When We Make Books

Click, Feb 2005 by Ackerman, Susan Yoder

My mother never scolds when I get mud or berry juice stains on my shirts. I reckon that's because of Father. He's the printer for the Virginia Colony. The soot and pitch and burnt sheep bones he mixes to make his ink are blacker than anything I play with.

This morning the sun is streaming in the windows as I follow Father into his printing shop. The brick floor is cold to my bare feet. Thomas the apprentice-he's sixteen and just learning the work of a printer-stands at an open wooden case. It holds hundreds of little pieces of metal, each with a raised letter of the alphabet on one end. The letters look backward, but when they're inked they'll print the right way.

Looking at a handwritten sheet of paper that has the words of the book Father wants to print today, Thomas takes the letters he needs from the case. He puts them upside down into his composing stick in the right order to spell each word. When the stick is full, he moves the letters to an iron frame.

Some day I'll know where to find each letter fast, like Thomas does. I want to help now, but I'm not tall enough to reach the upper case, where the capital letters are kept in ABC order. I can reach only the small letters in the lower half of the case.

It takes all morning for Thomas to fill the iron frame with enough lines of letters to make one page of The Virginia Almanack. It's just a little book, but the Almanack will have a calendar and the weather and important dates for Virginia for the year 1749.

"Why don't you print big books, like a family Bible?" I ask Father.

"Oh, Will," he says, "it'd take a whole year to make all the pages for a Bible. It would be too expensive for anyone to buy it. Most families we know can't afford many books-they own just two or three."

Printing is about to begin and will keep going until it's too dark to see in the shop. Two men work the big wooden press together.

I can't decide if I'd like most to be a beater or a puller. A beater gets to use the ink balls, one in each hand. They're made of wood and animal skins and stuffed with wool. You dip both balls in a puddle of ink, then beat them against the tray of letters. If you get too much ink on the ink ball, the letters will blur on the paper when they're printed. If you don't get enough ink, the printed letters won't be dark enough to be read.

But being a puller would be fun, too. I'd hang a dampened piece of paper on a padded frame and fold the frame over until the paper was lying against the tray of letters. I'd slide the tray under a heavy, thick piece of wood that would press the paper against the inky letters when I pulled on a bar. Then I'd open the frame and find a fresh bright sheet of new words-all printed and ready to be folded to make a book.

There may be sixteen pages printed on one big sheet of paper. The pages look like they're all mixed up, but Father arranges them so that when he folds up the big sheet, each page comes in just the right order. I love to watch him use his special cutter to slice off the folds so that the pages will turn. And of course he stitches the pages together with thread. Then it;s a book!

"Will!" Father calls. "Come help me in the bindery. I want to make paste paper for book covers."

An iron kettle is boiling in the open fireplace.

"Give the beetles a stir, would you now, Will?" Father asks.

I lean over to look in the boiling pot on the fire. I can't actually see the dried cochineal beetles Father ordered from Mexico, because they're tucked into a little bag. But their red color floats out as I move the long wooden spoon through the bubbling water.

"Should I add the flour now?" I ask.

Father looks into the boiling pot. "Yes. That's the perfect red color I want," he says. "Now, cook and stir till it's thick as gravy."

When the red flour-and-water paste is done, I bring the brass comb to Father. He uses it to spread the paste in wavy designs on lots of thick paper book covers. He hands me a scrap of paper, so I can practice making the decoration myself.

"A job for young Will!" comes the call from the printing room. My heart sinks. I know what's coming, and Td rather stay in the bindery making red designs. They've finished printing the hundreds of copies they need of one page and now they want me to wash the ink off each letter so it can be used again tomorrow.

"Coming, sir!" I say. Back in the print shop, I duck under the pages of drying print that hang on ropes like towels on washing day. Richard pours hot lye from the kettle over the letters, which have been placed in a special trough. I pick up a brush and scrub each little letter to remove the ink.

Later, when they're dry, I sort the letters one by one into the case-the b here, the m in its place. My hands are black; my shirt is streaked with red dye and black ink. When Father comes to take me home to dinner, his apron is smudged with the same colors.

I guess that's what happens when we make books.