(historical) A person who sets type; an employee in a printshop who manually selected pieces of movable type and assembled them for printing.
2023 January 25, Howard Johnston, “Peter Kelly: August 2 1944-December 28 2022”, in RAIL, number 975, page 47:
My writing all took place over weekends, and because I only lived about ten miles away, Peter would hot-foot it to my home on a Monday morning to collect a large parcel of hand-typed sheets of copy, for despatch to the typesetters.
(historical) A machine that combines type in the correct order for printing.