A Monument of That and You

by Ackroydian Temporal Layering, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

I

I set this down as I set all Things, one Letter at a Time and backwards, in the Stick, with my Thumb upon the last Sort to keep the Line from falling; and if there be Errors in it they are mine and not the Devil's, though Mr Clay was used to say that in a Printing-house the two are not easily told apart. My Name is Elias Mounsey. I was bound Apprentice to Mr Nehemiah Clay of Shoe Lane, Printer, in the Year 1806, and was out of my Time a Twelvemonth before the great Frost, so that what I did upon the River I did as a Journeyman, for my Wages and a Share of the Pence, which were many. I compose this in Long Primer, from no Copy but my own Memory, which is the only Copy I possess of those Days, the Ice having taken the rest.

You must know that a Compositor reads the World the wrong way about. He sees every Word reversed in the Metal before ever he sees it right upon the Paper, so that he lives always a little behind the Reader, or a little before him, I have never determined which. The Letters in the Case are cold in the Morning and warm by Noon, and a Man who has handled them some Years will tell you that they remember every Hand that set them, as a Stair remembers every Foot; and I believed this before the Frost, as a Fancy, and I believe it now as a Fact, for which I have no Proof but what follows.

The Frost had held from Christmas. There were Fogs so thick that the Link-boys lost their way in the Strand, and Snow upon the Snow, and then a Cold so bitter that the Ink stiffened upon the Balls and we were obliged to keep a Pan of Coals beneath the Stone. On the last Day of January the Ice that came down from above Bridge did not go out again with the Tide but lodged and locked between the Piers of London Bridge, which, as all the World knows, are so close set that they stop the River like a Comb; and the next Morning the Thames from the Bridge up to Blackfriars was one white Floor, very rough and humped, with the Lighters frozen in it like Flies in Sugar.

Mr Clay was at the Stairs by Nine. He was a lean Man, with a Face the Colour of Paper that has been left in a Window, and he had in his Head the History of every Frost since the Year 1683, when, he told me, the Printers had set up their Presses upon the Ice and printed the Names of all who came, the King among them. Elias, said he, the River is a Street now, and every Street must have its Printer. By Noon we had the old Common Press out of the Shop and upon a Sledge, with two Cases of Long Primer and one of Great Primer for the Heads, and a Chase, and the Quoins, and a Ream of Demy cut down, and the Watermen who had lost their Trade took Twopence of us to set it down upon the Ice, and Twopence more to tell us it would bear.

It bore. By Afternoon there was a Lane of Booths across from Blackfriars to the Surrey Side, and somebody had painted a Board and nailed it to an Oar, and the Board said THE CITY ROAD, and so it was called. There was Gin sold there, and Gingerbread, and Brunswick Mum, which is a Beer brewed of Wheat and very thick; there were Skittles, and Swings, and a Sheep roasted whole that was more Smoke than Mutton; there were Women who danced and Women who sold Oranges and Women who did neither but walked up and down; and on the third Day, as I shall swear to my Death, an Elephant was led across below the Bridge of Blackfriars, its Feet wrapped in Sacking, and it went very slow and looked upon all of us with an Eye of great Contempt, as though it had seen Rivers freeze before and thought nothing of it.

Our Trade was Names. A Man would come to the Booth with his Sweetheart on his Arm, and pay his Penny, or his Sixpence if he had drunk enough, and I would set his Name in the Stick while he watched, he reading it backwards over my Shoulder and not able to make it out, and laughing; and I would lock it up in the Forme beneath the Verses that Mr Clay had composed, or had taken from the Year 1683, which is the same thing in our Trade; and then a Pull of the Bar, and the Platen came down, and the Card came off damp with his Name upon it, and under his Name the Words, Printed on the River Thames. The Verses ran thus, and I set them so many times that I could set them now with my Eyes shut, and have:

Amidst the Arts which on the Thames appear, To tell the Wonders of this icy Year, Printing claims prior Place, which at one View Erects a Monument of THAT and YOU.

Mr Clay said that Paper lasts longer than Stone if it be kept dry, and longer than Men whether it be kept dry or no.

