The Imprint

by Dora Marsden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

Mr Firth had marked the passage in blue pencil, the pencil he kept for prices. He laid the proof on the counter and turned it round to face her, and then he put his thumb beside the mark, not on it, as a man shows on a map a place he has no intention of visiting.

"Eleven lines," he said. "From 'She took the lamp' down to there."

Edith Sugden read the eleven lines. She had read them already in the contributor's handwriting, which sloped like rain, and twice in her own fair copy, and they had not changed. A soldier's wife in Sowerby, a lodger, a wet October night, and one word of four letters set down where it belonged and nowhere else in the story. It was the best thing anyone had sent the Unbidden in the eighteen months of its life. She had told the contributor so by return of post, and he had written back from a place in France he was not permitted to name, in pencil, to say that he was glad, and that he had lost his other boot.

Behind the counter the platen thumped and opened and thumped, printing a funeral card for the Co-operative. The shop smelt of paraffin and the linseed in the ink. At the frame by the window Lily Hirst was setting something with her back to them, her hand going from the case to the stick and back so fast that it looked like a habit rather than a labour.

"I'll print the rest," said Mr Firth. "It's set. It's been standing since Saturday. That I'll not print."

"What would it cost you, if you did?"

He had taken his spectacles off to argue, and now he found he had nobody to argue with, and held them a moment by one leg.

"A summons," he said. "Obscene libel. The bench here would fine me, if I was lucky, and if I wasn't they'd send it up to the Sessions. The law wants a printer's name at the foot of every sheet, Miss Sugden, so that when the police come they know which door. It's my door. It's not yours, and it's not the young man's in France."

"Then you're right not to."

He put his spectacles back on and looked at her through them, as if she might be a proof with something wrong in it that he could not yet find.

"I'll want the copy for that page by Thursday," he said. "Something else. Anything. A poem."

"You'll have it," said Edith, and folded the proof, and put it in her bag.

---

The office of the Unbidden was one room over Pickles the saddler's in Square Road, and it smelt of leather all the year round, which Harriet Booth said was good for concentration and Edith said was good for Pickles. Harriet was at the table with the lamp lit at four in the afternoon, writing. She had been a district organiser for the Union until 1913, when she had left over the burning of letter-boxes, which she approved of, and the way the order to burn them had been given, which she did not. She wrote leaders the way she had once addressed open-air meetings in Brighouse: to the back of the crowd.

"Read it," she said. "It's half done."

It was headed THE COMPOSITOR'S PENCIL. Edith read it standing up. The freedom of the press had been purchased, the second paragraph said, by men who had gone to prison for it; it could not now be surrendered at a jobbing printer's counter in Halifax for fear of a magistrate. The Unbidden demanded of the Home Secretary an assurance that literature honestly intended would not be prosecuted as filth. It demanded of the printing trade that it remember its own martyrs. It was well made. Harriet's sentences always were; they came down like a sash window, all at once and with a bang.

"Who is it to?" Edith said.

"To everybody who reads it."

"It's to the Home Secretary. He's in the second paragraph and again at the end."

"Somebody has to say it to him."

"He doesn't read us," Edith said. "Two hundred and eighty subscribers and the Free Library. What's in the account?"

Harriet looked at her for a moment, then opened the cash book, because she was honest and the cash book was hers to keep. "Eleven pounds, four and threepence. And Mrs Greenwood's guinea, if she sends it."

"She won't," said Edith. She put the proof down beside the leader, the blue mark uppermost, and went out again before the lamp had been lit a quarter of an hour.

---

Normanton's of King Cross had printed bill-heads, raffle tickets, chapel anniversaries, and the posters for every brass band contest in the Calder valley for forty years. In the spring the two sons had gone with the Fourth Battalion. In August the father had died in his chair. The executors had a sale on the Wednesday, and Edith went, and stood at the back among men in caps who looked at her once and then did not look again, since she was plainly there by mistake.

The platen went at five pounds ten, after a man from Elland had gone to five pounds five and stopped. It was a foolscap treadle with a crack in the fly-wheel guard and Normanton's name cast in the frame. Two pairs of cases of small pica, a composing stick, a galley, three chases, a bodkin and a box of quoins went at two pounds two, because nobody else wanted small pica. She bought the ink at the end, a tin and a half of black, for three shillings, from the auctioneer's clerk, who sold it to her as he might have sold a stranger the last bun on a plate.

