One Line at a Time

The tour started at ten, and there were nine of them: a school group at the front, a couple from Denmark, and Farida, who had come on her own and said nothing to anybody in the queue.

The guide was about twenty. He held the program in one hand and read from it in a bright voice. The printing works had opened in 1897, he said. At its best, the production floor had run three shifts and printed two evening papers and a racing paper. Now it was a museum, and the café in the old paper store was quite good.

Then he took them past the presses to the Linotype machines, and Farida stopped hearing him, because of the smell. Ink and warm metal and something under that which she had no word for. It was the smell of her father’s hands.

“A man sat here,” the guide said, patting the seat, “and typed one line at a time. If he made a mistake, the whole line had to be melted and set again. Imagine the pressure.”

Somebody asked how much the men had been paid. Somebody else asked if it was dangerous. Farida thought about her father coming home at seven in the morning with ink in the lines of his fingers that no soap would touch, reading the paper backwards out of habit. He had finished primary school and nothing after it, and he had educated himself on the pages he set, one line at a time, for thirty-one years.

At the end of the tour, the guide brought them to a small hand press. Each visitor could have a card printed with their name on it, he said. It took two minutes and it was included in the ticket.

The Danish couple went first. When it was Farida’s turn, she gave him a name that was not hers, and spelled it out slowly, letter by letter.

“Family?” the guide asked, setting the type.

“He worked upstairs,” she said. “Thirty-one years.”

She carried the card out into the street, holding it by the edges, because the ink was still wet. Her father had set thousands of names in metal and never once his own.