Text 1: In the dark behind the curtain, by Mara Ellison

An original contemporary blog.

Before my week as a volunteer stagehand, I imagined backstage work involved standing in the shadows and watching actors perform. I arrived for the first rehearsal dressed in black, expecting to be given a headset and perhaps one important button to press. Instead, the assistant stage manager handed me a running sheet covered in times, arrows and notes.

My first job was to arrange the props in exactly the right places. A silver cup had to sit on the left of a tray, a letter had to be folded twice and a walking stick had to point towards the door. Between scenes, I helped push a heavy section of wall across the stage while another volunteer guided its wheels over strips of tape on the floor. Everything had to happen quickly and without a sound.

On the second evening, I put the silver cup on the wrong side of the tray. An actor reached for it, found empty space and had to continue the scene while searching for it. I waited for someone to send me home. The stage manager simply said, 'Check it, reset it and be ready for the next change.' Then she trusted me to give the signal for the wall to move.

By the final performance, I no longer needed to stare at the running sheet. I could tell from a line spoken on stage when the next change was approaching, and I had the wall moving just as the lights went down. The audience never saw us, but I heard their laughter and applause from the darkness. I had thought stagehands merely stayed out of sight. Now I understood that the performance depended on us being precise, calm and ready for one another.

Text 2: My first fortnight at the printing shop, by Edwin Vale

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this extract from a letter written in 1874, an apprentice describes beginning work in a printing shop.

Dear Mother,

I had supposed printing would be clean and scholarly work, since books are the finest objects I know. The shop has cured me of that notion. The presses strike the floor with such force that the windows tremble, the air smells of oil and hot metal, and by noon on my first day my fingers were black. I was set before trays containing hundreds of tiny metal letters, each one facing backwards, and could scarcely find a single one before the foreman called for another line.

On Tuesday I dropped a row of type that I had spent an hour arranging. Every letter scattered across the floor. I believed Mr Harcourt would say I was unfit for the trade, but he knelt beside me and helped sort the pieces. 'A printer learns by correcting,' he said, and gave me a small handbill for a concert to set by myself.

My first proof contained six errors. I had reversed two letters, left no space between two words and chosen the wrong size of type for the heading. Mr Harcourt marked each fault, but allowed me to correct them and print the proof again. Yesterday I passed the concert hall and saw one of the finished handbills fixed beside its door. Though no reader could know which lines were mine, I stopped to examine them.

The shop is still noisy and my feet still ache when I leave it. Yet I no longer think the work is merely the placing of one letter after another. A misplaced piece can spoil a whole line, while a well-set page carries its message to hundreds of strangers. I mean to become worthy of the trade.