“The turtle is fundamental to Ojibway mythology,” says Hugh. “In their story of the Great Flood, it was a turtle that offered its back to Waynaboozhoo to bear the weight of the new earth. In fact, Ojibway and other First Nations people call North America Turtle Island because of its shape—Florida is one hind leg, Baja California is another, Mexico is the tail.”
Hugh carved his own version of the petroglyph turtle in several sizes, and a friend cast them, creating a handful of pressmarks that live in the California case alongside the letters, numbers, and punctuation marks. He fingers one out of the case now and drops it into the too-wide gap between words on my composing stick.
“There! Problem solved!” Hugh exclaims. “You see, the turtles not only bridge unavoidable gaps between words, they block rivers, too.”
“What’s a river?” I say.
“Blank spaces that run down the page. Books these days are running with rivers!”
He pulls a book at random from the stack on a side table. “Unfocus your eyes so all you see is black text on white paper. Notice the white rivers? That’s what happens when wide spaces between words line up, one after the other. Machines can’t fix that. Not even computers. But we can.”
Ebook software can, too, but I take his point. Word spacing is key. When I was writer-in-residence at Green College, one of the graduate students was writing her PhD dissertation on spaces between words in the Arabic language. The run-on nature of Arabic sentences, she theorized, slowed the adoption of the printing press and the advances it provoked. In ancient cultures, reading was oral and words flowed together: it was up to the reader to separate out the words and convey the breaks through breath and cadence. It was Irish scribes in the seventh and eighth centuries who first separated words in their manuscripts, a practice that took 300 years to spread to Europe.
One of Gutenberg’s challenges was to mimic human script with his press. Today, when we print or write longhand, we instinctively vary the spacing between our words. The width of each letter might vary, too. We squeeze the words or stretch them out in order to make them fit the line. To duplicate this, Gutenberg had some 290 characters in his type cases, almost four times as many as Hugh, every letter cast in a variety of widths.
“Gutenberg realized that his new adventure had to be as pleasing to the eye as books written by hand. In my opinion, our attention to aesthetically pleasing typesetting has decreased since Gutenberg and has been all but obliterated by the digital age.” Hugh goes off in a huff.
I return to my composing stick. The next two lines go smoothly. Even so, it has taken me two hours to set four lines of type. If I really were a printer’s apprentice, I’d be sent back to my hovel in disgrace by now.
I show my work to Hugh like an eager puppy with a chew toy, waiting for a pat on the head. Hugh’s brow furrows.
“Did you proofread each line as you finished setting the type? The composing stick doesn’t come with spell-check.”
“You didn’t tell me I had to proof as I go!”
He grins, a master of tough love. “Typesetting offers a lot of options for making mistakes. You can place a letter upside down, leave a letter out, insert an extra letter. You can put in a wrong letter or leave a word completely out or put the same word in twice. You can use a wrong font.” He enumerates the possible errors on his fingers. “Congratulations! You have committed most of these sins in your first four lines!”
I’m used to proofing pages, not lines, to scribbling a manuscript with corrections and letting someone else make it right. I look back over my work and, sure enough, midday has three ds, I’ve dropped the comma after “terrace,” and the e in “children” is upside down.
That upside down e looks familiar. Before we started The Paradise Project, I commissioned Hugh to print mementoes for the authors we invited to Kingston WritersFest, a literary festival I founded. Just before the mementoes were to be delivered, Hugh sent me a message: “I have made a single copy of the WritersFest Keepsake for Wayne that will have the e in your name upside down. Don’t tell Wayne about my devious plan. I think he may enjoy that little touch.”
Hugh toppled his e in whimsy; I committed my sin in ignorance.
“What do I do now?”
“You rip it out!” Hugh says as gleefully as my mother did when I sewed my first zipper in backwards. “Use your bodkin.”
I’ve used a bodkin as a needle to pull ribbon through lace, and I know a bodkin as a small dagger from reading Shakespeare, but a printer’s bodkin is neither needle nor knife. Pointed like an awl, with a rounded wooden handle that sits sweetly in the palm, the bodkin is a kind of pick for extracting letters from set type. Clearly, I’m not the first person to make a mistake: in this business, errors have their own special tool.
I lift out the extra d and the errant e with my bodkin. Adding the comma is more troublesome. There are no spacers I can safely remove to make room for it.
“If you can add spacers, you can take them away!” Hugh shows me how to replace the three-em spacer with a single em. “Bingo!”
I pop out spacers and shift them around, breaking up the nascent rivers.
The winter before, Hugh and I visited Queen’s University Special Collections to view their reproduction Gutenberg Bible. “You remember how the word spacing was seen as very narrow slits of white? No rivers anywhere? That’s what we aspire to.”
He looks at my paltry four lines of revised text. “Good! Good!”
I feel a ridiculous rush of pride. I could have entered these four lines of text into a computer file in about forty seconds, but there is more to this typesetting business than speed and efficiency. A peculiar alchemy has taken place. The heavy burden of my errors and ignorance has been transformed into a glow of satisfaction. My few lines, at last, are worthy of Gutenbarclay.
