Explore "Privy Seal" by Ford Madox Ford on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"My mad nephew," Master Printer Badge said to Throckmorton, "shall travel down from his chamber anon. When ye shall see the pickle he is in ye shall understand wherefore it needeth ten minutes to his downcoming. " To Throckmorton's query he shook his dark, bearded head and muttered: "Nay; ye used him for your own purposes. Ye should know better than I what is like to have befallen him."
Throckmorton swallowed his haste and leant back against the edge of a press that was not at work. Of these presses there were four there in the middle of the room: tall, black, compounded of iron and wood, the square inwards of each rose and fell rhythmically above the flutter of the printed leaves that the journeymen withdrew as they rose, and replaced, white, unsullied and damp as they came together again. Along the walls the apprentice setters stood before the black formes and with abstruse, deliberate or hesitating expressions, made swift snatches at the little leaden dice. The sifting sound of the leads going home and the creak of the presses with the heavy wheeze of one printer, huge and grizzled like a walrus, pulling the press-lever back and bending forward to run his eyes across the type -- wheeze, creak and click -- made a level and monotonous sound.