The Bookman's Wake (8 page)

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,
this is so damn silly
. Beer was beer, wasn’t it? No, it was not. I learned
that day that there are more beers in heaven and earth than
mankind ever dreamed of. And so it is with type.

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
Grayson
, in pink ink, in the lower-right corner. At the end of the
workbench I found a large steel plate. It was a die or
matrix, a foot square, containing the letter
G
in upper case. It corresponded exactly to the
G
framed on the wall. Just beyond the matrix was a long
device that looked like a draftsman’s instrument: it
had a swinging arm that could trace the
G
and, I guessed after examining it, scale it down. Suddenly
I could see the process. Grayson would first sketch his
letters on paper. Then he would cast a die in metal. Then,
using his one-armed machine, he could scale it down to any
point size, down to the type on an agate typewriter if he
so chose. He was the Compleat Printer, with no need of a
type foundry because he was his own typemaking factory.
Rigby had saved a set of his sketches and some of his
equipment: he had main-tained the working environment of
Darryl Grayson, almost like a museum.

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.

A
t 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.

In twenty minutes my dilemma had been honed to a
razor-thin edge. Something had to give, for deception is
not my strong point. There was a time when I could lie to
anyone: the world I went around in was black-and-white, I
was on the side of truth and justice, and the other side
was overflowing with scum-sucking assholes. Those days
ended forever when I turned in my badge. I could like these
people a lot: I could open a mail-order book business in a
house up the road and be their neighbor. Every morning at
eight I’d wander into Rigby’s shop and learn
another secret about the universe beyond the door, and
sometimes in the evenings Crystal would invite me for
dinner, where I’d give them the true gen about my
rivers and deserts. Shave about eight years off my age and
you could almost see me married to their daughter, raising
a new generation of little bookpeople in the shadows of the
rain forest. They were the real stuff, the Rigbys, the salt
of the earth. Suddenly I liked them infinitely better than
the guys I was working for, and that included all the
judges and cops of the great state of New Mexico.

They were not rich by any means. The microwave was the
only touch of modern life in the house. The refrigerator
was the oldest one I’d ever seen still working in a
kitchen. The stove was gas, one step up from a wood burner.
The radio on the shelf was an Admiral, circa 1946; the
furniture was old and plain, giving the house that rustic,
well-lived look. Whatever Darryl Grayson had taught Gaston
Rigby all those years ago, the art of making money was not
part of the mix. Grayson’s name had come up just
once, in passing. Fishing, I had cast my line into that
pond with the offhand remark that Eleanor had told me of a
man named Grayson, who had taught Rigby the business. His
hand trembled and his lip quivered, and I knew I had
touched something so intrinsic to his existence that its
loss was still, twenty years later, a raw and open wound.
Crystal came around the table and leaned over him, hugging
his head. “Darryl was a great man,” she said,
“a great man.” And Rigby fought back the tears
and tried to agree but could not find the words. Crystal
winked at me, encouraging me to drop the subject, and I
did.

“What’s all this?” Eleanor said,
coming in from the hall. “What’re we talking
about?”

“I was just asking about the Linotype,” I
said, making as graceful a verbal leap as a working klutz
can expect to achieve.

“There hangs a tale,” Eleanor said.
“Tell him about it, Daddy.”

Rigby tried to smile and shook his head.

“You tell ‘im, honey,” Crystal
said.

Eleanor looked at her father, then at me.
“It’s just that we had a kind of an adventure
getting it here.”

“It was a damned ordeal was what it was,”
Crystal said. “What do you think, Mr. Janeway, how
does ten days without heat in weather that got down to
twenty below zero sound to you?”

“It sounds like kind of an adventure,” I
said, and they laughed.

“It was our finest moment,” Eleanor said,
ignoring her mother, who rolled her eyes. “Daddy
heard from a friend in Minnesota that a newspaper there had
gone broke and they had a Linotype in the basement.”
“It had been sitting there for twenty years,”
Crystal said, “ever since the paper converted to cold
type. Hardly anyone there remembered what the silly thing
had been used for, let alone how to use it.”

“It was ours for the taking,” Eleanor
said.

“Craziest damn thing we ever did,” Crystal
said. “

Who’s telling this, Mamma? Anyway, it was the
middle of winter, they were gonna tear down the building
and everything had to be out within two weeks.”

“It was one of those instant demolition
jobs,” Crystal said. “You know, where they
plant explosives and bring it all down in a
minute.”

“So we drove to Minneapolis,” Eleanor
said.

“Nonstop,” said Crystal.

“The heater in the truck went out in
Spokane…”

“Didn’t even have time to stop and get it
fixed. We took turns driving, sleeping when we
could.”

“Hush, Mamma, you’re spoiling the story. So
we get to Minnesota and it’s so cold my toenails are
frozen. The snow was piled four feet deep, the streets were
like white tunnels. You couldn’t even see in the
shops at street level.”

“They had this thing stored in a basement room
that was just a little bigger than it was,” Crystal
said. “They must’ve taken it apart and rebuilt
it in that room, because right away we could see that
we’d never get it out unless we took it apart and
carried it piece by piece.”

I looked at Rigby. “Had you ever done anything
like that?”

He shook his head.

“He had to figure it out as he went along,”
Eleanor said.

“Gaston can do anything, once he sets his mind to
it,” said Crystal.

“Anybody can, with a little time and
patience,” Rigby said.

“We spent two days in that basement,”
Eleanor said, “tearing down this machine, packing the
parts, and putting them on the truck. It was so cold your
hands would stick to the steel when you touched it, and all
around us the wreckers were stringing
explosives.”

“But we got the damn thing,” Crystal said,
“and sang Christmas carols all the way home…in
February.”

“We thought of getting the heater fixed in
Montana,” Eleanor said, “but by then, hey, it
was up to ten degrees—a major heat wave.”

“And we could smell home,” Rigby said.

I could almost feel the satisfaction and joy of getting
it set up here in working order, and I said something to
the effect.

“Yeah,” Crystal said, “even I
can’t deny that.”

“You can’t put a label on it,” Rigby
said.

“Somehow you mean more to each other,”
Eleanor said, “after you’ve done something like
that.”

A sudden silence fell over the table. The evening was
over, and I knew that, once again, I was not going to bust
her. I didn’t know why—it certainly
wasn’t Poe anymore—but I was ready to live with
it, whatever happened.

“You’ll find a lot of books over there if
you’d like to read,” Crystal said. “Sorry
there’s no TV.”

I made a so-who-needs-it gesture with my hands.

“Breakfast at six-thirty,” she said.
“That’s if you want to eat with us. I’ll
rustle you up something whenever you come over.”

She walked me to the door, leaving Eleanor and her
father alone at the kitchen table. On the porch she took my
hand. “Thank you,” she whispered. Then she
hugged me tight and disappeared back into the house. I
stood on the porch listening to the rain. The night was as
dark as it ever gets, but I felt as if a huge weight had
been lifted from my back. There would be no bust, no
handcuffs, no force. I watched my five grand grow wings and
fly away into the night. Half the puzzle was finished.

Now that I knew what I was not going to do, I thought I
could sleep.