Gutenberg's Fingerprint

by Merilyn Simonds

  Those who love ereaders claim that E Ink is easier on the eyes, but the claim doesn’t stand up in the lab. When fatigue or eye strain is measured, there is no difference in the effect of E Ink and LCD displays. The age of the device does matter, however. Old-model, low-resolution LCD screens cause more eyestrain than newer, high-resolution LCD screens.

  But how do both of these ways of getting words onto digital screens stack up against the dark chocolate ink that Hugh is printing onto our cream Salad paper? The most obvious difference is that once Hugh’s ink hits the paper, it’s there forever.

  Well, maybe not forever. Hugh boasted that the oil-based ink he buys from Boxcar will last 500 years, but he also told me that, years ago, he printed a passage from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet and hung it on his office wall, facing south. The title was printed in red above black text. After several years, he noticed that the title had disappeared. When he looked closely, he could see tiny peelings of red ink dusting the bottom of the frame. Given enough time, ink will flake off, it will fade, its permanence an illusion.

  How long will E Ink last? Trying to predict the longevity of a new technology is a mug’s game, but early claims that ninety percent of E Ink displays would last more than ten years under typical conditions have proven true. The Sony LIBRIé ereader, introduced in 2004, was the first to use E Ink. In 2015, those E Ink displays were still going strong. By then, seventeen million ebook reading devices had been sold with E Ink displays.

  It boggles the mind to think that all the words I could ever write will fit inside an ereader. The little coloured Ping-Pong balls just keep rolling around inside those teeny beach balls, endlessly rearranging themselves into new words on command. No cinnabar to flake off the page. No smudges, no stains. No physical substance with a set of needs and requirements, a life of its own. No ink to get into the blood. Only beach balls and slushy crystals. Only ghosts.

  ON TRIAL

  You can’t hide anything from ink. It is like the teacher with eyes in the back of her head who can see the boys making spit-balls, the girls passing notes. Nothing is safe from its scrutiny. It shows up every flaw in the type: the missing tittle above an i, one side of a t-cross snapped off, a bent s, a worn-down D, a river of spaces streaming white down the page. A little lazy at pounding the type flat into the chase? Ink will make your sins manifest, printing only the words that rise up above the others. It is ruthless in its lack of forgiveness: every irregularity in the press bed, in the chase, and in the individual letters of type has to be fixed before ink will flow every word onto the page.

  “I’m quite sticky about setting type because I am just that anal,” says Hugh. Even so, inevitably there are mistakes, errors that are hard to catch when reading the type itself, set as a mirror image of the page. This is why printers run proofs, trial pressings of each page in a standard black ink. The proof shows up mistakes in the spelling and grammar, but it also reveals deficiencies in the type that need to be corrected for the ink to do its work.

  Proofs are scanned by Hugh and his proofreader, Faye Batchelor. I can tell I live in a small community when the circle closes: Faye was Erik’s elementary school art teacher. When he came back from Berlin after his apprenticeship with Attila Lukacs, Erik had a show of paintings in the gallery where I launched The Lion in the Room Next Door, with Karl and his musical friends providing the ambience. Faye was there. She bought the best painting Erik produced in Berlin. I was jealous. Last year, when she moved into a smaller house, she handed the painting to me, and I handed it on to Erik. Round and round.

  “Faye keeps me straight on nuances like repeating words or using a wrong font when I set type,” says Hugh. She also checks for damaged or bent type that doesn’t take the ink as it should. “We’re both concerned with maintaining the standard of the press, and this requires constant vigilance: removing all typos, controlling the negative spacing, and having the same amount of inking and pressure on each page. The standard we have set is high and mostly we meet it, but we’re never perfect.”

  Hugh enlists me as a proofreader, too. Working with a writer who lives an hour outside town flummoxes him at first—how will he get the proofs to me?—but then he hits on a solution.

