The last letterpress on Harbour Street has a waiting list

The press in the back room of Calder & Daughter weighs a little over a tonne and was cast in 1958. Elspeth Calder, who is seventy-three, can tell from the sound of it whether the ink is too thick.

Her father opened the shop in 1975, printing raffle tickets, menus and the order of service for half the funerals in the parish. When the copy shops arrived in the nineties, most of that work left. Calder kept the press because, she says, it was too heavy to move.

Now the work has come back, for a reason her father would not have believed: people want to feel the letters. The type bites into thick cotton paper and leaves a dent you can run your thumb across.

A year’s wait

The shop prints about sixty sets of wedding invitations a year and has stopped taking bookings for next summer. Each card goes through the press once per colour. A set of a hundred and twenty, in two colours, takes most of a week.

People want to feel the letters. You can run your thumb across them.

Her daughter, Rosa, set up the shop’s first website last spring. It has one photograph and a phone number. “If you have to ask the price,” Calder said, “you probably should phone.”

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