The one fresher’s fair mailing list I could never quite bring myself to unsubscribe from was the Society of Bibliophiles. It’s not just the fact that, with no auto-unsubscribe it would involve the slight embarrassment of actually emailing someone to tell them I’m not interested in the stuff they keep sending me. It’s also that, when it comes down to it, I am a bit of a bibliophile.
So when I found myself in Oxford this vac with not much work, and an email popped up inviting me to bibliophiles term-card printing event, using the Bod’s historic presses, I set aside a year and a half’s precedent of ignoring it, and dropped by.
The presses are kept in a large room in, or rather, behind, the Story Museum, a place I’d never noticed, halfway along Pembroke Street. What a fantastic space! It’s like walking, not quite back in time, but into a world you didn’t think existed, certainly not in central Oxford. A world of letterpress and inks, beautiful cast iron contraptions and ancient wooden ones, and, of course, the master printer himself.
There are five of us there to finish printing the term-cards; my first ever experience of the bibliophiles, I’m not sure whether this turnout is typical. Either way, no one seems perturbed. One side of the term cards is left to do, and the type-block, called the forme, is set in the press, ready for action. The block is made up of individual pieces, known in the trade as ‘sorts’, each one a letter, painstakingly put together in a frame, spaced with blanks, and screwed tight. Because it reads backwards it’s apparently notoriously difficult, when setting the type, to remember that what looks like a ‘b’ is actually a ‘d’; the expression “mind your p’s and q’s” originates from the printing trade. This is not the only idiom to arise from printing; it is essential to have enough ‘sorts’ to finish a page of text, thus ‘to be out of sorts’.
We share out the work; two of us roll red and black ink into the block, another fits the paper onto a hinged board, and another brings the paper down onto the inked block, rolls it under the press, and pulls it tight for a few seconds with a large wooden lever. The result is stunning – a perfect print, in strong red and black, ready to be cut, folded and sent out. It occurs to me how incredibly patient Paul, the master printer is – to watch five people clumsily muddle around with something that takes seven years in apprenticeship to learn (yes, seven), must be incredibly frustrating.
The process takes a couple of hours, and we get through sixty cards. It is a real labour of love on the part of the bibliophiles. But the result is, without getting too pseudy, a work of art. The slight indentation of the paper, the even slighter wonkyness of the odd letter, the crisp, yet not always perfect line, make the bibliophile’s term card unbeatably beautiful. I suppose one could compare it to an old brick house and a new one – the slight imperfections lend a certain character to the old, in contrast with the perfectly aligned, dead looking new. This is the difference – hand printed type ‘lives’, leaps off the page, and captures you, in a sense that digital printing, in its sterile perfection, can never hope to do.
Apparently the presses are now known as the Bodleian Hand-Printing Workshop – if an opportunity arises to go and try your hand at printing (classes are run for the English faculty in Michaelmas, apparently), I cannot recommend it enough.
