The Rise and Maiden Flight of Hannah Goose Nursery Rhymes

I had no formal training as a letterpress printer, or designer, or graphic artist. I significantly lacked artistic talent, a deficiency often commented upon by artistic and even not-so-artistic friends. Nevertheless, in my late thirties, after volunteering for a year or two at a museum that described itself as a re-creation of a nineteenth-century print shop, I decided to do creative letterpress printing at home. Although my home was a loft in Tribeca (New York City), where one had range to dream about such things, and the neighboring galleries, studios, and taverns lent an aura of credibility to any new artistic undertaking, no matter how novel or far-fetched, it wasn't until two years had passed that I was able to find a suitably sized printing press. By that time, my living conditions had changed. I had married and become the father of an infant, whom my wife and I named Hannah, after my paternal grandmother; and a new landlord had had us evicted from our loft with breathtaking ease and we now somehow were all squeezed into a tiny apartment in a residential section of the borough of Queens.

The Encyclopedia Britannica's sobering characterization of Queens as "the borough of cemeteries" only exacerbated the sense that leaving Manhattan was the local equivalent of entering into exile, a form of spiritual contraction. Interior space was scarce, particularly since the baby required a room to herself—or, almost: the paper supply lay underneath her crib. It would have been sensible to surrender the notion of printing, but that was where, spurred on by a sense of cultural diminishment, we had to become unreasonable. Thus the press—an iron pilot press, a Kelsey (the sort that St. Nicholas had advertised for boys as early as the 1880s)—along with some fruit-colored inks, ink knives, and a rubber brayer (a roller used to ink the surface of a plate or type) came into our lives. We obtained them on the cheap from a man in Long Island City, a recent retiree from a paper manufacturer who planned on moving to Florida. Other evocative and essential materials (lead cutter, reglets, composing stick, job case), and most importantly a house font, followed.

In the letterpress context, selecting a house face is the equivalent of deciding whether to paint in oils or acrylics, to sculpt in wood or clay, to play a Fender Stratocaster or a Gibson. I perused type specimens from the American and English type companies generous enough to send them for free and at last selected Bembo from Pat Taylor's Out Of Sorts Foundry. Bembo appeared in 1929 from the Monotype Company, which modeled it upon a Renaissance typeface designed in 1495 by Francesco Griffo.¹ In the 1980s, Bembo was the gold standard of book types, often cited as the most frequently printed face of the year—hardly an idiosyncratic choice, or, given its elegance and a trace of lost aristocracy, one synonymous with what one might theorize as a child's aesthetic. Yet, in retrospect, there was one omen: I was particularly taken by the playfully elongated "nose" of the lower-case "e," a unique characteristic that led one to believe Monotype was attempting a respectful yet playful gesture toward the bottlenose dolphin figured in Aldo's famous device (a dolphin wrapped around an anchor).² I also was happy with the sound of the name; Bembo: the printer hobbit.

However, I didn't know yet what I wanted to print. The Kelsey had a small chase (the detachable cast-iron frame in which the types could be locked up after they'd been composed into lines and held in the press during printing). Measuring only 6" x 8," it limited the width of a page to 4" or less. I was neither fussy nor patient enough to be a miniaturist, but I felt...