Dead Matter

by Paul Goodman, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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Weintraub's shop was on East Seventh Street between Avenues A and B, three steps down from the sidewalk, and on the window in gold leaf it said JOB PRINTING · WEDDINGS · BAR MITZVAHS · TICKETS · CARDS. The leaf had been laid in 1931 and was coming off in the order in which people had leaned on it, so that TICKETS was nearly gone and CARDS was perfect.

At ten past nine on Tuesday, the twelfth of March, 1968, after a long day of wedding invitations, Harry Weintraub was wiping down the platen of the Chandler & Price with a rag and kerosene, and the radio on the shelf over the paper cutter was giving the returns from New Hampshire, where a senator from Minnesota whom most people had not heard of before Christmas was getting forty per cent of the Democratic vote against the President. Harry was fifty-eight. He had voted for Norman Thomas four times, and he did not think much of senators. He turned the radio down when he heard feet on the steps.

There were three of them. The first was Lewis Brandwein, whom he had not seen since the shiva for Danny, in August, when Lewis had sat for an hour on one of the low stools in the front room on Avenue C with his knees up near his chin and said nothing at all, which Bella had afterwards said was the best thing anyone did that week. Behind Lewis came a young woman in a navy pea coat with a stack of lined paper held against her chest in both arms, and behind her a boy of fourteen or fifteen, Puerto Rican, thin, in a green zipper jacket too light for March, who stopped on the bottom step and looked at the press.

"Mr. Weintraub," said Lewis. "This is Nancy Kessler. She runs the school on Sixth Street. And this is Teddy. Teddy Ocasio. He goes there."

"What school on Sixth Street?"

"It's a storefront," said Nancy. "Twenty-three children. We started in September." She said it as if it were an answer to an objection he had not yet made.

The thing they wanted was simple, and Lewis explained it in the way of a young man who has rehearsed on the subway. The school had a mimeograph machine, given by a church, and the drum had cracked. The children had written a paper, which was the stack in Nancy's arms. They wanted five hundred copies, a single sheet printed on both sides, to give out on Avenue B and at the meeting of the local school board on the twenty-sixth, so that the board could see what the children did when nobody made them do it. They had eleven dollars and forty cents.

Harry took a ticket stub off the spike by the cutter and turned it over.

"Paper," he said, writing. "Five hundred sheets nine by twelve, twenty-pound white, three dollars forty. Ink, call it nothing. Composition. You want it set by hand, because I don't have a Linotype, nobody on this block has had a Linotype since Gurevitch died. Two pages of ten-point. For me that's eight hours, maybe nine with your corrections. Lockup, makeready, a thousand impressions, wash-up. Thirty-eight dollars. That's the price I'd give the shul."

"We have eleven forty," said Nancy.

"I heard."

A word for Harry, since he is about to sound like a hard man, and the young woman in the pea coat certainly thought he was one. She had come down the steps believing what most of her friends believed that winter: that a man with a shop is a small capitalist, and that a small capitalist, being a capitalist, ought to give. But Harry had a lease, and a wife, and a press that was older than the lease. A man who gives his labor away to every good cause on Seventh Street does not have a press for long, and then there is no press for the good causes either. It is the young people who make the revolution and the old ones who know what things cost, and a decent society would put the two in the same room more often. On that Tuesday they happened to be in the same room.

"You people," Harry said, "have no economic sense. You come to a man and you ask him for twenty-seven dollars."

"We're asking you for a favor," said Lewis.

"No, you're asking me for twenty-seven dollars and calling it a favor." He put the pencil down. "Here's what I'll do. Paper you pay. Three forty. The rest you do."

"We don't know how," Nancy said.

"Then you'll find out how. Thursday I don't have weddings." He looked past her at the boy, who was still on the bottom step and had not looked away from the press the whole time. "You. You want to come Thursday?"

The boy shrugged, which on that block meant yes.

