The touch of words

But the warmth of a handprinted page is delightful, ranging from dark greys to a dense black. It’s a small challenge for the spoilt eyes of a modern reader, to whom variety in print quality means the ink heads are a bit clogged, something to be fixed.

It is the finite (and rapidly dwindling) number of letters that made me think about the preciousness of words set or written by hand. Poets are, by their nature, careful with words. It is a marvellous experience to get so intimate with a piece of writing. You may think your eyes and your mind caress a word as you read it, but imagine holding that word, piece by piece, and thinking about all its layers and nuances as you ease it into place (albeit upside down and back to front!).

Poets are also fond of alliteration, and patterns within their text. This time bend your brain to the frustration of knowing that you’re about to run out of “r”s and “k”s and meeting this line:

Dark its death-shining where the rocks rise black,

Gah! That’s when I take my tweezers and pull a few letters out of another set poem, hoping to hell that I don’t damage the top of the type with the tweezers as I ease it out.

And then I start setting again, and invariably my mind wanders. These are some of the things I’ve found myself thinking:

Many people think that newspaper compositors in small country towns over the last couple of centuries would have been rough working men. In fact, they were probably the most educated men in the region. They had to be able to spell, set, edit and proof, and print. They were the hub of the community. I’ve been enjoying dipping into Elizabeth Morrison’s Engines of Influence over the past couple of years and finding out things like this.

This issue of type running out as you’re setting it probably forced a number of changes to text that writers hadn’t wanted. I’d say there are numerous cases of sly compositors substituting words for others that had more readily available letters in them, especially for newspapers and cheap novels. These days we edit for style, and for economic factors (i.e. reducing the number of pages or a column length) but before automated typesetting I’m sure a lot of changes were made at the grass-roots level (the kinds of changes sub-editors can do these days out of ignorance! ;))

Someone commented to me the other day that the colonial notion of relying on a “mother country” like we used to with the UK has sort of come full circle with letterpress and other outdated technologies.

When Australia was first established, we had to drag printing presses across the world, along with type and everything else, and getting replacement bits was time consuming and expensive. (Did you know that the First Fleet contained a printing press, but no one who knew how to use it, so it sat around Port Jackson for about 20 years?)

Then we caught up with technology, and were pretty self-contained. Then we fell behind, because all the fancy new offset stuff was progressing in the US and Europe. So Australians ditched all the old things and fully embraced the new; we are now forerunners in cutting-edge print technology. This is bad news for anyone wanting to resurrect the old stuff (like me, and anyone into photo-etching), because as a nation we’ve chucked it all, or melted it down into scrap, or turned it into wall plaques. Gah!

Imagine being the compositor for Gertrude Stein’s books! Or James Joyce! All set by hand! eek! If anyone made a mistake, who would notice! Did the authors notice? Or do you think they would have been delighted with the accidental shift in their phrasing?