The Composing Room

I still see those men haphazardly standing around the comps’ floor, mostly silent, lost in their latest urgent jobs, looking up and down as if nodding yes from what they call their composers’ sticks as they set inverse words and lines of each page that could be taken for Greek scripture, declaring: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was made cold type and the Word was coldness, darkness, shiny greyness and light—and the Word dwelt amongst us. * Oh, I know these men would laugh this off. They’d say, if they simply didn’t throw their eyes to heaven, that they were just ordinary characters trying to keep the devil from the door, and with luck have enough left over each week to back a few nags, and go for a few jars. But they can’t say anything or set anything now. They are scattered from that place that’s not the same any more and many have left any place we know of in this life, calling to mind the old names for printing:The Mysterious Craft or simply The Mystery. * I set them up in another city, another country that’s as far away in distance from that city as it’s far in time. But they are still composing, cracking the odd joke above their sticks and galleys on some floor of some building that is eternally busy inside me even when I’ve forgotten that I’ve forgotten them; forgetting the world behind the word— every time I read the word world I wonder is it a typo and should I delete the l. * Now again I hanker to know the quality of each letter: the weight, the texture, the smell, the shiny new type, the ink-dark shades of old, the different types of type, the various sizes within the same font, the measures in ems, picas, points and units. I’d set the words up, making something out of all this that stays standing—all set as masterly as the words those men set that reveal something of the mystery behind and within these letters and the wonder and the darkness, but with the lightest touch. * And the umpteen ways things can foul up are beyond telling. Maybe the type is off, or the typesetter may not be up to the work, if only out of a hangover setting an ! where there should be a ? or a b where there should be a d, or miss aspace or a line or dingbat. And the proofreaders don't catch the error, passing the copy on as clean, or the make-up man fouls the assembly page, or the stoneman errs as he fastens the page of cold type and furniture with the chase, turning the quoin’s key. * Not to speak of the evil eye cast by fellow composers ready to knock the words of others, or the bosses writing on the composition: Kill. Old Shades, keep my words from such eyes and fretting about that pied world and let me go on regardless. And even if I foul up and the stewards are right to set Kill on my last page and my words are distributed and thrown in the hellbox, the real achievement will be that I tried to set the words right; that I did it with much labor and not without a font of love. But that said, * grant me the skill to free the leaden words from the words I set, undo their awkwardness, the weight of each letter of each word so that the words disappear, fall away or are forgotten and what remains is the metal of feeling and thought behind and beyond the cast of words dissolving in their own ink wash. Within this solution we find ourselves, meeting only here, through The Mystery, but relieved nonetheless to meet, if only behind the characters of one fly-boy’s words.