---

On Thursday Harry pulled two cases of ten-point Century Schoolbook out of the cabinet and laid them on the slanted top of the frame, side by side, and showed them the lay of the case. He did it once and quickly, because a lay of the case is a thing you learn with your hands or not at all. The capitals are on the right in alphabetical order, except that J and U come after Z, because they came into the alphabet late. The small letters are on the left and in the middle and in no order anybody can explain, the big boxes for the letters you use most: e, the biggest; then a and i and o and t and n and s. The spaces in their little boxes by size. "Mind your p's and q's," he said, "you think that's an expression? That's this." He held a p and a q up side by side and turned them over, and they changed places.

Then he took his composing stick out of the top drawer of the frame, and set its knee to twenty picas, and his hand went to the second drawer, and stopped there, and he closed it again without opening it. He went to the back and found three more sticks, old and a little rusted, and set them, and gave one to Nancy and one to Lewis.

"What about me?" said Teddy.

"You watch first."

Teddy watched for ten minutes. Harry set a line from the top sheet of the children's copy: The pigeons on Willie roof are his father's and he lets me feed them. He set it upside down and backwards, left to right, the nick of each letter turned up to his thumb, and he justified it with a thin space and a hair space and pushed the line up tight with his thumb, and pulled a lead, and set it down on the line, and began the next.

"It's backwards," said Teddy.

"It's backwards so when it prints it's frontwards."

"I know. I'm saying I can read it."

He could. He leaned over the stick and read the line out loud, every word, upside down and in reverse, Willie roof included, faster than Nancy could read the same line on the copy. Nancy looked at Lewis. The boy had been put in the remedial reading room at the junior high on Twelfth Street every year since the fourth grade; it was in the folder she had been given in September, together with the forty-one days absent. In the remedial reading room nobody had remarked that he could read anything in a mirror, because there was no mirror in the room and nothing in it that he wanted to read.

(In our society a child of fourteen who cannot do a thing in a classroom is said to have a reading problem. It is very rarely said that the classroom has a Teddy problem. I do not want to make him a prodigy; he was not one. He was a boy who had been asked for nine years to read things he did not care about, and who now held in his hand a stick of lead letters that were real and heavy and that a grown man would let him drop if he was careless. That is the whole of the method. It costs nothing, and the Board of Education has no budget line for it.)

Harry gave him the third stick.

By ten o'clock Lewis had set eleven lines and Nancy fourteen, and Teddy had set twenty-two and pied one of them, which is what a printer calls it when a line of loose type falls and scatters, and he had picked every letter of it off the floor and the frame and out of his own sneaker without being told to.

---

The children's paper was called WHAT WE DID. It had a piece about Willie Rosario's father's pigeons and a piece about a trip on the Staten Island ferry, which had cost five cents a person and had been taken eleven times since September. There was a recipe for arroz con gandules, a list of the books in the storefront library with the names of who had read which, and a long, angry, accurate account by a girl named Doris Fine of what happened when she brought a frog to P.S. 64 in the second grade. And there was a short piece by Teddy, which he set himself, on the Monday of the second week:

At the school nobody yells. Mr Brandwein and me fixed the boiler with a part from Canal Street it cost $2.15. Now it works. If it breaks I know where the valve is.

Lewis had taught chemistry for a year at a high school in Brooklyn and been asked to leave in June, for reasons he described differently to different people. He wanted to put a line under Teddy's piece explaining what the school was. Nancy wanted a paragraph explaining what the school was against. Harry, reading the copy on the stone, let them argue until it was a quarter past nine and then he said, "Two columns of ten-point, both sides. That's eighteen hundred words, give or take. The children wrote twenty-six hundred. Every word of yours is a word of theirs out," and they did not put in the paragraph, and they cut the list of books to the titles.

There was another argument about spelling. Doris Fine had written exparement. Lewis said they should correct it, the school board would laugh. Nancy said it was the child's word and they would print it as written. They both turned to Harry, and he said what the man who had taught him had said to him in 1924 on Hester Street: "Follow copy, even if it goes out the window." Doris Fine's frog went into the paper as an exparement, and so did Willie roof.

On the Tuesday, Teddy ran out of em quads and went to the back of the shop to look for more, as Harry had told him to, in the type cabinet under the window. He came back with a small brass galley, about the length of his hand, that had been pushed to the back of the bottom drawer. On it was a little block of type the size of a business card, tied round twice with page cord in the way a printer ties up standing type that he wants to keep.

