Although computers can mimic the style of letterpress printing, there is still demand for the original process—people like to see the embossment from the wood and metal type, the visual quirks of the old printing blocks, and the small discrepancies between each pull of the press. They are small things, but still things that computers can’t do.

After mapping out a design for each poster or invitation, a typesetter uses a composing stick, a small adjustable tray that holds type, to organize lines of text into a standard grid. When putting together type, I would first retrieve each letter I needed for the line of text I was working on. After I had assembled all of the letters in my composing stick, I would add spaces—the pieces of wood and metal small enough that they don’t print. The trick was equally distributing space between the words and then adding spaces between the letters until the line of type filled the length of the composing stick. As the designer Ellen Lupton writes in her book Thinking with Type, “Design is as much an act of spacing as an act of marking.”

Typesetting is slow. As I arranged and organized letterforms, I would pass the time talking with the two printers who ran the shop—about art, about politics, about creative anxiety, about the individual merits of the different sandwiches at the deli down the street. I also spent a good deal of time taking apart the designs that had already been printed—going letter by letter and space by space, putting each bit of metal and wood type back into its correct drawer or cubby so it could be used again for another design. Inefficiency is a virtue in a print shop. When no one is running the press, everything can be cleaned up and reconfigured. The spaces aren’t just in the composition, but in the workplace as well.

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In letterpress printing, spaces are added and removed as necessary to make sure that the words are justified to the margins of the page. But with the introduction of the typewriter, spaces became uniform. Christopher Latham Sholes invented the first successful typewriter in 1867. It resembled the typewriter we know today, except that it printed on the underside of the roller; the typist could not see the result until after finishing. Because typewriters work in a continuous line, there isn’t any way to adjust how much space goes between letters and words. If you look at the original typewritten manuscripts of any modern writer, you’ll see that the right hand margins are uneven, creating jagged blank spaces. The margins are always corrected in the final printing of the book, which by the 20th century was primarily done through offset printing, a process that transfers an entire page or image at a time from a single plate, as opposed to the individual forms of letterpress printing.

Today’s word processors mimic letterpress printing more closely than they do typewriters. Although the computer keyboard isn’t all that different from an early typewriter’s, the word processor can space and arrange text on a page after it has been typed. Many of the fonts in an ordinary word processor can also be found in the drawers of a print shop.