In 1901, at the age of nineteen, Virginia Woolf takes her bookbinding instructions from Miss Power and stands at her desk in the old nursery of her father’s house, blue curtains flapping in the window. She practices with vellum and linen, silk and leather, grids and paste and threads. She searches for books in need of repair, books that might be made better by a new leather lid, and writes her bookbinding passion into letters.
In 1914, she asks her friend Lytton Strachey if she might please be given responsibility for typing up his strange new manuscript—something for her hands to do, something to steady her mind as she emerges from a long madness. He says yes, and this she does, day after day after day, her typewriter keys hammering away, her fingers alert, her mind in the marinade of its present occupation.
In 1915, a tabletop letterpress comes to live on the dining room table at her home in Hogarth, and now Virginia and her husband, Leonard, are, like so many others of their era (drawing room ladies; hobbyists; Roger Fry and his Omega Workshop; truly, it’s a fad), obsessed with movable type and ink, talking sorts and versos, running out of t’s too soon, or n’s, expanding their type cases, their furnishings and furniture, they need more, they want more of everything, not to mention those binding papers: Japanese paper, hyacinth blue wrappers, paper-backed cloth, marbled paper boards (Vanessa makes these, so does Roger Fry’s daughter), papers from Czechoslovakia, brilliant colors, brilliant patterns, the labels where the titles go. She and Leonard buy what they can of what they love and when there isn’t enough for the book they are at the moment making, they trade one cover stock for another.
Uniformity is not the concern. Perfection is not the ambition, and certainly not the result, though the making of each book provides a lesson in the making of the next—how to prepare the woodcut illustrations, how to set the margins, how much ink is too much ink, how to become more exacting in the necessaries of proofreading, how to keep each printed page the same dimension.
Like William Morris before her and Walt Whitman before him, like any writer who doesn’t just write books but makes them, Virginia moves type. She locks it into place. She waits for the ink to be transferred to the page, then she disperses the type back into its case. Somehow words are fixed and somehow words are ephemera. White space is never accidental. The lines and the stories are reinvented.
“I’m still unsure whether setting type by hand involves a very intimate kind of reading, or not reading at all,” Anna Fewster writes in the online quarterly The Junket. “The repetitive rhythm of composing the text letter-by-letter makes it difficult to grasp a sense of the whole; occupied by fractured words, I often feel too close to a text to read it. Instead, taking hold of one character at a time, I find my awareness drawn to the shapes of letters, to the visual properties of words. Too often, our regular reading habits encourage a blindness to the ways in which this textual visuality produces meaning. Writing creates an image, forming expressions that cannot always be rendered in spoken language. As readers, we are familiar with the tactile sensations of experiencing a book, but unless they call attention to themselves the visible curls, strokes, proportions and placements of the black shapes on a white page often remain unnoticed.”
When asked how it might have felt for Woolf to sit down with the metal and ink of a letterpress, the novelist and book artist Lauren Faulkenberry says, “I think it would have felt like magic. Like the world had just opened itself up to every possibility.”
She continues: “Setting type is physical, time consuming, and therefore a contemplative activity,” the award-winning printmaker, designer, and lettering artist Joey Hannaford says. “For many people, the slow, deliberate process of setting type can increase one’s awareness of the deeper meanings of words and their relative range of interpretive possibilities. Any writer who enjoys composing words into meaning, this must increase the pleasure of the creative process.”
There is no becoming Virginia Woolf, no knowing all the secrets she never did confess to the letters, diaries, essays, novels, play, short stories, no proof that she extended her sentences because she preferred setting a comma to a period, no absolute evidence that she chose her words for how she imagined them in ink. But we can empathize, we can try, we can do it, again, for ourselves. And so, on a dark day at the start of The Year of the Pandemic, I find myself waiting for another beginner’s lesson in letterpressing. The Common Press lives at the University of Pennsylvania in the Fisher Fine Arts Library—a cathedral of a place designed by the monumentally ebullient Frank Furness, where, as a student years ago, I’d sit in the awed silence of the soaring reading room and watch the filter of the day through leaded glass and dangled dust motes. A cathedral like a fortress like a castle.
To find your way to the Press, you turnstile into the reading room, slide south between book stacks, and look for the door you’ve been told will be just around the corner, there. When you find it, descend and walk to the end of the short hallway. Since I am early, I’m invited in by Mary, who runs this operation with exquisite calm and a name-embossed blue apron, to look around, to take it in, this room like a working museum with its embodied history of presses and long-snouted oil cans, spools of string, Whitman stamps, ladders of wood furniture, cleaning rags, composing sticks, and stacked drawers of type—10 point Goudy Open, 12 point Greco Bold, 10 point Caslon Old Style, Nicholas Cochin Open—that have arrived through the years by way of gifts and acquisitions and occasional happenstance.
A handful of graduate students find their way into the space. My research assistant, Amber—wildly smart, joyously curious, her body inked, her poems percolated, her questions the ones Faulkenberry and Hannaford have been answering—does, too. We are to craft a collaborative page, Mary tells us. A group ode to Spring built out of the single sentences we’ll individually set in our personal composing sticks. Thin strips of brass and copper will serve as leading, to give our lines space. Blank-faced quads and spacers will give our words and punctuation room to breathe. The nicked letters of the font we choose (take care not to pull the drawers out too far) will be set into the composing stick right to left, upside down and backward, then maneuvered into the chase on the bed of the press, where they will be locked into momentary immobility and where we will take our turns at slipping the paper into its clips, cranking the inked cylinder, and letting go just before the machinery crushes our fingers. There will be art, Mary says, at the end of this.
We write our sentences. We choose our fonts. We navigate the compartments of each case drawer according to the job case diagrams we’ve been given. They are like little rooms. The lowercase x, q, v, u, t each in their own little wooden rooms on the bottom left of each drawer. The lowercase a and r, the semi-colon, the colon, the period, and the dash a few wooden rooms over. If you’re looking for the comma, look in the narrow room above the colon; there are more commas than there are colons, so the commas get a nicer room.
We’re to keep the lines on our composing sticks snug with our thumbs.
We’re to keep our type from jumping off its feet.
We’re to ask the questions we’ll have and now the work begins in earnest.
There are no windows to the outside world in this room. There is the steady beaming of intense overhead light, the sound of beginning letterpressers counting quietly, calling for a letter—Where did they hide the s?—and clinking through drawers for decorative flourishes. Standing, kneeling, squatting, we amateurs feel the pressure of the clock, cannot memorize the letters in their wooden rooms, are certain that the v is a u, that some previous letterpresser distributed their type hastily, or blindly. Mary, who can read upside down and backwards with ease, calms our nerves, suggests different quads, shows us how to tell that our work is still loose, unfinished, until we have each set our lines, each carried our composing sticks to the press, each maneuvered our set letters to the chase on the printing bed, and stood there watching Mary furniture our individual lines into a tight collective. She locks the quoins with a quoin key. She inks the rollers with an optimistic Kelly green, a flagrancy of color on a dark day on the edge of The Year of the Pandemic, as if Kelly green is our future and Spring is our right, and what we have is this:
a ray of
HOPE
rare soft birdsong
I still miss
knowing you less
everything could
happen unless
nothing does
Cherry blossom,
I await your arrival
IMPATIENTLY
Daffodils pop up
to say HELLO!
I have personally set just six words all this time, thirty-eight characters, a few bars of leading, a baker’s dozen of quad. I haven’t cleaned up, I haven’t distributed the type, and I am done for. The good kind of done for that comes from thinking with one’s hands, doing with one’s body, learning something new.
