right-angles and abbreviated daylight (in praise of the stolidness of moveable type)

    It is the sort of good I hadn't remembered and hadn't had for a long time. Two stories up from the city street, south windows not yet getting any direct sun in the first hour of the afternoon. The room crowded with careful multitudes of letters and guarded by the thick-oiled beasts of  printing presses. Nothing to do for the next hours but relearn the steps and processes of laying out type, and of printing.

     I think I've started going into rooms differently, sometimes. I let myself stand some, first, before engaging the pieces around me. I looked at things real close. I tried things gently, for once, walking around the room and remembering the separate areas, the niched boxes of auxiliary pieces to the larger technique. I found some reference materials pinned to the wall, and even though they didn't have to do with the steps of the process I was on, I thought about how they would be useful later. I measured things.

    I picked up a composing stick, held the flat metal of it in my hand, and slid the rail to an inchlength just a hair wider than the piece of paper I was going to print. Flicked the rail down, locked it into place, and felt like I might be able to do this, after all. I put the first few strips of leading in, as a base, and felt the tool weigh down my hand a little more, and I thought that the heft was good and familiar. Set down the stick and looked at all the thin drawerfronts, trying to remember all the typefaces and the sizes I had available, and which were what I needed. Counted capital letters to make sure I'd have enough. Finding the one I wanted, I slid the drawer all the way out and settled it up on the desktop, pinning close the map so that I could navigate to the letters making up the idea of the heavy set half-fold invitations I was aiming for. Uppercase on the right, lowercase to the right. Punctuation sprinkled at spots various and throughout.

    I started my fingers at the boxes, expecting to fumble through the letters of the alphabet, to drop and to ding and to get weary and get tired at the complications. But I didn't. Like someone told me, like I didn't expect, the lower light and the calm of each letter after letter, up to the lines and paragraphs of type, spaced with smooth darkened strips of leading, it was good.

     Each string of letters has to take up the same length of stick as the ones above and beneath it. Regimented, centered, else there'll be gaps where pronouns or personal names suddenly bite themselves into snaggletoothed nothingness,  the meaning in undisciplined margins. I had to slip coppers and brass in, thin and thinner slips of metal tucked here and there in the remainder spaces hairlining the type when a row is finished.

    Even when all the letters and spaces were in a solid row, metal staccato city blocks of sans serifs, after that it was still not enough. The rectangular chase frame slides out of the close hug of the press. The words were laid out on cold white marble, and I lowered the frame onto the marble so it fenced them in, and all the spacer type on the outside turned into lead cattle gathering around the wobbly kneed text . Set up what's called "furniture" around the words. The furniture fills up a case with evenly numbered softworn dark blocks of wood, like a child executive's toys. I ran fingers down along the numbers that mean length, and then across, where the different widths come into play. They are meant to move into the space between the frame and the block of type, but as symmetrically as possible, just like when phrases in the composing stick have to be justified properly between the edges of the line. Two blocks taken at a time, fingers as well-meaning but cruel Noah, plucking a pair only to distance them, one on each side of the type.  I added furniture until both the short and the long sides of the rectangle chase had a bridge to the words in the middle. Then there were the keys to turn, gently, but to a firm resistance. Something to hold it all in for when the sheaves of paper snubnosed individually up, glances cast sideways, looking to get inked.

     The furniture, the keys, it's so anyone who comes along, they can pinch the chase with thumb and forefinger at each of its top corners and then raise it all from the marble, hold the words up so that no light comes through, and strands of language that could have been just breaths in cold rooms at any sort of visible best, now they turn into fine-lined but heavy upright walls, and they slide into place onto the form of the press and are held to it, and with the ink and the paper added, and the rollers swiping in teams, alternating across the surface of the ink table and the flat honest faces of the type, the platen holding the paper and kissing up to the type in the sitcom split-second between swipes, making impressions.
 
    If I were to try and say something bigger about this, I would want to say that perhaps I had not known a very particular sort of satisfaction and grace until I picked out and contained the most basic pieces of  the things that I thought had to be said: not just the letters that hit up against the paper, but the counted spaces between words, and the breaths of spacing between sentences, and the expanse of inches on each side of a centered group. Having to think them and then set them and then be careful like a superstition in all of it (because that is how, I think, things like "craft" come about.), and then from all that, knowing that I could put shoulder to the press and print out sheet after sheet in deep machinery sneezes.
     I had forgotten all about that satisfaction because I think I spoiled it by just taking the word "letterpress" as a big idea of a project that needed to be done, of the whole expansive swath of it, the plan and the paper and the print and the machine, the ink, the rollers and the scrapers and the dirty bouquet of pungent gray towels it all cleans up with. I lost the sweetness of the first hours of laying letters, before the flourescents cough on and the presses start their heartbeats for the evening. Picking between two 14 point ampersands held up to each other in a piece of sun, watching the way their pear curves move across the face, thinking that one looks too dry, tinny and coldsharp, putting it aside, resting the warmer one in small and pleasant place. It is so quiet, it is so good to lay down lines .
    I had lost the settling of the typesetting.