them with a bodkin, so that a cord may be passed thvough them; card wears away quickly by repeated use, and becomes untrue.—See Type Scale.