In conversation with a letterpress printer

The print shop is one room at the back of a courtyard, down a passage you would miss if you weren’t looking for it. It smells of oil and paper. There are two presses — a small platen machine that rocks like a cradle when it runs, and a heavier cylinder press under a dust sheet — and along one wall, floor to ceiling, the shallow wooden drawers that hold the type.

Ada Brennan prints wedding invitations, poetry pamphlets, menus for a handful of restaurants and, once a year, a calendar she sells to people who have been buying it for longer than she likes to admit. She works mostly alone. We talked on a wet afternoon while she put a finished job back into its cases, letter by letter, without looking.

Setting the line

You’re putting those letters away without looking at the drawer. How long does that take to learn?

Longer than anyone wants it to. The case has a layout — every letter has its compartment, and they aren’t alphabetical. They’re arranged by how often you use them, so the e is big and right in the middle, and the j and the q are off at the edges. When you start, you hunt for every letter. After a year or so your hand knows where things live. Honestly, I couldn’t draw you the case from memory. My hand could.

People describe letterpress as slow. Is that fair?

It’s accurate, but I’d argue with the tone. Setting a page of text by hand can take a morning. You pick each letter and each space, and you justify the line by tucking thin slivers of metal between words until it’s tight. Then you lock it up, ink it, proof it, find your mistakes, fix them, proof it again. A computer does all of that in the time it takes to sneeze.

But the slowness isn’t a tax you pay for the result. It’s where the decisions happen. When every word costs a minute of handling, you think about whether you need it. I’ve watched poets cut lines from their own pamphlets standing at my bench, because they could see how long that line was going to take me. That’s an editorial process nobody designed.

That sounds a little romantic. Couldn’t a good editor do the same thing on a screen?

Of course. Some do. I’m not claiming the press makes anyone wise. I’m saying it changes what’s cheap and what’s expensive, and that changes behavior. On a screen, words are free, so people use a lot of them. Here, they cost something. You can get the same discipline other ways. Most people don’t bother.

Ink and pressure

What part of the work do people never see?

Ink, mostly. Everyone imagines the moment the sheet comes off the press. Nobody imagines the twenty minutes before it, getting the ink right. It goes onto a disc at the top of the press and the rollers spread it, and you’re listening as much as looking. When it’s right, the rollers make a soft hiss, a sort of velvet sound. Too much and it turns tacky and loud, and the letters fill in — the insides of the e and the a clog up. Too little and the print looks starved, gray instead of black.

Then there’s pressure. The fashion now is for a deep impression, the letters pushed right down into soft cotton paper so you can feel them with your thumb. I do it when people ask. But the old printers would have called it clumsy. The proper job was to kiss the paper — just enough contact to pass the ink across, no bruising. I like both. I just think people should know there was a choice.

Do you mix your own colors?

Always. I keep a book of every mix I’ve ever made: so many parts of this, so many of that, the paper it went on, the date. It’s the most valuable thing in the room. If the shop caught fire I’d grab that before the cash box. Not that there’s much in the cash box.

On mistakes

Tell me about mistakes. What goes wrong?

Everything, regularly. A letter set upside down — the n and the u are notorious. A letter from the wrong font that looks identical until you print it. A space that’s a hair too thin, so the line works loose halfway through a run and one word starts to wander. Once I printed two hundred menus where “roast” had lost its a. The restaurant used them anyway. The owner said people would assume it was deliberate, which tells you something about how people read menus.

What I’ve learned is that mistakes in metal are honest in a way mistakes on a screen aren’t. On a screen you fix it and there’s no trace. Here, the mistake exists. It’s an object sitting in the wrong place in the line, and you have to pick it out and put it right with your fingers. You remember that. I make the same mistake twice far less often than I did when I worked in an office.

You worked in an office?

For nine years. Catalog layouts, mostly. I was good at it and didn’t care about any of it. I found this place by accident. The old printer who had it was selling off equipment, and I came to buy a single drawer of type as a sort of souvenir. He talked at me for three hours. I came back the next Saturday, and the one after that.

Learning the trade

So it became an apprenticeship?

An informal one. He never called it that. He’d give me something to set and go off to make tea, and when he came back he’d run his thumb along the line and tell me where it was loose. He almost never explained why. You were meant to work it out. I found it maddening at the time. I understand it now — the explanation doesn’t stick, the thumb does.

There’s a young woman who comes in two days a week now. I explain a lot more than he did. I’m not sure it’s better.

Last question. Why does physical type still matter, when almost everything we read is on a screen?

I don’t think it matters for everything. Nobody needs their bus timetable letterpressed. But I think it matters that it still exists somewhere, as a reminder that letters were objects once. Every typeface you scroll past on your phone descends from something cast in metal and kept in a drawer like these. The spacing, the proportions, the reason an italic leans — all of it was worked out by hands, against the limits of a material.

When people come in here, especially young people, they pick up a single letter and turn it over and they’re surprised it’s backward. That surprise is the whole thing, really. You realize reading was always physical — that someone had to set every word you’ve ever read, even if now it’s a machine doing it. I like to keep that visible. One room is enough for that.