Hugh is an erratic teacher: here one minute, gone the next. I could have got out my laptop and watched an instructional video on compositing made by the California Vocational Foundation, complete with background music that sounds like it was lifted from a 1950s drama. Perry Mason maybe, or Dragnet. The muscled young man in the checked shirt slips type into his composing stick with all the dexterity and pride of a hipster showing off his Android skills.
Without the help of the checked-shirt man, however, it takes me the better part of two days to set a page of text. I’ve used two turtles. Three words in italics. Four hyphens. Made countless mistakes.
I proof and proof and proof again. When I am pretty sure every letter is where it should be, no more and no less, I show the block to Hugh.
“Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” is all he says.
THE STONEMAN’S IMPOSITION
When I’ve set seven lines, Hugh shows me how to unlock the movable edge of the composing stick and slide the type into the galley tray, pushing it up into the far corner in a firm block. By the time I have thirty lines set—one full page—the block of type bears a passing resemblance to a page in a book.
“Ready for the next step?” Hugh asks, and I nod with anticipation, a perpetual five-year-old. “Time to lock up.”
He sets the open side of the galley tray up against the sheet of glass on his work table, eyeballing glass and metal until they are perfectly level, then he slides the block of set type from the tray to the glass.
Four “chases” lean against the wall beside his press. He selects one and lays it over the block of type. The chase holds the type and is inserted into the press where it will be inked to print the page. Chase, Hugh explains, is a British corruption of the French word châssis, which means frame. Printing is studded with these verbal delights, corrupted tidbits of European languages that travelled to England with the printing press.
The process of locking the type in the chase is called imposition—as opposed to composition, which, in Hugh’s world, refers to the setting of the type. (In my world, composition is the writing of words and se
ntences and paragraphs.) Historically, imposition was done on a large, flat stone, and the person who imposed the words was called the stoneman.
Hugh is the stoneman. He selects some “furniture” from a sloping cupboard beside his type cabinet: assorted rectangles of hardwood that look like the blocks we made for our sons to build ramps and garages for their Hot Wheels cars. The thin slats of hardwood that look like lathes are called “reglets,” a word probably derived from the French règle, meaning both “groove” and “rule.” Hugh arranges the furniture and reglets to fill in the empty spaces around the text block until it sits square and tight within the chase. Then he inserts a small “key” into the quoin, a word I’ve used often in Scrabble although I didn’t know it meant “corner,” from the French coin. This makes sense: as Hugh tightens the quoins on two sides of the chase, the type is pushed tightly against the opposite corner.
“All locked down?” I say.
“Locked up,” Hugh says. “Locked down is for prisons.”
Hugh twists the quoin key, tightening each quoin in turn, then hands me the empty composing stick. “Keep at it, Apprentice!” he says, chuckling merrily as he returns to the press.
INTO THE HELLBOX
I set a few more lines, but I am too slow for Hugh. He fires me, which is a relief. I can spend hours at the computer happily inserting a comma and taking it out, but to pick out the letters physically, whether for practical reasons of spacing or because Stupid Merilyn has been at it again, drives me to distraction.
Hugh carries on until all four chases are locked up, or down, I forget which. Every so often he sends me an email, complaining that I use too many commas, or have such an affection for H’s that he has been forced to buy more type.
“What happens next?” I ask when I see the four chases lined up neatly on the glass. The studio has always struck me as dirty and disorganized, but the better I get to know Hugh, and the closer I look, the more I see a different kind of order, measured and controlled, exerted by the process itself.
“Now I print,” says Hugh. “I don’t have enough type to set more pages.”
I had the idea that the type for all the pages of the book would be set at once. I realize now how ridiculous that would be. Imagine the number of H’s Hugh would have to buy!
“So what do you do with these?” I wave my hand over the four pages. They look so permanent, each block of metal letters fixed within its frame.
“After I print them, I distribute the type back into the case.”
It reminds me of the sawdust carpets the people of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, make each year at Easter. Several kilometres of cobblestone street are covered with coloured sawdust, laid down in exquisite images of Christ, Mary, and other icons of peace and spirituality. Families work from dusk until dawn to finish the carpets so that the feet of the pilgrims returning to town will never touch stone. By eleven in the morning, their night’s work is smudged beyond recognition; then the sawdust is swept up by street cleaners. The ephemeral rugs exist only in the photographs I take as I walk. In the same way, the type we have just set will exist in this particular configuration only on the printed page.
When I return a few days later, Hugh is hard at it, disassembling my sentences, letter by letter, as carefully as he set them. He stands in front of the open drawer of Garamond 14 point and pitches the letters and spacers into their proper bins. It is a meditative task; he seems to hardly notice me.
Suddenly he turns and pitches a letter into a cookie tin with a winter scene pressed into the side, a gaily trotting horse pulling a sleighful of laughing children.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“The hellbox!”