Shifting the platen would have cost more than the platen. She did not shift it. She found the executors' clerk, a young man in a black armband, on the step with his notebook, and took the shop for a month at twelve shillings, rent in advance, with the gas to be paid by the tenant and the gas not on.

"It's not a printing business, you understand," he said. "The goodwill's not in it."

"I don't want the goodwill."

He wrote her a receipt against the door-frame. When he had gone she lit the paraffin lamp she had brought in her bag and stood in Normanton's shop with what she owned of it, which was everything that did not move and nothing that did.

---

The type lay in its case upside down to her way of thinking, and every letter on its foot was the wrong way round. She knew the principle. She had stood at Firth's elbow a hundred times and watched him correct, and she knew that a compositor reads the stick from left to right with the nick of every letter facing outward, and that d and b and p and q are the same piece of metal turned. She had not known that the knowledge was of no use to her hand.

She set the contributor's first paragraph, which was three sentences. It took forty minutes. She pulled it on a scrap and found Sowerdy and a space too many between the and lamp and a lower-case o from the wrong fount, half a hair taller than its neighbours, so that it stood up out of the line like a man who will not sit down at a meeting.

By ten o'clock she had nine lines in the galley. Her fingers were black to the second knuckle and smelt of lead. She counted the story. Two thousand three hundred words, near enough, which was four pages if she set it close. At the rate she was going it was ninety hours of work, and the supplement had to be folded into six hundred copies of the Unbidden by Monday morning, when the newsagent at the station took his bundle.

She sat on Normanton's stool and looked at the nine lines for a while. Then she put them back in the case, letter by letter, slowly, into what she was fairly sure were the right boxes, and blew the lamp out.

---

The Hirsts lived in a back-to-back in Siddal, in a yard with a tap and a privy shared among six houses. Edith was there at a quarter to seven on the Thursday morning, before Firth's opened. Lily answered the door with her hair wet and a towel round her shoulders and a younger sister holding the back of her skirt.

"It's about work," Edith said. "Evening work. This week."

"What's it pay?"

"A guinea for three nights. Friday, Saturday, Sunday."

Lily looked at her. Mr Firth paid her fourteen shillings a week, and Edith knew it, and Lily knew that Edith knew it. "Is it the bit he won't do?"

"Yes."

"I set it Saturday," Lily said. "Before he read it. Monday he made me dis it again." She wiped a drop of water off her neck with the corner of the towel. "Took me twenty minutes to set and five to dis. It were a good bit, that bit. The lodger."

"Will you do it?"

"Whose name goes at the bottom?"

"Mine."

Lily considered this with the whole of her face, as she might have considered a stranger's ticket at a tram stop. "Can I bring our Annie? Me mam's on nights at the mill."

"Bring her."

"A guinea," Lily said, to fix it, and shut the door, and Edith heard her on the other side of it telling the child to get her feet off that chair.

---

On Thursday Edith gave Mr Firth a poem for the page, eighteen lines by a curate in Luddenden about the moors in autumn, which had been in the drawer since March. He read it on the counter with the same thumb ready, and did not need it.

"This'll do," he said. Then: "There's talk you've been at Normanton's."

"I've taken the shop for a month."

"For that story."

"There'll be a loose sheet in the Unbidden on Monday. Four pages. You'll print the issue, and the sheet will go inside it."

"And the sheet'll have whose name on it?"

"Mine. E. Sugden, Printer, and the address at King Cross."

Mr Firth took his spectacles off again. This time he did not seem to want to argue with anyone. He breathed on the glasses and polished them on his apron, which made them worse.

"You'll have no planer," he said at last. "Normanton's planer went to his brother at Todmorden. You'll lock your forme up and it'll print like a ploughed field."

"Then I'll want a planer."

He went into the back and came out with a block of beech, smooth on its face and battered on its back, and a mallet with a split handle bound in wire.

"Two shillings," he said.

She paid him two shillings. He wrote it in the day book, planer & mallet, s/h, and the date, which was the twenty-first of October, 1915.

---

Lily came on the Friday at a quarter past seven, with Annie by the hand and a paper of chips for both of them, and before she had taken her coat off she held out her other hand.

"Half now," she said. "It's not that I think you'll not pay. It's that Normanton's is shut and you might not be here Sunday."

