@Faldone: That's normal for letters (though with uppercase letters like in the cartoon, there's more variation than with lowercase ones). Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage says, "Letters are normally pluralized with -'s […] although capital letters are sometimes pluralized with -s alone." The Chicago Manual of Style says "the plural of single lowercase letters is formed by adding an apostrophe before the s. […] Capital letters, however, do not normally require an apostrophe in the plural."
Odd. The bag labelled SORTS makes it look like sorts were the characters that had been broken down from a previous print job that were not yet sorted, But that doesn't make much sense given the rest of the dialog.
"Sorts" deriving from printing seems like a folk etymology. Doesn't sort indicate a nature, as in "Bob is the sort to act superior"? So, "out of sorts" really derives from this version of sort, meaning out of character.
Well, the cartoon is referring to past time, so possibly the person drawing it didn't actually have experience with that kind of typesetting. The Font of All Knowledge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typesetting ) seems to use "sorts" as a term for individual pieces of type. It points out that this practice was obsolete at the end of the 19th century.
@John Roth: While it is true that machine composition was taking over the industry by the end of the 19th c., hand composition ("hand-pegging" in a composing stick) continued as a standard practice in some applications until at least the 1970s and continues to this day in private art press work. So "sort" as a bit of printer jargon to refer to an individual type, while it may not be familiar to the average worker in the printing trades today, is still familiar to us old farts. (Whether "out of sorts" truly traces to an empty compartment in a type case or something else, I'll leave to the lexicographers.)
Also interesting is that conventions for balloon dialog apparently weren't yet settled. The most natural order of events would seem to be the boss saying "Thunderation – late going to press again," followed by "Out of sorts" etc., followed by "Did you look in the bag?" In a cartoon today these would be placed in vertically ordered sub-balloons.
Readers of the time may have been used to working out the correct order of things, much as we still do today for physical events happening in a panel that aren't really simultaneous.
@Ajay, I think Margaret is right. You have to read part of the first balloon, part of the second one, then the rest of the first balloon, then the rest of the 2nd. It makes more sense that way then reading the whole first balloon, then the whole 2nd one.
@Margaret, thank. The comic makes so much more sense now.
@John Rothe: The cartoon dates from 1927, and was in the Inland Printer, one of the premier printing trade journals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I'm sure the cartoonist was well experienced with the hand-setting of type. That was only obsolete at the time with respect to the setting of large amounts of text for newspapers and books but not for job printing. And anyone involved the printing trade (and even many people who weren't and took printing in high school) would have learned to hand set type.
@Faldone: the cartoon is presumably of small town newspaper (in the days the wuz) and the bag labeled sorts presumably is indeed of type carelessly shoved in a bag. The compositor is probably out of cap I's in the type cases whereupon the editor asks him if he's looked in the bag.
The word "thunderation" reminded me of when I took German many years ago. A text that we had been set to read included the German exclamation "Donnerwetter!" and the teacher explained that this meant thunderstorm (literally thunder weather), but that the word did double duty as a mild exclamation. She suggested the translations "My word!" or "Good Heavens!". I pointed out that there did exist an English exclamation "Thunderation!" but that it was distinctly old-fashioned sounding. My teacher (who was not a native English speaker) did not know that word and was delighted that there was such a precise translation, since apparently the German "Donnerwetter!" is also somewhat old-fashioned sounding.
OED dates "out of sorts" back to 1621:
"1621 S. Ward Life of Faith 46, I wonder..to see one..that knowes all must worke for the best, to be at any time out of tune, or out of sorts."
and the typographical sense of "sort" only back to 1668.