irony that possession previously considered almost entirely useless is now discovered to be useless

I probably told you some years ago when I bought this amateur printing set from Helping Hands in Airport West. It is absolutely the sort of thing I would naturally purchase as it is (1) impossibly arcane (2) impossibly archaic (3) smells bad (4) comes in an unrelated but quite delightful box (5) has the feel of something that, at some time, might have been in some way useful if only to a specially-contrived project formulated entirely to utilise it. So, this is the box:

But its contents is not a nice thick stack of heavy duty tubes. It is the elements of a printing set, or actually, a few printing sets combined, along with at least one date stamp. This is the biggest glom of printing letters, they are made of rubber:

There are also some metal ones (not pictured) (actually now I think of it probably lead?) and also some much smaller rubber ones, in fact at least some of these are I think cut from a date stamp:

Yes, they are as blurry as this photograph in real life.

Anyway, last week or probably the week before I got copies of my grandmother's memoir which my mother and I worked on way too long and which we finally forked out to print (so much cheaper than I thought it would be, by the way - if you ever want to print a short run of a book, christ, so cheap) and of course as with all of these things we forgot one important element i.e. we forgot to put our address on it. 

This doesn't matter massively in the scheme of things since the book's not for sale, but I have a feeling that it is technically illegal, so, I wanted to put an address on the copies we sent to institutions (eg the libraries and historical societies in the towns she grew up in the UK, and so on). At last! A job for my crazy little printing kit(s). 

I'd never used them before, so this had never really occurred to me previously, but I was very surprised to discover that in fact that although there were masses and masses of letters here, there was a substantial deficit in numbers (I needed to put a PO Box number and a postcode). I have a 7 (useless), I could use an O for a 0 (not exactly very professional, but bearable) but otherwise no numbers at all! (And why a 7?!). Also, no capital B and no lower-case fs (as far as I could tell anyway). 

So, now you understand why I titled this post the way I did. Hope you're well.