Rudy Lehman, typesetter

A couple weeks ago I discovered letterpress, which is to printing what the Windsor is to the chair. I found Lehman Typesetting in Wilkinsburg on the Briar Press website, and this past Monday I stopped by for a visit.

This is Rudy Lehman, proprietor, sitting at his Linotype. In the tray to his lower right, past the keyboard, are thin bricks of lead, each cast on the fly from forms assembled from individual brass letter forms. The letter forms, each called a matrix or mat, are stored in the sloped cartridge at top above the keyboard. The left half of the machine houses the lead furnace! You can't see it here, but the floor under the furnace is covered with lead scraps. This set-up is as authentically awesome as the above picture and this write-up would have you believe. Total time warp.

I asked Rudy how long it would take to set a book. "On a good day, you can do 4, 5, 6 pages." Two months! I asked him if he ever got burned. "Oh yeah! All the time. But, knock on wood, I've never seen this: if the line is spaced out too much, there's a chance that the lead will come shooting up through and shower down on you. There are mechanical safeties, but mechanical safeties never work 100%." Lead volcano!

So on the one hand, I was obviously experiencing something foreign. In other ways, though, Rudy and his business were definitely recognizable. I ran my own small web design shop for five years, and I recognized not only the continuity of the small business owner here, but even the work itself. Rudy and I commiserated on how both our jobs require extended concentration, all too often broken—whether by telemarketers calling his rotary phone, or spammers in my inbox. I asked him about his family, and learned that his sons worked the Linotype with him from about age 10. I usually wag my head in dismay when I see how fluent my seven-year-old is with a mouse and keyboard. But talking to Rudy made me realize that, contrary to my usual spin on the specialization of labor, Leah would be ready to start working with me in a few more years, had I stuck with the business.

Nowadays, letterpress is entering retirement in much the same way as the Windsor chair: as a hobby or badge for the more affluent. But Rudy Lehman is the real deal yet. The market for letterpress today is the modern bride looking for a tasteful invitation, but Rudy's six or eight remaining clients (he had 20-25 during his heyday) are old fellas like himself printing Lodge schedules and church dinner tickets. When Rudy handed me a sample print from his work, I ran my fingers over it expecting to find the "bite" that John Kristensen led me to expect. It wasn't there. I asked Rudy, and he told me that the lack of a bite is the sign of a good letterpressman. "You want to kiss the paper, not punch it!"

In other words, the bite is to letterpress as even spindles are to the Windsor chair. To generalize, can we say that as a craft matures, the characteristics of its mastery reverse? But then doesn't this highlighting of previously muted foibles contribute to the trend toward hyperreality? Many craftsmen would see themselves as resisting the pressure to sensationalize. But if you pay twice as much for a chair or some stationery, you want to feel the difference, don't you? It's one thing for mature crafts to depend on the Internet. But looking more closely, it seems that the advance of civilization changes not just the way transactions are handled for a craft, but the practice of the craft itself.