One of the reasons why I enjoy letterpress printing so much is because it is an activity in which I feel effective, in the sense that if there is a problem I can, generally speaking, effect the change that will solve it. A worn piece of type that isn’t printing well? I can switch out that piece of type. Over or under-inked page? I can remove or add ink. And so on.

However, I find myself increasingly befuddled by digital technology. I think this is at least somewhat by design: I feel that as a teen and younger adult computer operating systems were set up to enable the operators to be effective – you could defragment your own drive fairly easily, and so on. Nowadays, even ‘copy’ and ‘paste’ and ‘rename’ for file shortcuts are buried an extra layer deeper. Cynically, I think this is because if digital technology seems mysterious, people will pay for other people – or, nowadays, AI tools – to do things for us.

I am currently stubbornly resisting the use of AI in the construction of my own website, and right now it feels worse than printers’ pie. “Pie” is a term in letterpress applied broadly to type that has fallen off its “feet” into some form of disorder. This can happen, for example, when you are transferring a line of type and it falls out of your hands. In that case, at least, you hopefully only have one or two lines of type to re-set, and the exact characters you need right there. More extensive “pie” is worse; I spend a day a week working at the Pathfoot Press at the University of Stirling, and haven’t yet worked up the courage to tackle a brown paper bag filled with mixed type whose origin has long since been forgotten. Wrangling my new website feels a lot like the latter type of pie.

So, dear readers, please bear with me, because just as with all other things computing, things feel infinitely more complicated and obscure to me than they did a decade ago. If anything about this website looks odd to you, I am sure it is my fault, but please give me grace, because I have no idea what I did wrong or how to fix it. And I am very much looking forward to getting off my computer and back into my pressroom where, even if I regularly get things wrong, I generally know how to fix them.

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