We met a friend today who had been working in a printers in Indonesia. In the basement they still had the very old machines that had been brought across from the Netherlands. There was a whole collection of lead typeface and people who still knew how to assemble it and use it. They taught our friend, a writer, how to do it – during spare time in the evenings when the press was not too busy. Probably the typefaces themselves, the designs of the characters, have ceased to exist in Europe. There will be plenty of others – we have hundreds. But not these. And not in lead. Almost like an extinction, or the loss of an original work of art at least. Typefaces and printing – there is still, even setting within InDesign, a real magic to the appearance of the words on the page, a subtlety in the spacing between the dots of an ellipsis. Maybe there is something still about the lead itself. Perhaps one would still be wise, in the long run, to chose the lead casket over the silver or the gold.
David
