Page 1 of 12
In a provincial city’s printshop, a young typesetter faces an impossible choice when incendiary pamphlets ignite unrest and authorities close in. She must decide whether to hand over the press’s tools to spare loved ones, or preserve the workshop and risk brutal suppression. The stakes: lives, evidence, and the fate of the words she sets.
Page 1
The shop sat on a crooked street where the rain had learned to gather in the hollows of cobbles and stain the boots of anyone who moved between market and square. Inside, the air was always the same: a warm, oily breath of ink and linseed, the faint metallic tang of lead type, the slow, stubborn perfume of paper uncut. Anna Novak had learned to read the press like a living thing — the small, almost human groans when the platen closed, the bright snick of a newly set line, the whisper of a proof pulled and smoothed on a wooden block. She traced letters with a forefinger that was always ink-flecked, and at twenty-two she could set an entire pamphlet in a night if the shape of the sentences pleased her eye.
Karel Havel kept the shop as he kept his books: tidy, a little trembling with the memory of raids and fines, but never quite shut. His hands were thick from years of holding the composing stick and guiding apprentices, and his hair had the iron dust of long hours beside the press. He moved through the room like someone who knew the worth of silence; he also knew the worth of the small murmurs that passed among men in the corner where clients waited. In that corner, on a wet spring evening, Josef Marek bent close to Anna’s shoulder and slipped a folded manuscript across the bench.
“You can make it sing,” he said in a quick voice that carried the small rasp of many crowded inns and the larger edge of the square when he spoke to crowds. Josef smelled of damp wool and tobacco; his eyes were the bright, dangerous kind that refused to be satisfied with the way things were. “It needs to go out tonight.”
Anna unfolded the paper with the precision of someone who handled brittle collars in the bindery — careful but willing to let new form appear. The title, as much a dare as a sentence, began with a call: to the people, to the mothers and the smiths and the bakers, an appeal in plain language for civic rights and for an end to the old venal privileges. Parts of it were carefully argued; parts of it were a sermon dressed in the clothes of common sense. When she read it back aloud, setting her lips to the words, the shop seemed to lean in.
They set type by lamplight. Apprentices worked with the measured, quiet motion of those who have learned to keep their hands from trembling. Karel lingered by the press, watching the first sheets through the frame’s window like a father watching a child’s first steps. There was a rhythm to the work that steadyed the nerves — compose, proof, correct, ink, pull, fold. Each sheet that came free from the press smelled anew of possibility.
At midnight, with the town wrapped in a thin, foggy hush, bundles were tied and given into the hands of men who would disperse into taverns and markets and the narrow lanes where talk had always found purchase. Anna watched one young courier go, his boots bright with the wet of the street. She felt as if she had put something necessary into motion. The pamphlets were not only words; they were small machines that might make other people think, or shout, or come together. To Anna, raised on the steady certainty of type, that seemed nothing short of miraculous.