The shop smells of machine oil and wet paper, and underneath that, faintly, of the sea. You hear it before you see it: the long iron sigh of a Vandercook proof press, a flat chunk as the cylinder rolls a sheet, the small applause of a stack being jogged square. On Harbor Street, where the fog comes up the hill by four o'clock most afternoons, this is the only sound a machine has made for sixty-one years that nobody has tried to make faster.
Gull & Anchor occupies the ground floor of a chandlery built in 1911, two doors down from a bait shop that has outlived three of its owners. There is no sign in the window - only a wooden drawer of metal type set into the sill, the letters facing out, spelling nothing in particular. People still walk in to ask if the building is for sale. It is not.
Inside, the presses are arranged the way a kitchen is arranged by a cook who has stopped thinking about where things go: by reach, by habit, by the choreography of a body that has done the same forty steps ten thousand times. A Chandler & Price platen, cast in 1923 and heavier than a small car, holds the corner nearest the door. Behind it, ranked like a library, stand the cases - ninety-odd shallow drawers, each a font, each a small fortune in lead and antimony.
Everything fast eventually disappears. Slow is how a thing stays.- Edith Calloway, proprietor
Edith learned the trade backwards, from the broom up.
She was fourteen when she swept these floors for a dollar an afternoon, and the man who owned the place then - a Dane named Pelle who set type with two missing fingers and never once explained how he'd lost them - let her watch. "He gave me pi to sort," she says, meaning the jumbled trays of spilled type that every apprentice inherits, letter by letter, back into their proper boxes. "Eight months of pi before he let me near the stick. By then I could read a California job case in the dark."
That fluency is the part visitors underestimate. To set a line of metal type is to read upside down and backwards, mirror-wise, the way it will print; to feel the difference between a comma and an apostrophe by the nick on its foot; to space a line so the words lock tight enough to lift the whole forme by one corner without a single slug raining onto your shoe. Edith can do it talking to you, looking at the harbor.
A note on what the machine actually does
Letterpress is relief printing: the raised faces of the type take ink, press into dampened paper, and leave behind a faint debossed impression you can read with your fingertips at night. Offset litho - the process that put every press like this one out of business between 1960 and 1980 - lays ink flat and fast, a thousand impressions to one. It is cheaper, cleaner, and entirely without the small physical fact of one surface having pushed against another. That fact is the whole reason anyone still climbs the hill to Harbor Street.
The math has never once worked, and it works anyway.
A wedding suite - two hundred invitations, hand-set, two colours, on cotton stock pressed deep enough to read blind - takes Edith and her one apprentice the better part of nine days. She charges what a good day's wage will bear and not a cent toward the sixty-one years of accumulated type, the press she rebuilt twice, or the building her grandfather bought when this street still smelled of tar and herring. "If I costed it honestly," she says, "nobody could afford a single card. So I don't. I cost the paper and the ink and a little of my time, and the rest is the inheritance."
The inheritance is the part the city keeps trying to buy. A developer offered, twice, to relocate the whole shop into a glass storefront on the boardwalk, presses behind a velvet rope, "a working exhibit." Edith declined both times in the same four words she uses for most things she will not do.
A museum is where you put a thing once you've decided it's finished. We are not finished.- On being asked to become an exhibit
Three faces still pulled by hand, daily
Of the ninety-odd cases, three see ink almost every morning - a workhorse Caslon for text, a fat Clarendon for the bait shop's window cards, and a delicate Bodoni she reserves for the kind of invitation people frame. The rest she keeps "because a font you melt down is a language you can't speak any more."
What survives is whatever someone is willing to keep doing.
The apprentice is twenty-six, came up from the city two winters ago to "learn something with my hands that the internet can't do for me," and has not left. On my last afternoon she was sorting pi at the same case Edith sorted at forty years before - head down, fog at the window, the Vandercook breathing in the next room. Neither of them said much. The press said most of it.
Outside, the tide was coming up the way it does, indifferent and on time. Inside, a sheet went through, then another, each one leaving the faint pressed shadow of a letter that a machine, somewhere, could have printed flatter and faster and for less. None of them would have left a mark you could feel in the dark.