The Last Letterpress in Fort Kochi

The type cases at the Malabar Press are arranged by frequency, not by alphabet. The letter e sits in the largest compartment, at the point where a compositor's right hand falls without being asked. Q and Z are exiled to the top corners, where reaching for them costs a full second.

This arrangement is called a lay², and no two printing houses in Kerala used quite the same one. It was a house dialect: learned in the first year of an apprenticeship, never written down, and unusable anywhere else.

Balakrishnan Nair has been reading this particular lay for forty-three years. He is the last person alive who can.

The economics of one job

The press occupies the ground floor of a building on Bazaar Road that has been subdividing itself since the 1950s. Upstairs is a homestay. Next door is a shop selling spices to tourists at four times what the same spices cost two streets inland.

Malabar Press does not sell anything to tourists. Its work, such as it remains, is wedding invitations for families who have used it for three generations, and occasional letterpress runs for a design studio in Bengaluru that discovered the shop on Instagram in 2019 and has been sending it work ever since, at rates that Nair describes as “embarrassing, in the correct direction.”

The studio commissions perhaps eight jobs a year. It is not enough to sustain the press. It is enough to keep it from closing, which is a different and lower bar.

What a job stick teaches

Anjana Pillai came to Fort Kochi in March to photograph type for a dataset. She is a researcher working on historical document recognition: training systems to read printed Malayalam from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where the letter forms are inconsistent, the inking is uneven, and the existing models fail badly.

She expected to spend three days photographing specimens. She has been coming back for five months.

I thought the problem was the images. It is not the images. It is that I did not understand what I was looking at.

Malayalam typesetting carries a specific difficulty: the script has conjunct characters, and in metal type each conjunct is its own sort¹: its own piece of lead. A press's inventory of conjuncts is a record of editorial decisions. Which conjuncts a house stocked, which it approximated, which it simply refused to set and reworded around: all of that is invisible in a printed page and completely visible in a type case.

Nair does not know what a machine-learning model is, in any technical sense, and has declined several attempts to explain it. What he knows is which sorts the press ran out of in 1988 and never replaced, and what the compositors did instead.

That information exists in no archive. It exists in his hands.

The apprenticeship problem

There is no shortage of interest in letterpress. There is a shortage of the eight years it takes.

Two design students spent a summer at the press in 2022. Both were serious, both were capable, and both learned to set clean type at roughly a fifth of working speed, which is the expected result after three months and no indication of anything at all.

What is actually being lost

The romantic account of a closing letterpress is about objects: the machines, the smell of ink, the physicality of it. That account is available in a hundred photo essays and it is not wrong, exactly. It is just not the interesting part.

The interesting part is that a press is a body of undocumented practical knowledge about a writing system, accumulated by people solving specific problems under specific constraints, and that this knowledge was never considered worth recording because everybody who needed it already had it.

Pillai's dataset will capture some of it. She is candid that it will not capture most. “I can photograph every sort in this room,” she said. “I cannot photograph the reason he reaches for one and not the other.”

Nair is sixty-seven. The press has no successor and he has made no arrangements, which he regards as a practical matter rather than a sad one.

Asked what should happen to the type cases, he thought about it for a while. “Someone should use them,” he said. “Not keep them. Use them.”