The Last Press on the Coast

You smell the shop before you see it. Port Alma's main street runs four blocks from the harbor to the hill, and somewhere past the bait shop and the shuttered cannery office, the air changes: linseed oil, kerosene, the faint sweetness of old paper kept dry against all odds. Follow it to a storefront with gold leaf flaking off the glass, push the door, and a brass bell announces you to the Anchor & Quoin, established 1948, open most days, weather and arthritis permitting.

Marguerite Pell, who has answered to Margo since the Eisenhower administration, will not look up right away. She will be standing at the stone, the waist-high steel table where pages are assembled, with a composing stick in her left hand and a line of 14-point Caslon growing letter by letter under her right thumb. Interrupting a compositor mid-line is the sort of thing you do exactly once. So you wait, and you look around, and looking around the Anchor & Quoin is its own education.

Three presses share the floor with forty type cabinets, each cabinet holding two dozen shallow drawers, each drawer holding a complete font of metal type sorted into a grid of compartments that has not changed since the 1870s. There are galley racks and proof presses, a guillotine cutter with a blade the length of your arm, and a paper loft upstairs where reams of cotton stock sleep under canvas. By Margo's own count there are 212 typefaces in the building. By weight, there are about eleven tons of equipment standing on fir floorboards that her father reinforced twice and she has reinforced once more.

"People come in and say it looks like a museum," she says when the line is set, wiping her hands on an apron gone gray with decades of ink. "It is not a museum. A museum is where things go when they stop working. Everything in here works. Including me, most mornings."

She is 74. The shop is 78. Between them they constitute the entire commercial letterpress trade on roughly six hundred miles of coastline, from the redwood country in the south to the wide gray mouth of the Columbia in the north. There used to be dozens of shops like this one, a printer in every harbor town turning out auction bills, tide tables, dance posters, and obituary cards. One by one they went quiet. The Anchor & Quoin did not. The question that brought me here, the question everyone in Port Alma eventually asks out loud, is: what happens when it does?

The biggest of the three presses is a Chandler & Price platen, built in Cleveland in 1911, freighted west by rail, hauled the last forty miles by a logging truck whose driver, legend insists, demanded payment in advance and salmon. It weighs a little over a ton and a half and runs on a treadle, which means it runs on Margo. She pumps it like a church organist, one foot keeping the great flywheel turning while her hands feed paper in and pull printed sheets out, a two-second rhythm she has repeated, by her own conservative arithmetic, somewhere north of nine million times.

"The press will take your hand off and keep the beat," she says, flatly, the way other people recite a phone number. "My father printed sixty years with all ten fingers. So have I. You respect the machine, the machine respects you. It is the most honest relationship I have ever had, and I was married twice."

Beside the platen stands a Vandercook proof press, the precision instrument of the pair, the one she uses for fine book work and for the broadsheets of poetry that subsidize everything else. The third press, a hulking Miehle cylinder, has not run since 2019, not because it cannot but because the part it needs has to be machined by hand, and the machinist she trusted died in Coos Bay that winter. She keeps the Miehle oiled anyway. "You do not let iron sit dry," she says. "Iron remembers being neglected."

What separates letterpress from every printing method that replaced it is pressure. The inked type is pressed physically into the paper, and the paper remembers. Run your fingertips across a sheet from the Anchor & Quoin and you can read it like braille: every letter a small, deliberate valley. Modern boutique printers chase that deep "kiss," cranking their presses to crush thick cotton stock because customers love the feel. Margo considers this vulgar. "A proper impression you can feel and barely see," she says. "Anything more and you are not printing, you are embossing. The old men would have docked your pay."

Here is the arithmetic nobody in the trade likes to say out loud. It takes roughly five years to train a competent letterpress printer: not someone who can pull a pretty wedding invitation off a tabletop press, but someone who can set a full page of text type, lock it square, make ready a hundred-year-old machine, mix ink to match a swatch by eye, and troubleshoot the four hundred small failures that stand between a clean sheet and a ruined run. Margo learned it the only way it has ever been learned, standing next to someone who already knew, in her case her father, August Pell, a Navy printer who came home from the war and decided a fishing town needed at least one person who could spell.

