The typesetter's ear

You can hear a bad line before you see it. The press makes a slightly different sound when a letter is set too low. After a while, your ears proofread for you.

This is Room Tone. I'm Ada Lindqvist, and I'm sitting in a print shop that smells of ink and oil, with Inês Mota, a letterpress printer.

Mind your sleeve. Everything in here is a little bit wet.

Tell me what we're looking at.

These cases hold metal type. Every letter is a small block of lead alloy, cast backwards. Over there are the wood types, for posters, some of them a hundred years old. You pick each letter by hand, one at a time, and set them in a line in this, which is called a composing stick.

How long does a line take?

A short line, a minute. A page of small text, a whole afternoon. That's why every word matters. When a client sends me a long paragraph, the first thing I do is ask what they can cut.

Do they cut?

Usually. It's the best edit they'll ever get, because it costs them money per letter.

And the wood type?

Wood is softer and it remembers. Every poster printed from it left a tiny dent. When I print with old wood type, the grain shows in the ink. You can't fake that, and people can feel it, even if they don't know what they're looking at.

How did you learn all this?

From an old printer who was closing his shop. I bought two cases of type from him, and he threw in six months of Saturday lessons because he couldn't bear to see it done badly. He made me reset my first line eleven times.

What happens when you make a mistake?

On a computer, you press undo. Here, you print three hundred cards and then notice the comma upside down. So you check the proof, and then you check it again, reading backwards, letter by letter.

Have you ever kept a mistake?

Once. I printed a wedding invitation and one letter was from a slightly different font. Nobody would have noticed. I told the couple, and offered to reprint. They said keep it. They liked that one letter was different, like a guest who came in the wrong shoes.

That's a lovely way to put it.

It's their line, not mine. I just kept the cards.

Are there mistakes you never forgive?

Uneven pressure. If one side of the page is lighter than the other, it looks careless. That one I always reprint, even when the client says it's fine.

Who orders letterpress now?

Weddings, small shops that want business cards people keep, poets who want a short run of a single poem. And designers who are tired of screens and want something they can touch.

How do you take an order?

Slowly. I ask how many, what paper, and how soon. If they say tomorrow, I say no. Ink needs a day to dry before you can trim it. The schedule is set by the materials, not by me.

Do you ever turn work away?

When someone wants it to look like a computer printed it. Perfectly flat, no impression in the paper. That's not what this machine is for, and they'll be paying for the wrong thing.

Inês Mota, thank you for letting us in.

Wash your hands before you touch the door.

That's Room Tone. Next week, Tomás talks to a sound recordist about the quietest sound in the room.