I assumed the name of his printing enterprise—Thee Hellbox Press—referred to thinking outside the box, the box itself being some kind of hell. But no. Hellbox is the container where typesetters traditionally toss their type after printing. It was left to the apprentice, the printer’s devil, to pick out the letters from the hellbox and put them back in the type case, surely a hellish job. Because Hugh has only temporary—and in my case, incompetent—devils, he distributes the type himself, reserving the hellbox for broken and damaged type: T’s and I’s with a serif snapped off; a P caught in the edge of the press and bent to a curve; vowels that have been used so often their faces are slick and round.
“The thing about type is that it has no tolerance. It has to be absolutely flat, or it won’t print. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to pull out a lowercase i because the dot didn’t show. It was there, all right, but it was worn down below the level of the rest of the letter.”
In Gutenberg’s day, worn and damaged type would have been melted down and recast. I assume Hugh ships his back to a foundry somewhere.
Hugh laughs. “I’ve had the same hellbox since the beginning of time and it is only half full. I’ve told my executors to ship it to a foundry but to make sure it’s remade into lead type, not bullets!”
Hugh named his press after the hellbox of type the printer handed over when Hugh hauled away the old hand-operated press that gave him his start back in the ’70s. The Hellbox Press: that’s how the name is spelled in his first book, A Letter to Teresa.
“It was Bill Poole who suggested, with tongue in cheek, that I call it Thee Hellbox Press so my press didn’t get confused with all the other Hellbox Presses. (<;)-”
Hugh likes to think of himself as one of a kind. A rebel. He draws his role models from the ranks of innovators and revolutionaries. Johannes Gutenberg, Martin Luther King Jr., Che Guevara.
“There is a quote that we think was uttered by Che in 1959 when his soldiers entered Havana. ‘We don’t know where we are going but we can’t turn back.’ In my mind, it not only takes courage to make a statement such as that, it also invites generations unborn to take up the cause. I think it also speaks to our cause.”
I’m not sure if he means The Paradise Project or the survival of letterpress printing. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
“Press on!” Hugh exclaims, punching his fist in the air. “Joy is the objective!”
BLOOD INTO INK
In the photograph, the woman is naked except for black brogues and argyle socks held up by leather sock suspenders. She sits splay-legged on a stool, an antiquarian book the size of a ledger propped open between her legs. With one hand, she turns a page. In the other, she holds a long feathered quill. Her eyes are closed in ecstasy, and her head tips back as she dips the quill deep into her wide open mouth.
This photograph sits on my desk and has done so through three houses and almost as many decades. It was taken by Dianne Whelan, an Ottawa photographer who was a friend of my older son’s girlfriend. She sent it to me as a thank-you postcard. Once, when I thought I’d lost it, I tracked down the photographer and bought three more, just in case. A lifetime supply.
The photograph could be an illustration of something T. S. Eliot once wrote: “The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.”
Hemingway supposedly said something similar—Writing is easy. You just open a vein and bleed—except that if he actually did say this, he was quoting a 1949 newspaper column in which Walter Winchell interviewed “Red” Smith, a popular sports columnist of the day. When Red was asked if he found it difficult to churn out column after column, he replied, “Why, no. You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.”
Even then, it was not a new idea. Nietzsche, in his philosophical novel Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, published in the late 1880s, makes a similar allusion to blood as ink in the chapter “On Reading and Writing”:
“Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood.”
Could blood, physically and chemically, be used as printer’s ink? Lovers down the ages have spilled a little blood and dipped in their pen nibs to sign their names in a lasting pledge of love. Ever since Tom Sawyer,
and probably before, novitiates have been signing their names in blood to join a gang. The Scottish Covenanters signed their call for a Presbyterian Scotland in their own blood, wearing red neckerchiefs as their insignia (the genesis of the term redneck, which originally meant a Scottish dissenter).
The Dutch poet and journalist Ruud Linssen took the metaphor literally and printed his entire Book of War, Mortification and Love using his own blood as ink, to stress the voluntary suffering that is the theme of the essays. First, he very considerately had his blood tested “to avoid innocent people getting exotic diseases by reading a book.” When his blood was declared fit, vials of it were removed by a doctor. Linssen gave the vials to an experimental printer. Months of experimentation followed in an attempt to overcome the primary obstacle: the blood, which is water-based, refused to mix with the oil-based printing ink. In the end, Linssen’s blood was freeze-dried to remove every last drop of H2O, leaving behind a pure blood powder that was mixed with oil to create ink for the offset press. (The typeface the printer used was Fakir.)
Every time I am with Hugh—every single time, without fail—at some point in the visit he’ll thrust his fingers towards the crook of his arm as if he’s holding a syringe. “Time to get my fix,” he’ll say, which means, time to get back to the press. He and Vladimir Nabokov would have gotten along. “Ink, a drug,” Nabokov writes in his 1947 dystopian novel, Bend Sinister.
I look at my photograph, at the naked woman dipping the quill into her mouth, and I understand, at last, my attraction. Ink may be in Hugh’s blood, but my lifeblood flows in every word I write.
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