Talking Shop with a Typesetter in the Age of Screens
One of the last working letterpress shops, and the man who still runs it.
He sets type by hand for a readership that mostly finds him through the internet, and sees no contradiction in that at all.
His shop is one of perhaps a dozen still operating a working letterpress commercially in the region, setting type letter by letter for wedding invitations and small-run poetry chapbooks.
Most of his new customers, he told me, find him through a website, which he finds funny rather than ironic - the oldest printing technology and the newest discovery technology, working together without friction.
What he will not do, on principle, is digitize the process itself. The point, he said, is the specific weight of a hand-set line, which a font file can imitate but never actually produce.
