The Letterpress Printer of Micanopy

The press is called Cabbage Palm, and it operates out of a citrus-packing shed a quarter of a mile off Route 441, on a piece of land that the printer, a man named Wendell Boyd, bought in 1998 for what he describes as 'the price of a used car and the promise of a lot of work.' The lot of work has, so far, produced forty-two books.

Each book is set by hand, printed on a Vandercook proof press that Wendell restored himself, and bound by his wife, a bookbinder named June, in the front room of the shed. The editions run to about two hundred copies. They are sold, mostly, by word of mouth. There is no website. There is a phone, but Wendell is often on the press and does not answer it.

I asked him, in the shed, why he had chosen a form of publishing that is, by every modern measure, inefficient. He set a line of type — the word 'Micanopy,' backwards, in a face called Centaur — and slid it into a chase. 'The books that get found by algorithms,' he said, 'are the books the algorithms wanted to find. I am not interested in being that book.' He tightened the chase, inked the roller, and pulled a proof. The word came up, on the paper, exactly the right way around.