I slept in the Booth those Nights, to guard the Press, wrapped in the Tympan-cloth and a Horse-blanket. It was not quiet. The Ice speaks at Night. It groans and it ticks, and there is a Sound under it of the Tide going out beneath your Body, very far down, like a great Breath drawn and not let go; and lying with my Ear upon the Boards I heard it, and I heard also, or I dreamed I heard, a Sound like a Press working a long Way off, the Bar pulled and let go, pulled and let go, though every Press upon the River was stood still and every Pressman drunk or sleeping.

II

Somebody is working a press under the railway.

The sound comes through the brick: the long pull of the bar, the knock of the platen, the bar let go. A train goes over at 6.14 and the sound stops and then it starts again. It is Len Pask, fifty-eight, grey hair clippered short because it saves thinking about it, and he has been doing it since four.

The arch is cold. There is a fan heater on the floor, pointed at the inking slab so the ink will move. The arch smells of linseed and white spirit and wet brick. Water comes in at the back wall when it rains and runs along a channel he cut in the concrete fifteen years ago, out under the roller door into the street.

The press is an Albion, made in London in the eighteen-nineties. It is the wrong press. In 1814 they would have had a wooden common press, or one of the new iron Stanhopes if they were rich. Nobody at the Bankside Winter Fair will know that. They will know it is old and black and that it makes a noise. Len knows. He minds a little.

He has two jobs for the fair. The first is the cards. He has copied the border and the verse from a frost fair card in a museum photograph, set it in Caslon, and left a gap in the middle for names. On Saturday he will stand on the riverside walk below the Globe with the Albion on a pallet and print people's names for five pounds a card. Kerry, his niece, will take the money on a card reader. It was her idea.

The second job is the pamphlet. That was his idea, and Kerry thinks it is mad. Twelve pages, hand-set, sewn, sold at the stall for eight pounds. The Account of Elias Mounsey, Journeyman Printer, Upon the Ice. He made Elias up in September, on the bus. He needed a voice to tell the story of the fair and none of the real ones would do: the books by the printers on the ice are mostly jokes and weather. So he made a boy from Shoe Lane, and gave him a master and a bad blanket, and wrote him a page a night in a school exercise book.

Then he stopped writing in the book. Since the middle of October he has set Elias straight into the stick, standing at the case, with no copy. He has never done that before with anything. He is a careful compositor. He writes everything out first.

But the sentences arrive faster than he can write them. They arrive the right way round in his head and the wrong way round under his thumb, and he does not have to think about either. He sets a line, justifies it, slides it onto the galley, sets the next. At six he stops and pulls a proof and reads it under the strip light. It reads like somebody else. That is what he wanted. It is also not what he wanted.

He reads the proof again. There is a line about the elephant. He knew about the elephant; everybody who reads about the 1814 fair knows about the elephant. He did not know about the sacking. He takes his phone out and searches, and finds nothing about sacking, and puts the phone away face down on the stone.

Further down there is the beer. Brunswick Mum, which is a Beer brewed of Wheat and very thick. He has never heard of Brunswick Mum. He searches again. It is real. It was sold on the ice in 1814. There is a list of what was sold, on a website for schoolchildren: beef, mutton, gin, gingerbread, Brunswick Mum.

He must have read it. He has read a great deal since September. That is the obvious thing, and he says it out loud to the arch, which does not answer.

He goes out to the café at the end of the street and has a tea with two sugars and comes back. The roller door is up as he left it. A train goes over. The proof is on the stone where he left it, and in the stick, lying on the case where he put it down, there is a line he has no memory of setting:

and a Woman's Head upon it, which I took for one of Queen Anne's

The type is Long Primer. He sets in Pica. He has three cases of Long Primer, bought in a lot from a firm in Leicester that closed, and he has never opened them.

He takes the line out of the stick. He reads it backwards, the way it sits, and then he reads it forwards in his head, and he locks it into the forme with the rest, because it is good, and because it is not his, and because he has no idea what else he would do with it. In the morning it is still there.

III

It was still there in the Morning, the Ice, and so was I, though I had not expected either; for that Night, which was the Night of the Fourth, the Wind went round into the South-west and the Snow turned to Rain, and the Ice under the Booth began to sweat, and a Waterman put his Head in at the Canvas and told Mr Clay that if he valued his Press he would have it off the River by Noon.

