Moving into the print shop

Our Copenhagen studio now lives in a print shop that closed after sixty years. The type cabinets became shelves, three drawers of metal type stayed as they were, and the press we meant to sell is still here, because its former owner offered to teach us to use it.

For four years the Copenhagen half of Small Caps worked from two desks in a shared office above a bicycle shop. It was fine. The coffee was free and the Wi-Fi had opinions. When Leela and I started hosting workshops, we had to borrow a meeting room downstairs and carry the index cards past a row of disassembled bicycles.

In January, a friend sent me a listing with no photos and one line of description: former print shop, ground floor, some equipment remains. I went to see it the next morning.

What remained

The shop had printed wedding invitations, menus, business cards and, for a while in the seventies, a neighborhood newspaper. It closed in 2019, when the owner, Birthe, retired after running it for thirty-four years. Her father ran it before that. The space had been empty since, and "some equipment" turned out to mean:

• Eleven wooden type cabinets, each with around twenty shallow drawers.

• A guillotine that I am not allowed to touch.

• Several thousand sheets of paper stock, sorted by weight, in a cupboard that still smells of them.

• One platen press, about the size of a small car, black, with a flywheel taller than me.

Birthe still lives two streets away. She came to the viewing with a thermos of coffee and told us which drawers stuck.

The cabinets

A type cabinet is a beautiful piece of information design. Each drawer is a case, and each case is divided into compartments of different sizes, one for every letter, figure and space. The compartments aren't alphabetical. They are sized and placed by how often a compositor reaches for each letter, so e has the largest compartment, right where the hand falls, and z lives in a small box in the corner.

It is a content model, essentially. Someone looked at how the thing was really used and shaped the container around it, not around the alphabet.

Most of the drawers were empty or nearly so: the type had been sold years ago. We kept the cabinets and turned them into shelves for books, cables and the workshop cards. Three drawers still hold full fonts of metal type, and we kept those as they were.

One of them is a twelve-point roman with its own drawer of small capitals. I did not make that up for the blog.

The press

We were going to sell the press. It weighs over a tonne, the floor had to be checked before we were allowed to keep it, and none of us knew how to use it.

Then two things happened. On the day we moved in, my pug, Noir, walked straight past the desks and the kitchen, lay down underneath the press, and refused to come out. And Birthe offered to teach us. She comes in on Friday afternoons, and so far she has taught Leela and me to set a line of type, lock it into a frame, ink the press and print one card at a time. Our first print said SMALL CAPS in small caps, obviously. It was crooked. The second was less crooked.

Setting type by hand changes how you think about it. On screen, a line of text is free: you type, it appears, you change your mind. In metal, every letter is a physical piece you chose from a compartment, and every space between words is a piece too, in one of several thicknesses. You start noticing spacing the way you notice your breath when someone mentions it.

The studio now

The front room, with the windows onto the street, is where we work: four desks, a long table for workshops, and the cabinets along the back wall. The press has the back room to itself, apart from Noir, who has it to herself. There is a kitchen with a stove that predates all of us.

Workshops will happen here from now on. Twelve people fit around the long table, and the cards finally have somewhere to live that isn't my backpack.

The type cabinet was shaped by how the letters were used, not by the alphabet. We will be quoting that at clients for years.

If you are in Copenhagen on a Friday afternoon, come by. Birthe will probably be here, and she will probably let you print something. Expect it to be crooked.