The Nobility of the Composing Stick
Let the rabble have their steam. Let the opportunists south of Fleet Street debase themselves with these infernal "Rotary Presses." Here at The Gazette, we shall not surrender the soul of publishing to a mindless cylinder.
I hear the whispers in the alehouses. You fear the roller. You fear the speed. You ask, "Archibald, how can we compete with a machine that prints ten thousand sheets while we are still justifying the left margin?" I tell you this: Speed is the enemy of Truth.
Consider the typesetter. A man of dignity. He selects the letter 'A' from the case. He feels the cold lead. He places it in the stick with intention. There is a connection between the hand and the word that a steam-valve can never replicate. This is "Hand-Setting." It is pure. It is honest.
Now look at these "Roller-Men." They do not set type; they feed a beast. They pour ink into a hopper and pray. And what happens? I saw it myself at the Morning Herald. A gear slipped. A plate shifted. And the machine—lacking the moral compass of a human compositor—printed "The Queen is a Harlot" instead of "The Queen is in Harlow" across five thousand copies before anyone could stop the wheel. They call it progress. I call it a disaster in the Fold.
They say these machines free us from drudgery. I say they detach us from the craft. When you let a cylinder decide the pressure, you lose the "vibe" of the page. The ink smears. The serif is lost. It is soulless output generated by a mindless engine that consumes paper like a glutton. Rest easy, gentlemen. As long as I draw breath, we will not pivot to "Steam-Publishing." We will continue to hand-set every comma, every period, and every spacer. Because when the world drowns in a deluge of fast, cheap, steam-pressed garbage, the discerning gentleman will always pay a premium for a paper that was built, letter by tedious letter, by a human being who actually knows how to spell.
Back to the cases, lads. The future is manual.