Profiles · Onward and Upward with the Arts
The Metal Type
An independent printer in Tampa’s historic cigar district preserves the heavy, mechanical art of wood type in a digital age.
In the high-ceilinged warmth of an old Ybor City cigar factory, Mirabelle Fletcher operates a cylinder press that weighs slightly more than a male hippopotamus. The machine, a 1923 Babcock Optimus, hums and clacks with a heavy, prehistoric rhythm that shakes the floorboards beneath her paint-splattered work boots. Fletcher, thirty-two, is one of the last commercial printers in the state of Florida to work exclusively with handset metal and wood type. Her fingernails are permanently stained with carbon black and petroleum solvents, an occupational hazard she wears like a badge of honor. Around her, the walls are lined with wooden trays containing thousands of tiny lead characters, arranged in the traditional, non-alphabetical California job case.
Fletcher’s paradox is that her clientele consists almost entirely of Silicon Valley tech executives and luxury resort owners who spend their lives in the cloud. They pay her thousands of dollars for business cards and bespoke stationery that bear the deep, tactile impression of an iron press, seeking a sense of permanence they cannot find on a screen. Fletcher finds this irony amusing, if a bit hypocritical. "They want their digital empires to have the heft of a nineteenth-century ledger," she said, aligning a brass lead rule with a line of twelve-point Gill Sans. "But they don’t want the noise, the grease, or the splinters that actually go into making it."
Outside her window, the brick streets of Ybor City are quiet in the midday heat, save for the wild chickens that roam the sidewalks. Fletcher worked for years as a graphic designer in Chicago before returning to her native Florida, drawn by the decay and history of the Gulf Coast. Her work is slow, deliberate, and expensive; she can spend an entire afternoon printing fifty copies of a single broadside. Yet, she insists that this slowness is the only way to resist the slick, frictionless future that threatens to erase the city's tactile past. "The press reminds us that words have weight," she said, looking out at the brickwork.