No. 3: Ink on the thumb

This week I went to see Tomasz in his shop, which is a former dairy with a tiled floor and one very sensible cat. He prints the occasional pamphlet for friends, and I wanted to see what happens between a document and a page.

This week

He let me set one line. It was a single sentence, and it took forty minutes, and I got the order of two letters wrong in the middle of a word. He looked at my stick, the way a teacher might look at a recital, and said nothing for a while. Then: “It’s better than most people’s first.”

I have never been so pleased with such faint praise.

What I learned

That a space is not nothing. There are about a dozen kinds, and Tomasz can name them in the dark. That the letters sit in the case in an order dictated by frequency, so that the e is close to hand and the z is far away. And that you read the line backwards as you set it, which turns out to be very good for finding typos.

He has agreed to write a longer piece for us. I won’t say more, except that he asked me not to call him an artist. He says he is a tradesman who is good with sentences.

One thing to look at

A letterpress print, up close, in raking light. If you have a wedding invitation, an old visiting card or a poetry pamphlet at home, hold it so the light comes across the surface at a low angle. You will see the impression: a slight dent where the type bit into the paper. It is the clearest signature the process leaves.

A small thing. My thumb is still faintly grey on the left. I am choosing to treat this as a sign of seriousness.