Mr Clay did not value his Press. He valued the Pence, and the Pence were never so many as on that last Day, when every Man in London who had not yet stood upon the Thames came down to stand upon it before it was too late, and every one of them wanted his Name. We printed four hundred Cards before Dinner. The Ink ran thin with the Wet. The Paper cockled. The Names came off the Press blurred at the Edges, like Names upon a Stone in a Churchyard that the Weather has been at, and nobody complained, for they were Names Printed on the River Thames, and nobody else would ever have such a Name again.

It was in the Dusk of that Day that he came.

He was a Man of perhaps fifty or sixty Years, without a Hat, his Hair grey and cut close like a Felon's, and he wore a short Coat of some black Stuff that shone with the Rain and had no Buttons that I could see. He did not walk as the others walked, carefully, with their Arms out. He walked straight up the City Road as if he knew it, which no Man could, it being four Days old. He stopped before our Booth and looked, not at me, but at the Press, a long Time, and then at the Case, and I saw his Fingers move against his Coat, as mine move when I am setting in my Sleep.

He said, Is that Long Primer?

I said it was.

He said, I have three Cases of it, and never opened them.

I did not know what to say to this, and so I asked him his Name, as I asked every Man; and he told it me, and I set it. PASK, he said, and I set PASK, and he said, Leonard, and I set LEONARD before it, and he watched the Letters go into the Stick backwards and read them, I swear it, as easily as I did, his Lips moving the wrong way about. There is no Man in the World reads Type like that but a Compositor; and I knew every Compositor in London by Sight, from Shoe Lane to Bartholomew Close, and he was none of them.

I locked his Name up in the Forme and pulled the Card and gave it him. He held it a long Time, the Rain falling upon it, and he read the Verses half aloud, Erects a Monument of THAT and YOU, and then he looked at me, and it was the Look a Man gives to his own Handwriting when he finds it in a Book he does not remember owning.

He paid me with a Coin. It was a small Coin of a white Metal like Silver, but too light for Silver, and it had seven Sides, which no Coin has, and a Woman's Head upon it, which I took for one of Queen Anne's, though I had never seen one of hers so bright; and when I looked up from it to thank him he had gone back down the City Road toward the Surrey Side, and I lost him among the Booths that were coming down, and the Lanterns.

At Seven the Ice began to go. I will not write of that. There were Men and Women drowned, and a Booth of Gingerbread went under entire with a Boy in it, and I heard his Voice under the Ice for as long as it takes to set a Line of Type, and then I did not. Mr Clay's Press went through by the second Pier of Blackfriars Bridge, with the Bar standing up out of the Water like a Hand, and then it was gone. I saved the Forme, and one Case, and the Coin, which was in my Pocket. Mr Clay saved nothing, and did not speak to me for a Week, as though it were my Fault the River had remembered it was a River.

In the Spring I was sent with a Parcel of Bills to a Tanner at Bermondsey, and I went out by Tooley Street and across the Fields, where there is nothing but Tan-pits and Market-gardens and the Smell of the Hides, which is the Smell of Death made useful. It was coming on to Evening, and there was a white Mist lying on the Fields, and through the Mist I saw a Row of Arches of Brick, very high, each one like the Arch of a Bridge, going away East one after another as far as the Eye could follow, and nothing upon them, and nothing under them but Darkness; and there are no such Arches at Bermondsey, nor were ever, nor any Bridge there to need them. In one of the Arches there was a Light. In the Light a Man stood at a Press. He had his back to me, and his Hair was grey and cut close, and as I watched he pulled the Bar, and let it go, and I heard the Platen knock.

I did not go nearer. I stood in the Field a long Time, until the Mist came up over the Arches and took them, and the Light last of all.

IV

It does not freeze. It has not frozen properly in London for years. On the night of the Bankside Winter Fair it is eleven degrees and raining, and the Thames is a high brown tide that slaps at the wall below the riverside walk and smells of diesel and cold mud.

Kerry has put fairy lights round the gazebo. The Albion stands on its pallet under the canvas, black, wet at the edges, the bar wrapped in red tape where it is worn. Len has been printing since four. He has printed a hundred and nine names. Children, couples, a hen party from Croydon who wanted their names on one card and then fought about the order. A Japanese man who asked for his name in Japanese and was very kind when Len explained that he could not. Kerry tapped the card reader and gave out change for the cash and laughed with everyone, and called him Uncle Len loud enough for the customers to hear it, because she says it sells.

