In his book A World Lit Only By Fire, William Manchesteer says (p204)that William Tyndale had found a printer for his Bible but "...a local dean ... persuaded authorities in Cologne to pi the type."

I've been around printing for more years than I want to recall but I've never heard that expression, nor can I find it anywhere. Has anyone heard of it? I assume it means to destroy the printed material.

I think it's "to pie the type." When you set a bunch of individual letters painstakingly by hand into a frame, and then you drop the frame and the type is (alas) all mixed up again, you have "pied the type" (verb), and what you are sadly looking at (because of all the wasted work you now have to do again) is "pied type" (adjective).

Or at least that's how it was in Print Shop, back in the eighth grade.

Now that I have the correct spelling, it is easy to find (though I still don't recall hearing the term). Of course, most of my experience was not with hot type. Thanks, h.

Interesting. Here are two pictures of pied type: Link and Link