It is the feel of the type. The tactility. The touch of type. It is language, and sound. This ability to, quite literally, play with words. With letters. The physicality of type, its heaviness. The weight of language in lead. An uppercase M weighs more than a lowercase t. The heft of it. Even space has weight, in lead. The spacing between words, or the leading between lines of type. What is left out might be just as important as what is there. Touch. The emotion conveyed by language. The motion of the press, the facility of it. Its hypnotic rhythm. The beat of it, like heartbeats. The pulse of it. The smell of printing, the odor of ink and machine grease, even the acrid stench of solvents, and the softer, more distant scent of well-made paper. The softness of paper, the touch of it. And the impression of type into the softness of paper.

It is the story. The narration. It is the characters and their conflicts. It is the plot and its resolution. Or sometimes its irresolution. It is the relation between letters and spacing, between one person and another, between type and paper. Between opening gambit and closing remarks. Between paper and ink. Between body movement and the motion of the press. It is the conversation. The process of writing and design, the dialogue between designing and printing, between printing and cleaning the press. I call these my “laundry prints,” so named for printing while cleaning. I also call it designing on your feet, or making design decisions while the flywheel is spinning and the platen snapping first open, then shut. Or painting at the press. It is the relation between the past and the present. It is the story.

It is paying attention. It is working with the press itself as a design tool, pushing that boundary when design stops and printing begins. It is appropriating images from the past. Writing a new story. Setting lead type by hand is not faster in the twenty-first century than it was in the fifteenth. Locking up a chase and printing on a platen press is not more efficient than offset lithography. Letterpress printing is not cheaper than the copy center in your neighborhood, nor is it more convenient than Control+P. So why bother? Why the Hell Not? cards, or you might think of them as microshort fiction that has been letterpress printed in very small, deliberately variable editions, so each and every print is one of a kind. Why? It is giving value to something other than speed. Other than efficiency. Other than economy and convenience. It is paying attention.