The pamphlets are in a box under the table. They have sold eleven. People pick them up and read the first page and put them down again, gently, as if they were something that belonged to someone else.

He has not slept much. He set the last pages of Elias on Wednesday night, straight into the stick. The thaw. The boy under the ice. The arches. He had not planned the arches. He read the proof in the morning and sat on the floor of his own arch, under the line to Greenwich, for a long time, and then he got up and printed it, because the fair was on Saturday and the pages were set.

He did not set the stranger. He would have remembered setting the stranger. But it is there on page nine, in the Long Primer, his own name in capitals, and the coin. He has a twenty-pence piece in his pocket from the café, Elizabeth on one side, and he has taken it out and looked at it more times this week than he has looked at a coin in his life.

At ten to ten Kerry says they should pack up. The rain has stopped. The walk has emptied except for a man asleep on the bench under the wall and two police officers talking by the steps. Len says one more. He does not know why he says it. He wipes the platen and inks the forme with the gap in it and leaves the stick on the table, empty.

The young man comes up the walk from the direction of Southwark Bridge.

He is twenty-one, twenty-two. He has no hat. His hair is dark and uncut and falls over his collar, and there is frost in it. Len sees this and looks at the sky, which is low and orange and full of rain, and looks back. There is frost in it. It glitters under the fairy lights. He wears a brown coat that is too big for him, and grey wool stockings to the knee, and shoes that are wet through, and his hands are black at the fingertips with ink that has gone into the skin and will not come out. Len's hands are the same. He puts them in his pockets.

The young man does not look at Len. He looks at the press. He looks at it a long time. Then he looks at the cases, open on the table, and his fingers move against his coat.

"Is that Pica?" he says.

"Caslon," says Len. "Pica. Yes."

"We had Long Primer."

Kerry is folding the gazebo sides. She says, "Name, love?" and holds out the card reader, and the young man looks at the card reader as he looked at the press, without fear, with a kind of careful respect, as you might look at a dog you have not been introduced to.

Len says, "I'll do this one."

He takes up the stick. The young man watches his hands. Len says, "Name," and the young man tells him, and Len already knows it, and sets it. MOUNSEY, and then before it ELIAS, the letters going in backwards under his thumb, and the young man's lips are moving the wrong way about, reading them, as fast as Len can set them. Nobody reads type like that but a compositor.

He locks the name into the forme beneath the verse and pulls the bar. The platen knocks. He lifts the tympan and peels the card off and hands it across, and it is damp, the ink still shining.

The young man holds it in both hands. Water drips from the gazebo onto it and he does not move it out of the way. He reads the verse half aloud, Erects a Monument of THAT and YOU, and then he looks up at Len, for the first time, straight at him. It is the look you give a stranger in the street who is wearing your coat.

He takes a coin out of his own coat and puts it down on the edge of the stone. It is big and dark and heavy, a penny the size of a medal, with a broad raised rim, and a man's head on it in a laurel wreath, worn nearly smooth.

"I had one of yours," he says. "It has gone very dull. I keep it in the Case."

Then he goes down the river steps. Len watches him go. The tide is up nearly to the top step and there is nowhere for him to go, no foreshore, nothing but the brown water moving fast toward the bridge; and the two police officers turn and look at the steps, and look at each other, and one of them goes over and shines a torch down, and stands there for a while, and comes back, and says nothing to anyone.

Kerry says, "Who was that?"

"A customer," Len says.

He picks the penny up. It is cold, colder than the night, and when he closes his hand on it his fingers ache to the bone. He puts it in his pocket with the twenty pence, where it knocks against it, once.

Then he takes the forme out of the press and unlocks it, and before he distributes the type back into the case he reads the name in the metal, backwards, the way it sits, the way Elias read it, and for a moment, under the fairy lights, with the river loud below the wall, he cannot tell which way round is right.

The card he keeps is the proof, pulled first, on the waste sheet. It reads:

Amidst the Arts which on the Thames appear, To tell the Wonders of this icy Year, Printing claims prior Place, which at one View Erects a Monument of THAT and YOU.

ELIAS MOUNSEY

Printed on the River Thames.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Kalendās Novembrēs (28 October 2026), ā Petrō Ackroydō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Ackroydian Temporal Layering, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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