The Last Press
on the Coast

The first thing you hear is not the press. It is the gulls, then the foghorn out past the breakwater, and then, underneath all of it, a sound like a heartbeat wearing boots: chunk-ka, chunk-ka, chunk-ka. Follow it down Anchor Street, past the bait shop and the shuttered cannery office, and you arrive at a storefront whose gold-leaf window lettering has outlived three repaintings of the building around it. Mercer & Daughters, Fine Printing Since 1911. The door sticks. Everyone in Port Alma knows you have to lift the handle while you push.

Inside, the twentieth century is still fully operational. Type cabinets line the walls like card catalogues for an alphabet-only library. A Chandler & Price platen press, built when Taft was president, swings its flywheel in the corner with the patience of a lighthouse. And at the stone in the middle of the room stands Edith Mercer, 74, sleeves rolled, locking a poem into a steel frame called a chase, with the unsentimental speed of a woman who has done this for six decades and intends to keep doing it.

"People come in and say it smells like the past," she tells me, not looking up. "It doesn't. It smells like ink and kerosene. The past didn't smell this good."

Edith is the third Mercer to run the shop and, by her own accounting, the last letterpress printer working commercially anywhere on this stretch of coast. The nearest comparable operation is a teaching studio in Portland, two and a half hours inland, which she respects and gently refuses to be confused with. "They preserve it," she says. "I bill for it. Those are different jobs."

Her grandfather, Howell Mercer, opened the shop the year the harbor got its first cannery, printing fish-ticket books, tide tables, and dance posters for the Saturday socials. Her mother, Vera, ran it through the war on government forms and ration notices, and added the "& Daughters" to the window in 1948, a small act of defiance that scandalized exactly the people it was meant to. Edith swept floors at eight, set her first line of type at eleven, and at nineteen turned down a scholarship in Eugene because, as she puts it, "the press doesn't run itself, and I had already met everyone I wanted to meet who didn't live here."

What the shop prints now is a working census of small-town life: wedding invitations and funeral cards, oyster-festival posters, menus for the two restaurants that change their menus, stationery for the harbormaster, and broadsides of poems that Edith selects herself, prints in editions of one hundred, and sells from a wire rack by the door for twelve dollars. The broadsides subsidize nothing. She does them, she says, "to keep my taste from rusting."

To watch Edith set type is to watch arithmetic performed by hand. She stands at a California job case, 89 small compartments arranged in an order that stopped being intuitive to anyone else around 1965, and her right hand moves over it without her eyes following: e from the big bin in the middle, spaces from the left, capitals from the upper right. Each letter is a small lead soldier, cast in reverse, and she reads them mirrored and upside down as fluently as you are reading this. A line is justified not by software but by physical wedges of metal, thin as fingernails, until the line literally cannot be made tighter. "When it's right," she says, "it rings. You tap it and the whole line sounds like one piece."

The vocabulary of the trade has the blunt poetry of all old trades. Blank wooden spacers are furniture. The expanding locks that clamp everything tight are quoins. Individual letters are sorts, and when a job exhausts the shop's supply of lowercase e, you are, literally and originally, out of sorts. Edith deploys this etymology on every visitor and has not once tired of it.

The ideal impression, she insists, is a kiss: ink transferred, paper barely dented. The deep, tactile bite that customers now request, the one you can read with your fingertips like braille, was considered sloppy work for two hundred years. She will do it, for money, the way a violinist will play the wedding song. "Fashion is fine," she shrugs. "Fashion pays for roof repair."

The threats to the shop are not abstract. The building's foundation is older than the seawall protecting it, and the seawall is losing. Last winter's king tides put four inches of water in the basement where the paper stock used to live; the paper now lives upstairs, and the basement holds only things that can survive a drowning, which in a letterpress shop is most things. Insurance premiums have tripled in a decade. The town's population has thinned to under nine hundred souls in the off-season, and the cannery whose forms once kept three presses running full weeks closed before Edith's hair went gray.

And there is the question nobody in town asks her directly, which is the question of after. Edith's daughter is a marine biologist in Juneau and loves the shop the way you love a grandparent: genuinely, and from a distance. There is no apprentice. There was one, for three years, a serious young man named Tomas who learned the Windmill and the job case and then, reasonably, followed a living wage to a design studio in Seattle. Edith does not resent this. She prints his wedding invitations at cost.

"The trade doesn't need saving," she says, when I finally ask the question badly. "Trades die. That's allowed. What I mind is the idea that it needs pity. This shop has cleared a profit ninety of its hundred and fifteen years. Show me a startup with those numbers."

On my last morning, Edith prints the June broadside: a poem about herring by a fisherman's widow from up the coast, set in Caslon with a single ornament, in dark blue-black on paper the color of sea foam. The Vandercook's bell rings at the end of every pass, one hundred times. She checks the tenth print and the fiftieth and the last one against the first, holds two of them up to the window light, and nods once, which I have learned is the highest grade she issues.

I ask her what happens to the form now, the locked frame of metal that took her a full afternoon to set. She is already unlocking it, already distributing the letters back into their 89 compartments, each one returning home under fingers that don't need to look. The poem comes apart into an alphabet again. Tomorrow the alphabet will be something else: a menu, a name, a date with a dash between two years.

"That's the whole secret," she says, dropping the last e into the big bin in the middle. "Nothing here is precious. Everything here is permanent. Most people get those two exactly backwards." Outside, the foghorn agrees, the way it agrees with everything. ❦