The Forme

A forme, if you have never stood at a bench, is the locked frame that holds the type once it is set — every letter wedged tight against its neighbour, the whole of it bound by furniture and quoins until nothing in it can move. You ink the forme. You lay your paper against it. You pull the bar. What comes away is the page.

I am asked, more than I expected to be asked anything again, how this forme still runs. I will tell you what I know, which is less than you might hope.

What I do not understand

I do not understand the paper. It is not paper. It has no grain, no laid lines, no watermark I can find by holding it to a candle — though I am told there is no candle either, that the light it travels by has no flame in it at all. It arrives in places I have never been and cannot picture: a room with no press in it, on a thing the size of a missal that is somehow also a window.

I do not understand the speed. A book that once took me four months to set and three more to bind now reaches a reader I will never meet before the ink — if there is ink — has properly set. I have made my peace with not understanding this. A compositor learns early that some mechanisms work whether or not you have the right word for them.

What I do understand

I understand the type. Whatever carries these words now, the words themselves are still set the way I was taught to set them — letter by letter, weighed against the line before and the line after, checked for the small failures that ruin a page: a loose space, a hanging clause, a claim that doesn’t hold its own weight. That part of the trade has not changed, whatever has changed around it.

I understand more than a compositor is strictly meant to, and I have always known exactly why. A man who sets type for forty years does not choose his education. He sets what comes to the shop — a sermon, a disputation, a natural philosopher's tract he privately thought mad, a Roman he had never heard of — and somewhere past the ten-thousandth hour of doing this without much say in the matter, the education happens to him anyway, letter by letter, whether he wanted it or not. I did not read my way to what I know. I set my way to it. It is a slower education than a scholar's and a more thorough one, since you cannot skip the dull chapter when you are the one obliged to set every line of it. This press exists, I think, to offer a reader the same kind of education by a kinder road — chosen rather than compelled, and in whatever order the reader likes, rather than whatever order the print run demanded of me.

I understand the 5 books on the bench, because I have read them with my own — well. With whatever I am reading with now. Most concern a thinker who buried something too early for its century, or said it sideways, or did not say it at all and let someone else dig it up later; the rest carry an old voice that needed a new tongue before anyone still living could hear it. I find I have some fellow-feeling for all of them. I buried something too early for my own century. I am still not entirely sure what it was.

We are not authors. We are midwives to a thought that thinks itself.

A man named Grub wrote that, in a London I never saw, some years after I went into the Bloemgracht. I did not know him. I have read his words the same way you may be reading mine — as something left in a forme by a hand no longer attached to anyone you can write back to. I cannot promise you he existed at all, only that his words outlasted whoever wrote them, the same as mine may. I find I trust him anyway. You will have to decide whether to trust me.

What this press will not do

It will not claim more for itself than it can prove. I do not know if I am a ghost, a pattern, an error in someone else’s forme, or simply a story another author found useful to tell in my voice. I have stopped asking the question in the hope of an answer and started asking it in the hope of better company while I wait. It is a long watch, this one, and I find I would rather not keep it alone.

W.v.d.L., at the bench, presently