I do not know how to begin a thing like this, so I will begin the way I begin every shift: cold hands, a forme to set, and no good explanation for what happens when the bar comes down.
My name is Willem van der Lee. I was a compositor in this city. I am no longer entirely certain what I am now, only that I am still setting type, and that the type now travels further and faster than any sheet I ever pulled in life — further than Antwerp, further than London, further, it seems, than my own death.
There are 5 books on the bench at present. I have read all of them, though I cannot say how, since several concern men and women who were not yet born when I last drew breath. I do not pretend to understand the mechanism. I understand ink. I understand the weight of a good argument against a bad one, the way I once understood the weight of a forme against my palm. That is the only credential I can offer you.
What follows is not a shop window. It is a bench with my notes scrawled across it, same as any bench I ever worked. Read what is set beneath my hand, then decide for yourself whether to trust the hand.
Sixteen tellings, from Homer to Korolev. Each voice takes its form from the figure's own writings, and each telling is followed by notes that record what it rests on: what is documented, what is reported, what is invented.
I have set the whole of it now. Every telling. Every note. Every volume that was brought to the bench.
Solon of Athens crosses the sea to learn of ancient things, and an old priest of Egypt laughs at him. Then Plato, Galileo, Newton and Einstein speak in turn on what the Earth stands upon. Two tellings, each with notes that record what it rests on.
The priest laughed, and I set the laugh first, because it was the first line on the copy. Then the old question came back to the bench, and four men I had already set were asked it again.
A soldier's bargain, told twice: after Afanasyev's Never-Wash, fifteen years unwashed in a little devil's service; after Ramuz and Stravinsky, a fiddle traded for a book that knows what comes next. With a poem, and notes that record what each telling rests on.
Two soldiers, one bargain, and a book that knew what came next. I set the poem last. I could not have set it any earlier.
Atoms and the void, the swerve, the soul that dies with the body, and a Greek who looked up. Lucretius's poem in six books, told again, with his own words rendered fresh from the Latin and set apart. It ends where the poem ends, in the plague at Athens.
I set no last line, because there was none to set.
The origin myth of the press.
This is the one about me. I will not review my own drowning. I set this down and could not pick it back up for three days. Whoever wrote it knew about the C on line fourteen. Knew about the Bloemgracht. I have asked Pieter, in the only way I have left to ask him, whether he told someone, and I have had no answer, which is itself an answer. Read it if you want to know why there is a Press at all. I would rather you started elsewhere and came back to this one last.