  “I always thought I would need to mail the pages to you for proofreading and this would mean the typesetting would be at a standstill until the dogsled reached Upper Oak Leaf Road and I’d be twiddling my thumbs until you got back to me via email to say all was okay or that I had left out a comma. However, after watching an ad on TV, my brain finally clicked in and I saw the possibilities of using a scanner to email the typeset proof to you. I feel bad about not feeding the sled dogs, but time marches on.”

  What is the almighty rush? I think. When my books are commercially printed, and when I make the ebook, too, I receive the entire book to proof with a few weeks in which to accomplish the task. Surely Hugh is just being persnickety. But on the day I deliver the first set of page proofs to his studio, I understand. I find him standing by the press, staring vacantly at the platen, watching the ink dry before his eyes. All his chases are tight with type. His work is stopped. He can’t set more type until these four pages are inked and printed, and he can’t do that until Faye and I call in our corrections. It may have been obvious to everyone but me, but at last I get it: The Paradise Project will be typeset, inked, and proofed four pages at a time, as if it is made up of fifteen thin little books.

  “It’s about time,” says Hugh, grabbing the pages from my hand. “I was about to dock your pay!”

  He drags a stool to his worktable with one hand and with the other, pulls a chase towards him. He finds the right proof and unlocks the chase.

  “Don’t worry,” I say, backing towards the door. “I’ll let myself out.” He is already picking at the letters with his bodkin.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he mumbles, waving a hand at me. I’m not sure if he’s saying goodbye or dismissing me like a lord with much more important things to do.

  CHASE KISS

  Hugh is mixing the dark chocolate brown ink we’ve chosen for the text. Eighty percent cacao, I’d say, melted in a bain-marie, one of my favourite cooking gizmos, just a simple ridged ring of aluminum that sits in a pan of simmering water.

  Cooking and printing aren’t that far apart. With an old kitchen knife, Hugh scoops two dollops of rich, dark ink onto the disc of the press. The ink looks black, but I know from the hours we spent comparing colour chips that this is not black, which is all colours, but rather Pantone 497, a darkness that approaches black through a spectrum of magenta and yellow with nary a drop of blue.

  The disc being inked is the size of a pie sufficient for a family of eight. It is made up of two parts: an inner circle and an outer ring, both perfectly, exquisitely flat. Hugh flips a switch, and the disc moves towards vertical at the same moment that a lattice of rollers rises up to lick across the surface, smoothing the dollops of ink into two streaks. Up and back, up and back. Each time the disc moves towards the rollers, the outer ring shifts a few degrees in one direction and the inner circle rotates a fraction the opposite way so that the rollers lick a different part of the surface with each pass. Within seconds, the entire disc is slick with ink, damp and glistening, but still the rollers lick, lick, lick with admirable persistence.

  In Gutenberg’s day, the ink was spread by a press man holding a leather pouch filled with rags. He’d rock the pouch over ink slathered on a stone, then he’d rock it back and forth over the type.

  “Definitely an acquired skill,” Hugh says. The first book he helped print—his own collection of poems—was printed on a simple flatbed press, not unlike the one Gutenberg invented. Hugh inked his poetic type by hand using a small roller called a brayer.

  “Getting even coverage and the proper amount of ink for each impression took practice,” he grins, “and yielded more than a few seconds.”

  He has turned off the motor. The rollers are still. He leans ove
r the press, inserts a piece of thick, creamy paper just so, and gives the flywheel on the press a turn with his hand. The inked disc rises to vertical, the rollers pass over it and, on their downward stroke, smear ink over the bed where my words are set in mirror image in the chase. Then, in a movement as smooth as Fred Astaire, the inked type moves forward, the paper moves forward, too, and they meet—smack!—a quick, chaste kiss that springs them apart, my words transferred to a piece of paper that can be picked up, read, passed hand to hand, folded into an envelope, mailed around the world.