Edith gave her ten shillings and sixpence. Lily put it in her stocking with her back turned, ate the last chip, wiped her fingers on the paper, and went to the case. She did not set a letter. She took out a lower-case e and held it to the lamp, and then an a, and ran her thumbnail over their faces.

"His small pica's been worn since the old Queen," she said. "It'll print grey. You'll want to pack the platen up a sheet or two." She took a page of the fair copy and fixed it to the copy-holder with a clothes-peg she had brought for the purpose. "And don't stand there. I can't set with folk stood there."

Edith went to the other end of the shop and learned to cut paper on Normanton's guillotine, which nobody had bid for and the executors had left where it stood. It had a notice on it in his hand, KEEP YOUR FINGERS, and nothing after it, as though he had not been able to decide what to keep them from. Behind her the type went into the stick with a sound like hail on a skylight, steady and small. Every few minutes it stopped, and the stick was emptied into the galley, and began again. At ten Annie fell asleep under the window. At midnight Lily pulled the first galley proof, read it standing, made three marks, and corrected them in less time than it had taken Edith to find a k.

"That's the first page," she said. "Two more tomorrow and the last on Sunday, and you'll have your four, if the lodger doesn't run on."

---

Harriet came to Normanton's on the Saturday night, because Pickles the saddler had told her where the light was. She stood in the doorway in her coat with her umbrella dripping on the boards and looked at the lamp on the frame, and Lily at the case, setting at a speed Edith had stopped trying to watch, and Annie Hirst asleep on a pile of brown paper under the window with her boots on.

"You're going round them," Harriet said.

Edith was at the stone with the first forme, tapping the quoins with a key she had been shown how to use an hour before. "Round who?"

"Firth. The bench. The law. If we go round, nobody ever has to change it. They'll go on putting their blue pencil through whatever they like, and we'll go on creeping off to back shops at night with an apprentice girl—"

"I'm not an apprentice," said Lily, without stopping. "I've been out of my time since March."

"Firth won't change," Edith said. "Why should he? It's his shop he'd lose. He's not wrong."

"Then the law must."

"Write to it, then."

Harriet looked at the lamp, and the girl, and the sleeping child, and the forme on the stone with its columns of grey metal laid in like a street of very small houses. For a moment it seemed possible that she would take her coat off.

"I've written," she said. "I've sent the leader to the Guardian. As a letter. Since we have no room for it."

"Good," said Edith, and meant it, and Harriet heard that she meant it, and went out into the rain.

The Manchester Guardian printed Harriet's letter eleven days later, cut to a third of its length, in a column between a letter on the price of household coal and one from a vicar in Cheshire about the proper feeding of Belgian refugees.

---

At half past one on the Monday morning the last forme was locked up in the chase. Lily had set the story clean in two nights and a half; on the first night she had found the bs Edith had put back among the ds, and the qs among the ps, and sorted them out of the case without comment. Then she had shown Edith how to pull the rollers across the inking disc so that they came up even and black, and how to stand to the treadle with the weight on the left foot, and how to lay a sheet to the gauge pins and take it off again before the platen closed on your fingers, which it would, she said, the once.

Edith had set one thing herself. She had set the imprint, which was one line at the foot of the fourth page, and it had taken her twenty minutes, and Lily had let her.

The fly-wheel turned. The platen came up with its sheet and closed on the forme and opened again with the sound Mr Firth's made, a heavier sound in this empty shop, and the sheet came away printed. Edith took it to the lamp. The eleven lines were there, near the head of the fourth page, and the word was there in them, black and exact and no bigger than any other word, since it was set in the same small pica as the rest.

At the foot of the fourth page it said: Printed and published by E. Sugden, 3 Normanton Buildings, King Cross, Halifax. Only the g in Sugden was turned. It lay upside down in the line, its tail in the air, like a dropped spoon.

Lily looked over her shoulder at it and said nothing. Annie Hirst turned over on the brown paper. Edith carried the sheet back to the press and set it down on the feed-board, and loosened the quoins, and with the bodkin lifted the g out of her own name and turned it the right way up and pressed it home. Then she laid the planer on the face of the forme and struck it twice with Mr Firth's mallet, so that every letter on the page stood level with every other, and tightened the quoins again, and put her foot to the treadle.

The platen closed and opened. Her name came away on the sheet the right way up, wet, at the foot of the page, where the police would look for it.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā Dōrā Marsden per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Dora Marsden, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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