What’s a Furniture Coin?

Gutenberg printing press and literal meanings

People keep asking me why I named my Substack Furniture Coins.

Okay, I lied—not one person has asked me that. But since it’s a fun and esoteric pun referencing the printing press, and I needed an About page with a proper Welcome email, here’s a short and sweet explanation (~600 words).

If you've been here since the beginning, consider this an apology and reprieve from my 2,000+ word assaults. If you’re new, rest assured the assaults will resume shortly.

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The story begins in a familiar way: I needed a Substack for Write of Passage but all the good names were taken.

Substack claims they’ll reassign a dormant name if you fill out a form, but their bot doesn’t do a damn thing. No confirmation email. No ticket number. Nothing. So to all those early birds who parked names like water.substack.com from 2018: congrats, the names are yours forever.

Womp womp for me. As a late adopter, I’m well-practiced at never getting the handle I want. I could probably use my actual name, but I've never been too keen on it. Plus I enjoy anonymity.

In this harrowing situation, I default to puns. The challenge? I didn’t have a niche or topic to riff off. I planned to write about whatever strikes my fancy. So while I usually come up with 5 or 6 puns, this time I was stuck trying to make a pun out of nothing.

Enter my partner at the time, who was creating a handmade card with an old-fashioned printing press. He was teaching me about the process and just like that, I landed on the perfect pun. What divine luck.

Before I explain, let me first share a delightful tidbit: did you know that font sizes (like 12-point font in Microsoft Word) are real measurements? Physical types were measured in points, with one point being 1/72 of an inch. So a 12-point type is 1/6 of an inch tall.

When I heard this, I felt like a Gen Alpha kid seeing a floppy disk for the first time.

Now onto the pun, derived from the printing process. Metal templates are first assembled in a frame called a chase. Then blocks of wood called furniture fill the empty spaces. These blocks are then secured with tightening metal objects called quoins. Finally ink is applied to the template and a lever is pulled to press it into paper.

Voila, Furniture Quoins was born! Except only spelling bee nerds can spell quoins, so I wrote it as “coins.” It’s a perfect name, not only for its meta-reference to publishing origins, but also for the fun imagery of fishing out loose change from under couch cushions. I could go even more literal by writing about money, since I did spend an absurd amount of time teaching myself personal finance only to lose a bunch of money on Crypto Twitter.

So while I may never get a sleek name like love.substack.com, I’m happy with Furniture Coins. It was meant to be, a feeling augmented by one of our first lessons in Write of Passage. They taught us to focus on Shiny Dimes: the core takeaway of an essay (pithiness may or may not be included).

I hope you, my dear reader, can dig around here and find nuggets of unexpected value, filling your pockets with shiny coins.

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Thanks so much for feedback:

Becky Isjwara

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Coco Liu

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Dolores Lucero

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Malarkodi