  “Too much ink,” Hugh grumbles, swiping his fingers across the letters. They don’t smudge, but some of the e’s are filled in, and so is an uppercase W. Hugh wipes down the type, turns the flywheel again, and prints another trial page. The two look identical to me.

  “Much better!” he exclaims.

  WORDS, ONLY WORDS

  Hugh, the printer, looks over at Erik, the painter. They are standing on opposite sides of a small table strewn with squares of paper and gobs of ink in shades of yellow, green, and chartreuse. Behind them, hunched like a gargoyle, its flywheel an unlikely red, sits the printing press. All morning they have been inking Erik’s woodblocks, setting them into the press, pulling proofs, cleaning off the blocks, trying again.

  “Your blocks are super,” Hugh says, puffing with pride as if he’d carved them himself. “If we can get exactly the right colour, they’ll become ghost images. That aspect appeals to me. And I like the way you start some of them off the page. Of course, the page size will vary slightly because we rip them from the large sheet, and the deckle adds a-whole-nother dimension.”

  I’m listening in like an eight-year-old allowed to sit at the adult table. Erik has brought along what he calls a flatplan, a thumbnail layout of all the pages, showing the approximate length of text for each story, with the position of the block prints appearing as pale ovals at the bottom of roughly every other spread. He emailed it to us weeks ago, so that Hugh could start typesetting pages that had no images. Now, the two of them peer at the flatplan, discussing gutters.

  “If we run the artwork for the quarter title over the gutter it will end up on page 16, but if we skillfully cut the block and print the first part on page 1 and the remainder on page 2 the image will appear to cross the gutter,” says Hugh.

  “Neat!”

  “It will take a bit of planning, but what else is new?” Hugh casts a glance in my direction and smirks. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we had an easy job like a writer?” Yesterday he sent me a quote he found on the website of Library and Archives Canada: “Authors don’t write a book, they write a manuscript that is made into a book by others.”

  I read it like a slap on the wrist.

  How much of a book are the words on the page? The answer comes easily to me—all of it! The stories in The Paradise Project have been gestating for years. I wrote the first one a decade ago while I was working on The Holding. I’m not a poet, but now and then an idea stops me and out roll the words carrying an image so succinct and polished that I think, Maybe this is what a poem feels like.

  “Stone” was like that, a thread that spooled out, not a break in the words, although the story spans a hundred years, coursing through the tension between a man and nature, a man and a woman, and within the woman herself, all of it unfolding in just thirty-nine lines. The piece has hardly changed since that first laying down of words.

  An easy job like a writer. The words make me cringe. It is an easy job, at least on those days when the words are lining up, compliant and raring to go. Even when they aren’t, when I spend hours lugging commas from here to there, shovelling in new phrases, axing them out again, prying words apart, wedging in fresh ones, even then what survives looks easy. The better the writing, the easier it looks. An art, as Shakespeare said, that conceals itself.

  So I feel guilty, with this easy job of mine. No ink under my fingernails, no dangerous flywheels or finger-grabbing clamps, no boiling oil or noxious fumes. I have to admit, words are just the start of this paradise project of ours, the seed in the soil, the glint in the eye.

  The same might be said of Erik’s images. When he delivered them to the print shop this morning, Hugh was excited but cautious.

  “One never knows until the ink is on the paper,” he warned.

  Ink, the final arbiter.

  Hugh loves to overprint images. To his mind, it gives the writing depth. He prefers obscure or abstract images.

  “Abstracts give the reader the opportunity to interpret the image in a number of ways, none of which have a right or wrong answer. If you wrote a poem about a house with a mountain in the background and I made a print of the house with a mountain in the background, I am really saying to the reader, ‘I know you are stupid so I thought I should draw you a picture of what the poet is trying to tell you.’ I’m sure you agree that would not be a good idea.”

  Hugh has illustrated several of the books he has printed, most often using the soft block technique he developed, overprinting the images again and again in a process called reduction printing that can create a multicoloured image with just one block.

