991
.918
Two vaguely similar numbers—991 and .918—coalesced in my mind this week when we achieved an unprecedented head-start on preparing our annual Christmas greetings cards in what ought to be good time even for our increasingly sluggish postal service. The date 991 is famous in my little sphere for a battle in which a brave band of English warriors met in a bloody fray with marauding Viking Marines. This event is memorialized in an important Old English poem, “The Battle of Maldon.” When making their heroic speeches, military heroes in Old English poems have a tendency to go through the drill of presenting arms. Having no sabers to rattle they instead brandished spear and shield in menacing fashion as they uttered their alliterative threats, boasts, encouragements, and philosophical observations. A famous spear-shaking speech appears in the “Battle of Maldon”. The spear-shaking orator is an old warrior named Byrhtwold. Things are not going well for the home team, who experience serious attrition. As his comrades fall all around him Byrhtwold delivers a memorable pep talk: “Our courage must be all the greater,” he declaims, “our hearts the keener, our spirits more intense, as our strength diminishes.”
Well, I too am a geezer—so I translate eald geneat--and though I face no Vikings, companions are falling all about me and I face my own personal version of Byrhtwold’s problem of diminishing strength. My response involves neither targe nor javelin. I simply do about a quarter of what I used to do, and spend about three times as long on each task. The tasks recently completed—setting the type for and then printing a very modest Christmas greetings card—took me pretty well two full days. Tidying up will probably take another full day. The paradox is that I am about two weeks ahead of my normal schedule. When the “last minute” ceases to be a possibility, you tend to do it way before that.
As to the fraction nine hundred and eighteen one thousandths (.918), it relates to my role as an amateur letterpress printer. That is the height (in inches) of a piece of movable type. You probably know that “letterpress” refers to the printing technique associated with the name of Johannes Gutenberg in the middle of the fifteenth century. In letterpress, the raised faces of cast metal types precisely arranged and secured in a strong frame are first inked and then pressed against paper or some other suitable material by mechanical force, resulting in a printed sheet. Printing was a huge American industry in the nineteenth century. Every page of every book, every copy of a daily newspaper, was put together by the human hands of compositors (type-setters) working in large shops. In addition there were thousands of “job printers” working from their own homes or small shops producing letterheads, commercial advertisements, business forms, calling cards, and so on. The amounts of heavy metal type used in the industry were staggering. The joke used to be that the only thing keeping Manhattan Island from blowing away in a storm was the weight of a thousand print shops. There was constant innovation, as for example with stereotypes. The fevered and protracted race to invent an efficient type-setting machine was won by the Mergenthaler Linotype, one of the most brilliant inventions in the history of printing, which was in significant use by about 1890.
But though the equipment and procedures of letterpress printing were greatly improved over more than three centuries, its basic principle—a raised and inked type face pressing against paper--remained in operation well into the twentieth century. Then the process called offset lithography challenged and largely replaced it. Lithography (“stone writing”) exploits the fact that oil and water do not mix. This allows a properly prepared text or design on a plane surface to be transferred or “offset” to a flat rubber blanket and thence to the desired printing surface. The techniques of offset were especially effective for printing huge numbers of copies of magazines or other materials making lavish use of photographs and pictorial design. The undisputed reign of offset lithography, however, was much shorter than that of letterpress. As with so many other industrial processes, computer technology is revolutionizing practically all aspects of the printing industry. In fifteen minutes you can compose on your MacBook to be printed on your wireless Brother a page as beautiful as one produced by Manutius Aldus in Venice in 1500. Or almost as beautiful. You will be hard pressed (so to speak) to find a stock of hand-laid rag paper, and you will never be able to feel the bite of the types as you run your fingertips (clean, please) very lightly over a few lines of the printed text.
Letterpress “Print Shop” was still common as one of the vocational options in many high schools, including mine, in the early 1950s. But by the 1960s and 70s, commercial letterpress was in rapid, near total collapse. How I developed an interest in printing might be an engaging story, but it is for another essay. Suffice it to say I got my first press as a birthday present from my wife about 1970. It is a beautiful old Vandercook Proving Machine found in an intimidating printing junkyard in Camden. The fouled makeready on its large, cylindrical drum was still in place, recording forever its last macabre act: NOVEMBER, MONTH OF THE HOLY SOULS. ENROLL YOUR DECEASED NOW. I used to go to weekend auctions in New York where they were selling tons of type at scrap metal prices and you could buy a Heidelberg press for two hundred dollars. Of course you then had to move it. Sometimes an entire shop would be sold for scrap. Over a few years I put together a fine if eccentric letterpress shop for about a thousand dollars. In one sale California job cases in bulk were a dime apiece. Then Manhattan interior designers discovered their potential for the mural display of tchotchkes. Now a single type case may go for fifty dollars on Ebay. Naturally I have spent a certain amount of time cursing myself for not snapping up this, that, or the other when I could have done. Then, again, divorce is a high price to pay for a few hundredweight of Caslon. There has been a renaissance in craft printing and with it a lightning transition from burdensome junk to expensive antique.
Hand-set letterpress printing is enormous fun, but quite hard work. You need a strong back (lots of standing), excellent eyesight, and nimble fingers. The requirements are vaguely similar to those for the Anglo-Saxon army, though the work itself is fortunately less dangerous. Byrhtwold’s answer to the diminishing strength of his cohort was to fight more fiercely, but that worked only for a short while. Mine is to moderate expectations, choose achievable projects, go slow, take a lot of time, talk to myself a lot, have a magnifying glass always close at hand, and make frequent recourse to large mugs of tea.