He did not ask about it. He was not a boy who asked. He put the galley on the bed of the proof press in the corner, as he had seen Harry do with the children's columns, and inked the type with the brayer, and laid a scrap of newsprint on it and rolled the cylinder over, and pulled off the proof and read it.

DANIEL WEINTRAUB
Printer
Cards · Notices · Tickets
RESONABLE RATES
1956

Harry had come out from the back with the ink can. Lewis saw him see it. Nobody said anything, and the radio was not on, and outside a bus went by on Avenue A and the window shook in its frame the way it did.

"It says resonable," said Teddy. "It's missing an a."

"I know what it says." Harry put the ink can down on the stone. "He was eleven. I told him it's spelled wrong, and he said that's how he wrote it on the copy, so that's how it gets set. He was throwing my own words at me." He took the galley off the proof press and looked at the type, which shone wet with the new ink, and turned it a little in the light, the way you look at a coin. "He set the whole thing himself. It took him a Sunday. Then he went to the Catskills with his mother for August, and I tied it up, so it would be there when he came back."

"Was it there?" said Teddy.

"It's here."

He put the galley down on the frame, by the second drawer, and went back to the stone, and showed Nancy how to lock up a chase, the quoins and the furniture, so that the whole page of loose letters rose up off the stone in one piece and held, and she could hardly believe it would hold, and it held.

---

They ran the first side on Thursday, the twenty-first, and the second side the next night. Harry fed the press himself, because it had a motor on it and a platen that closed like a mouth every three seconds, and he had been feeding it for forty years with all his fingers. Teddy took the sheets off the delivery board as they came and laid them in a stack, each one square on the one before, without smudging the wet ink, because Harry had shown him how, once. By nine o'clock on Friday there were five hundred and twelve copies of WHAT WE DID drying on the drying rack and across the cutting table and the top of the radiator, and at the foot of the back page, in six-point italic, the line Harry had set himself at the last minute and locked into the form without asking anyone:

Set by hand by the students and teachers of the East Sixth Street School, at Weintraub's, East Seventh Street. Paper $3.40.

Nancy read that line and laughed, out loud, the first time any of them had heard her laugh, and she paid him the three dollars and forty cents in coins from a coffee can.

Then there was the type. When the run is finished the forms are dead matter: a printer's term, and not a sad one. It means type that has done what it was set to do and will be put back in the case, letter by letter, so that it can be set again. Harry washed the forms down with kerosene, unlocked them on the stone, and showed them how to distribute. You take a few lines on your left hand, he said, on a rule, and read them off the right end a word at a time, and drop each letter in its box. Your fingers will know the boxes in a week. A week after that you won't have to look.

Lewis and Nancy worked on the pigeons and the frog. Teddy did his own piece about the boiler, and the ferry, and the list of books, and he was faster than both of them, and when he dropped a letter in the wrong box he went in after it with two fingers and got it out.

At a quarter to eleven the forms were gone. The galleys were empty and the cases were full. Harry wiped his hands. Then he went to the frame, and picked up the little brass galley by the second drawer, and took out his penknife, and cut the page cord, and the type sat there loose for the first time in twelve years, a little proud of the galley, the way type stands when the string comes off.

He held it out to Teddy.

The boy looked at him and did not take it.

"It's type," Harry said. "Go on."

Teddy took the lines on his left hand the way he had been shown. He read them off from the right end, backwards, quickly, as he had read the first line in Harry's stick, and dropped them in: the letters of RESONABLE RATES and of DANIEL WEINTRAUB into their boxes on the right, among all the others of their kind. The small letters of Printer went into the lower case. The 1 and the 9 and the 5 and the 6 went in with the figures, and when the last one dropped it made the same small sound as all the rest.

Harry opened the second drawer, took out the composing stick that was in it, and set its knee to twenty picas, and put it down on the frame by Teddy's hand.

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THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Paulō Goodmanō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Paul Goodman, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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