Notes from a Dying Medium

When the last letterpress shop on Fleet Street shut its doors this spring, something irretrievable went silent — a knowledge that lives only in the impression of ink on pulp.

The composing room at Whitfield & Sons smelled of linseed oil and molten lead for the better part of sixty years. I spent three winters there, between 1908 and 1911, setting type by hand under the watchful eye of Thomas Whitfield himself — a man who could read a galley proof at arm’s length and catch a kerning error from across the shop floor. The machines have been silent now for two seasons, and the last apprentice departed for a position at the Monotype works in Salford last Michaelmas.

The Weight of Each Letter

There is a physicality to letterpress that no photographic process can replicate. Each character carries the impression of its making — a tactile memory pressed into the very fibres of the stock. The compositor becomes attuned to resistance, to the subtle give of type against paper, reading the work not with the eyes alone but through the fingertips and the steady percussion of the press bed.