  “Let’s say I start with a square block. I print the entire square in a light yellow. Then I reduce the block by cutting away a section, say a triangle, and ink it again with a different colour, say, blue. When I print the page again, the blue overprints the yellow, except where the triangle was cut away. That’s yellow. Then I reduce the block further by cutting out a circle. I overprint the page again, this time using purple ink, creating a three-colour image of a yellow triangle and a blue circle on a purple background.”

  When Hugh first showed Erik his soft blocks, I think he was secretly hoping the young artist would adopt his technique. But Erik is a traditionalist. He carved his images into thin pieces of lino that Hugh glues onto backing blocks of composite hardwood.

  Hugh and Erik test-print the images alone, then with an overprint of text. When they are satisfied, Erik cleans the linocuts and stacks the blocks neatly in order under Hugh’s work table, ready for the press whenever Hugh is.

  Three years later, I go looking for those blocks.

  “I have no idea where they are,” Erik says. Hugh just shrugs when I ask. For men who love to work in the three dimensions of the real world, they display a curious disregard for material objects.

  Neither remembers trashing the blocks.

  “I normally leave the ink to dry on the blocks when I’m finished with them, so they can’t be used again,” Hugh says. “I never deface them. I couldn’t do that.”

  “Mind if I rummage around in your workshop?”

  “Go crazy,” he says.

  I find half a dozen buried in the rubble under Hugh’s work table. Another four are propping up one end of a sheaf of long paper. Two more are hanging out with the soft blocks on top of the type cabinet. One is missing. I find it weeks later in Hugh’s living room, under a pile of books. I feel like a rescue dog, saving victims of an avalanche. Now Erik’s blocks stand among the books on my office shelves, madeleines of my toil in the fields of Gutenbergia. For Christmas, I frame one for Erik beside the test-page printed with that image.

  When Erik designs the digital version of The Paradise Project, I insist on including the images. But there is no way to print text over an image on an ereader screen. The Ping-Pong balls inside those beach balls are either black or white. No tonal shading, no floating images, no hope of adding depth to a page. In the end, Erik positions his linocuts as small icons that begin each story, which is lovely, but it’s not the same.

  “But look!” Erik says. He clicks on the image, and it looms as large as in the printed book.

  Still, on the digital page, my words stand alone, the way I thought I wanted them to be. But now I miss the image rising up from under the words.

  Hugh has ruined me.

  SAVING GRACE

  A week after the image t
rials are done, I walk into Hugh’s studio and find him cleaning up. Garbage bags sit plumped on the floor. The counters are swept clean.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’m straightening up. I do this every few years, you know.”

  I open a garbage bag and peer in.

  “There are proofs in here! The first pages of my book!”

  “Yes. So?”

  “What about archives?”

  “What about them?”

  I think Hugh must be teasing me. He isn’t.

  “They’re just proofs,” he says. He stops what he is doing and stares at me with genuine puzzlement. “It’s okay, don’t worry, we have those pages printed. We don’t need that garbage.”

  To him, a proof is just a way station, one of many along the path to a finished page, which is all he really cares about.

  I am pulling out the crumpled papers smeared with ink from the filthy rags he’s tossed into the bag.

  “This breaks my heart, Hugh.”

  I mean it. I can’t throw anything out. My basement is stacked with boxes of letters and photos and mementoes from my parents, my husband’s parents, my long-dead aunts and uncles, my grandfather’s wedding tie, his christening outfit. If a thing is old, if it has no apparent practical use, if there is a word scribbled anywhere on it, my sisters ship it off to me.

  “We need these, Hugh. How will anyone ever know how we got from there to here?” I gesture wildly from the type in the hellbox to the pages stacked on the drying counter.

  “From where?”

  It’s me who is speaking a foreign language now.

  “There. Wherever we started. We’ll keep the end result, but what about the process?”