The Nevada State Journal

Thomas Gray set type the way other men played piano -- by feel, without looking, his fingers finding the right letter in the case before his eyes had finished reading the word.

He was thirty-one years old and he had been a typesetter for fourteen of those years, starting in a print shop in St. Louis when he was seventeen and working his way west through a succession of newspapers that grew smaller and more optimistic as the towns grew smaller and more remote. He had set type in Denver and Salt Lake City and Carson City, and now he set type for the Nevada State Journal in Reno, which was not the largest paper in the state but was, in Thomas's estimation, the most honest about what it didn't know.

The Journal offices occupied a narrow building on Commercial Row, two streets from the river, close enough that on quiet mornings Thomas could hear the water from the composing room. The building smelled of ink and lead and the metallic tang of the type cases themselves, hundreds of small wooden compartments holding thousands of individual letters, each one a reversed mirror image of itself, arranged in an order that made no alphabetical sense but perfect practical sense to anyone who had learned it.

Thomas worked the night shift. He arrived at six in the evening and worked until two in the morning, setting the next day's paper one line at a time, working from handwritten copy that the reporters left in a wooden tray by the composing stone. The copy was sometimes legible and sometimes not. Thomas had learned to read the handwriting of six different reporters the way he had learned to read the type cases -- through repetition and a willingness to guess.

The paper came out six days a week, four pages, set entirely by hand. Thomas could set about fifteen hundred ems per hour on a good night, which meant that on a four-page day he was responsible for roughly a quarter of the paper. He did not think of it this way. He thought of it as words, one after another, assembled from metal and arranged in lines and locked into a chase and inked and pressed onto paper. The meaning of the words was someone else's concern. His concern was the letters.

On the night of March 3, 1891, the copy in the tray was about the railroad.

This was not unusual. Half the news in Reno was about the railroad. The Southern Pacific -- successor to the Central Pacific that had built the town -- ran through the middle of everything, and its decisions about schedules and freight rates and depot locations shaped the town's economy the way the river shaped its geography. The story Thomas was setting concerned a proposed spur line to a mining district south of town, a project that the paper's editor believed was worth covering and that Thomas believed was worth setting, though he had no opinion on the spur line itself.

He worked through the evening, his fingers moving between the type case and the composing stick in a rhythm that was almost musical. Pick, set, pick, set. The letters accumulated into words, the words into lines, the lines into columns. The lead was warm to the touch, heated by the friction of his hands, and it left a gray residue on his fingertips that never entirely washed off. His wife, Anna, said she could always tell when he'd been working by the color of his hands.

At nine o'clock the night editor, Greer, came in with fresh copy.

"Fire on Fourth Street," Greer said. "Two buildings. No one hurt."

Thomas looked at the copy. It was short -- eight inches, maybe. He could set it in twenty minutes.

"Pull the spur line from page three," Greer said. "Run the fire instead."

Thomas unlocked the chase and removed the spur line column, letter by letter, dropping each piece of type back into its compartment in the case. This was the part of the job that required the most discipline. Pulling type you had already set was like unbuilding a wall brick by brick, knowing that the bricks would be used again tomorrow for a different wall. The words were temporary. The letters were permanent.

He set the fire story and locked it in and pulled a proof on the hand press and read it backward in the mirror the way he always did, checking for transpositions. There were none. The proof was clean.

At midnight he ate his supper at the composing stone -- bread and cheese and cold coffee that Anna had packed in a tin pail. He read the proof of the front page while he ate. It was a collection of items about the legislature in Carson City, a report on cattle prices, a notice about a church social, and an editorial about the need for a public library. The editorial was written by the editor himself, a man named Allen, who believed in public institutions with the same fervor that other men in Reno believed in silver or gambling or the railroad.

Thomas agreed with the editorial. He also did not think about it particularly. His job was to make the words appear on the page in the correct order, spelled correctly, spaced correctly, aligned correctly. Whether the town needed a library was a question for other people. Whether the word "library" was set in the right font at the right size in the right position -- that was his.

He finished the night's work at one-thirty and locked the final forms and left them for the pressman, who would arrive at four and run the press and have the papers folded and bundled by six, in time for the boys who delivered them on foot and on horseback to every door in Reno that wanted one.

Thomas walked home through the dark streets. The town was quiet at this hour, the saloons closed or closing, the gas lamps making small circles of light on the wooden sidewalks. He could hear the river. He could hear a dog somewhere north of town, barking at something only dogs could see.

His hands were gray with lead. He wiped them on his trousers and kept walking.

In the morning, people would pick up the paper and read about the fire on Fourth Street and the cattle prices and the need for a library, and none of them would think about the man who had assembled those words from individual letters in a dark room at midnight. This was correct. The news was the news. The typesetter was invisible. Thomas Gray preferred it that way.

He had set the words. The words would do the rest.

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