Imprimi Potest, all that plus Bird’s Nest

This NYT article about an exhibit of hundreds of historical punches and matrices of various typefaces and dozens of books on view at Manhattan’s Grolier Club came out last year – LAST YEAR, friends – but remains relevant even today.

They offer a reminder, in the ethereal era of bitmapping, that type was once the tangible province of engravers and metal casters who labored in unforgiving but enduring media. To make a C with a cedilla, for example, involved a lot more effort and thought than holding down the Option key on your Mac. A comma-shaped steel appendage had to be lashed with string to the bottom of the C punch to produce a new matrix.

“People are practically printing books with their smartphones,” Mr. Fletcher said, in a tone suggesting that he did not think this was such a good idea. “It’s much more gratifying to be able to touch something and find out it’s real, rather than a matter of bits and bytes.”

Reminiscent of a certain character in a certain book forthcoming from Korrektiv Press:

He copied the drawing and put it up with the rest of his poems on a blog so as to be able to access them from the computers at school, and now all he had to do was find someone who’d be willing to publish it as a chapbook. He’d found a number of smaller presses that, provided with enough funds, seemed to specialize in this. Of course the way things seemed to be going, blogs were the future anyway. Maybe poets would soon stop bothering with the chapbooks and go to electronic self publishing. But there’s something about holding a book in your hands; something about paper that still seems to constitute something more real.

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