The last letterpress in Fort Kochi

The press is a Heidelberg platen from 1958 and it makes a sound like a door closing politely, over and over, about forty times a minute. Damodaran feeds it with his right hand and takes the sheet with his left, and has done so for fifty-five years, and has all ten fingers, which he mentions before I can ask.

The shop is one room off a lane in Fort Kochi, deep enough that the light gives out halfway. Along the back wall: forty-one type cases, Malayalam and English, in sizes from six point to seventy-two. He knows where every sort is by touch.

The customers changed

For thirty years the work was invoices, receipt books, wedding cards and the occasional political pamphlet at short notice and no questions. Digital took all of it, in roughly that order, and by 2009 he was open three days a week and considering not being open at all.

Then something turned around, and it turned around from an unexpected direction. His customers now are designers. Studios in Bengaluru and Chennai, a stationery brand in Ahmedabad, a poetry press in Thiruvananthapuram that sends him files he cannot open and has learned to send drawings instead.

They want the bite. On a screen everything is on top of the paper. Here it is in the paper.

K. R. Damodaran

The bite is the impression — the slight debossing where metal met sheet under pressure. For most of letterpress history a visible bite was a fault, evidence of an over-inked, over-pressed job. Damodaran was taught to avoid it. He is now paid extra for it, a reversal he finds funny in a way he does not entirely explain.

What happens to the cases

He is seventy-three. There is no apprentice, and he is straightforward about why: the work does not pay enough to be learned slowly, and it cannot be learned quickly. Two design students came for a fortnight in 2023 and were, he says, very good and very fast and completely uninterested in the six months it would take to become merely competent.

The type will probably go to a museum in Thrissur that has expressed interest and not yet found funding. The Heidelberg is a harder question — it weighs 1,400 kilos and the lane is not wide enough for a truck, which is a problem that has been true since 1958 and was solved once, in the other direction, by eleven men and a set of rollers.

He locks up at six. On the bench, waiting for Monday, is a run of five hundred business cards for a design studio that will photograph them, at an angle, in raking light, so that the bite shows.