In a shed behind a Hobart bakery, a 1912 Heidelberg still prints wedding invitations at forty an hour. Its owner is 84. Nobody has asked to learn.
Words by Ada Lindqvist · Pictures by Tomas Reyes
The shed smells of oil and paper dust and the particular sweetness of ink that has been mixed by hand for sixty years. Werner Kessler moves around the press the way you move around a person you have lived with for a very long time: without looking, with total confidence, occasionally with irritation.
He feeds a sheet. The platen closes. There is a sound like a door shutting in another room. He lifts the sheet and holds it to the light, and the letters sit inside the paper rather than on it, pressed a hair below the surface so that you could find them with your eyes closed.
“People say it's the imperfections,” he says, and shakes his head. “No. It's the pressure. Everything now is just a picture of a thing. This is the thing.”