She has had eleven apprentices since 1989. Two stayed past the second year. One of those, a quiet woodworker's daughter named Ines Calloway, lasted six years and was, by Margo's account, the finest natural compositor she ever saw. Ines left in 2014 for Portland, where she runs a successful design studio and, Margo notes with a complicated pride, owns a tabletop press she prints on every Christmas. "The work did not leave her," Margo says. "The town could not hold her. Those are different problems and I only know how to fix one of them."

The latest candidate is 23 years old, grew up four streets away, and is currently, on the afternoon I visit, redistributing a galley of 10-point type back into its case, the patient, meditative chore that has tested every apprentice since Gutenberg. His name is Daniel Ruiz; he found the shop the modern way, through a video of Margo's hands that a tourist posted online, eleven million views and counting. He watched it in a college dorm in Eugene, dropped out of a logistics program the same month, and knocked on the door with the bell.

"Everyone my age works in things you cannot touch," Daniel tells me, not looking up from the case, because she trained him not to. "I wanted one thing in my life where, at the end of the day, there is a stack of paper that exists because I existed. That is the whole philosophy. It fits in a sentence."

Margo, across the room, pretends not to hear, and pulls a proof, and reads it upside down, which after sixty years is the only direction she fully trusts.

Running a print shop on the coast means running a small, perpetual war against water. Salt air corrodes steel; fog swells paper; a wet winter can change the dimensions of a sheet between the first pass and the second, throwing a two-color job out of register by the width of a hair, which in this trade is a chasm. Margo's father built the paper loft with double walls and a wood stove that someone must feed from October to May. The shop's hygrometer, a brass instrument older than the state's area codes, is consulted more often than the telephone.

"Inland printers think humidity is a setting on a machine," Margo says. "Out here it is a neighbor. Some days a good neighbor. You learn its moods or you ruin stock, and cotton paper is not cheap and never was."

And yet the sea is also why the shop survived. When offset printing gutted the trade in the 1960s and 70s, the towns big enough to attract a modern print plant lost their letterpress shops first. Port Alma was never big enough to be worth the trouble. The fishing fleet still needed tide tables; the grange still needed dance posters; the county still wanted its notices done the way they had always been done. The Anchor & Quoin limped through the lean decades on small jobs and stubbornness, and then, around 2008, something unexpected happened: the world came back around. Designers began driving out from the cities with commissions. Stationers wanted real impression. A small press in San Francisco asked Margo to print a poetry chapbook, then a second, then a standing order. Last year, the shop shipped work to nine states and two countries, every sheet fed into the press by hand, one at a time, to the beat of a treadle.

"We were obsolete for forty years," she says. "Then we were heritage. I did not move an inch. The world did all the traveling."

On my final morning in Port Alma, Margo lets me pull a sheet on the Chandler & Price. She sets the line herself, locks the chase, makes ready, and then stands beside me counting the rhythm out loud the way her father counted it for her: in on one, out on two, and never, ever reach back for a crooked sheet. The flywheel hums. The platen closes like a door in a well-built house. The sheet that comes out carries five words in 24-point Caslon, and when I run my thumb across them that evening, two hundred miles inland, they are still there, a sentence you can find in the dark.

She has made arrangements, of a kind. The building is paid for. The type is willed, case by case, to a printing museum in Tacoma, "unless," the codicil reads in language Margo dictated and clearly relished, "a working printer of sound judgment and sounder habits shall be operating the premises, in which event the museum gets my apologies." Daniel does not know about the codicil. Margo asked me not to print it until the issue ships, by which time, she calculates, he will either have earned the knowledge or moved to Portland like the rest of them.

I ask her, before the bus, the question I came with: what happens when the shop goes quiet? She finishes the line she is setting first, drops the last sort home with her thumb, and reads it upside down.

"Wrong question," she says. "The presses are iron. Iron does not die, it waits. The question is whether anyone will be left who can hear what it is waiting for." She ties up the page with a printer's knot her father taught her, and the bell above the door rings me out into the fog, and behind me, faint and regular as surf, the treadle starts again.