In the Holiday Rush, I Almost Forgot to Tell You

At some point in the middle of November, the latest issue of Upper Valley Life magazine showed up in my mailbox. Inside is a story about letterpress printing and a man who lives in North Thetford, Vermont named Bob Metzler.

Bob is an avid practitioner of what devotees call the "black arts," letterpress printing with equipment made in the late 19th, early 20th century.

This is printing as Johannes Gutenberg conceived it. In letterpress, whatever you want to mass produce is first set up one letter and space at a time in a holding device called a composing stick. When complete, the text is inked, pressed to paper, and the result is a copy of what you've set up, over and over again.

When you compare letterpress printing to what a writer had to do in order to create a book pre-Gutenberg, the improvement in mass communication is immediately  apparent. Just think about these two numbers if you're in the market for a mind-boggling experience: in 1439, the year Johannes perfected his printing system, it is estimated there were 5,000 books in all of Europe.

That's all copies of all books—5,000.

Fifty years after Gutenberg's printing system was in place, the number of books in Europe numbered 5 million.

That's a lot of pent-up demand.

I've long believed that in order to understand what's happening in book publishing, you have to know what's happening in the print industry because the creation of a book is entirely dependent on printing, no matter how it's done.

Letterpress, because of its long setup process, made it uneconomical to print a single copy of a book. Offset printing, which was the next big development in printing, made single-copy printing impossible.

Digital printing and electronic books have freed folks who want to publish their books from the necessity and expense of having to print a thousand copies or none at all. Books are, once again, being printed one at a time.

Ironically, digital printing has done a lot to preserve the art and craft of letterpress printing because we have re-learned how to think of books as something that can, and perhaps should be, created in small batches.

There are thousands of letterpress enthusiasts like Bob all over the country. They are the place to go if you want something beautiful done on paper in a small quantity, like a chapbook of poetry, perhaps. And if you find the right printer, you may get the opportunity to get your own fingers inky. Imagine printing your own work, one beautiful copy at a time.