“All of us. Me too. Hell, I’ve known that kid since she was born, she used to hang around my printshop for hours after school, asking questions, pestering. ‘What’s this for, what’s that do?’ She’s such a sweetheart, I couldn’t think any more of her if she was my own daughter. And I know that anybody who helped her out of a tough spot could walk in here and the Rigbys would give him damn near anything they owned. So rest easy, I guess that’s what I wanted to say, just rest easy. These people aren’t kidding when they say they’re glad to see you.”
Then he was gone, clumping down the stairs, leaving me with one of the strangest feelings of my life.
I sat at the stove in Gaston Rigby’s clothes, gold-bricking.
What the hell do I do now? I thought.
7
A few minutes later I climbed down the stairs to the printshop and stood there in the quiet, aware of that primal link between Gaston Rigby’s world and my own. It was there, huge and fun-damental—amazing that I could live a life among books and be so unaware of the craftsmen who made them. Darryl Grayson had worked in a shop much like this one, and not far from this spot. Here he had practiced his voodoo, making wonderful things on quaint-looking equipment, just like this. I felt a strange sense of loss, knowing that someday we would attain technological perfection at the expense of individualism. This magnificent bond between man and machine was passing into history. I was born a member of the use-it-and-throw-it-away generation, and all I knew of Grayson’s world was enough to figure out the basics. The big press was power driven. The plate identified it as chandler and price , and it was run by a thick leather strap that connected a large wheel to a smaller one near the power source. On a table was a stack of leaflets that Rigby had been printing for an east Seattle car wash. I looked at the handpress. It had been made long before the age of electricity, but it was still, I guessed, what Rigby would use for fine work. It had a handle that the printer pulled to bring the paper up against the inked plate. The table beside it contained a few artistic experiments—poems set in typefaces so exotic and disparate that they seemed to rise up on the paper and battle for attention. It’s like beer, I thought foolishly. I had once been asked to help judge a beer-tasting, and I had gone, thinking,
Rigby seemed to have them all, yet instinctively I knew that this was far from true. Still, his collection was formidable. They were stacked in tiny compartments of those deep steel cabinets: there were at least fifty cabinets set around the perimeter of the room, and each had at least twenty drawers and each drawer held a complete and different face. I pulled open a drawer marked cooper black and saw a hundred tiny compartments, each containing twenty to fifty pieces of type. I looked in another drawer farther along: it was called caslon old style . I did know a few of the names: recognized them as pioneers of type development, but the names conjured nothing in my mind as to what their work would look like. I didn’t know Caslon from a Cadillac, and most of the names were as foreign to me as a typeface of old China. There were deepdene and bodoni, century and devinne, kennerley, futura, baskerville, and granjon . Each took up several drawers, with compartments for various point sizes. There were some that Rigby himself didn’t know—entire cabinets labeled unknown in all point sizes, unknown antique face, c. 1700, found near wheeling, west virginia, 1972. wheeling , Rigby called it, and it seemed to have come, or survived, in only one size. At the far end, nearest the presses, was a cabinet marked grayson types , each row subtitled with a name— Georgian, pacific, snoqualmie . On the other side were cabinets marked dingbats and woodcuts . I opened the first drawer and took out a dingbat. It was a small ornament, which, when I looked closely, became a fleur-de- lis that could perhaps be the distinguishing mark of a letterhead. In the far corner was a paper cutter: next to it, coming down the far wall, a long row of paper racks. Then the Linotype, an intricate but sturdy machine the size of a small truck. This was the world of Gaston Rigby. Enter it and step back to the nineteenth century, where— forgetting its sweatshops and cruelties and injustices—man’s spirit of true adventure, at least in this world, made its last stand.
And there was more. I came to a door halfway down the far wall and opened it to find a room almost as large as the first. I flipped on a light and saw what looked at first glance to be another workshop. But there was a difference—this had neither the clutter nor the workaday feel of the other. It looked like the workplace of a gunsmith I had once known, who also happened to be the world’s most vigorous neat-freak. There was a long workbench with rows of fine cutting tools—chisels, hammers, and files of all sizes. There were several large anvils, a row of powerful jewelerlike eyepieces, two strong and strategically placed lamps. This is where he does it, I thought: does it all by hand. I realized then that I was thinking of Grayson, not Rigby, as if I had indeed slipped back in time and somehow managed to saunter into Grayson’s shop. I saw the sketches on the wall—an entire alphabet, each letter a foot square and individually framed, upper and lower case. The drawings ringed the entire room. I looked closely and decided that they were probably originals. Each was signed
When I looked around again the world had changed. My calling had shifted at the foundation, and I knew I would never again look at a book in quite the same way. I lingered, hoping for some blazing enlightenment. At the far end of the room, half-hidden in shadows, was a door I hadn’t noticed before. Perhaps it was in there, the answer to everything. But the door was locked, so I had to forgo the pleasure.
I heard a bump up front: someone, I imagined, coming to fetch me. I turned out the light and went back through the shop to the front door. But when I opened it, whoever had been there was gone.
8
At the end of my universe is a door, which opens into Rigby’s universe. Either side must seem endless to a wayward traveler, who can only guess which is the spin-off of the other. We sat at the kitchen table, talking our way through their high country and along my riverbeds, and if much of what I told them was fiction, it was true in spirit and gave them little cause to ponder. I discovered that I could tell them who I was without giving up the bigger truth of why I was there. Occupation, in fact, is such a small part of a man that I was able to frame myself in old adven-tures and bring them as near as yesterday. Crystal served sweet rolls steaming with lethal goodness, the butter homemade, the sugar flakes bubbly and irresistible. Rigby sat across from me at the kitchen table, his face ruddy and mellow, cautiously friendly. Eleanor had excused herself and gone to the bathroom. Crystal pushed another roll toward me with the sage comment that nobody lives forever. That was one way of looking at it, so I took the roll while Rigby considered going for a third. “Ah, temptation,” he said in that soft, kind voice, and he and Crystal looked at each other and laughed gently as if sharing some deeply personal joke. I reached for the butter and said, “I’ll have to run for a week.” Crystal told me about a bumper sticker she had seen that said: don’t smoke…exercise…eat fiber…die anyway . And we laughed.
