Between the Lines

Pictures by Jeff Nye

On the nook of San Juan Avenue and Fourth Road in Saguache (pronounced Suh-WATCH), Colorado, stands a constructing the coloration of daffodils, with inexperienced excellent and many of home windows, and whenever you tap on the glass, you may maybe maybe well maybe factual ranking invited in. On most days, one can ranking Dean Coombs—the third-technology creator of the Saguache Crescent—tinkering on a Linotype machine inner. The Crescent is the most straightforward Linotype newspaper in the nation, and maybe even the world. Talking to Dean Coombs is admire getting a history lesson and a tutorial on newspaper printing at the same time. Coombs has most attention-grabbing lived a long way from Saguache for four years, making the sixty-eight-year-gentle newspaper creator a de facto historian of kinds as smartly.

The Saguache Crescent has been a fixture in Saguache County for smartly over a century and has been in Coombs’s family since 1917, when his grandfather moved from Current Mexico with his family to grab the paper. His grandfather’s uncle had passed away, leaving an estate worth $12 million in 1914. The cash became divided amongst a mountainous family, but Coombs’s grandfather became ready to grab the paper outright. And a couple years later, he purchased a Linotype, having printed outdated editions of the paper by hand-surroundings form. Linotype machines had been very costly at the time, and most had been owned by mountainous papers, which the Saguache Crescent became not.

Saguache is a rural metropolis of five hundred folks, fifty miles from the rest even similar to a mountainous metropolis. The essential employer is the county, which supplies govt jobs as smartly as jobs for teachers. The quite a lot of alternate is, needless to convey, agriculture, with some farming and quite a lot of ranching. In quite a lot of words, the alternatives to produce a residing must not large, and the paper equipped a regular earnings for the family. After Coombs’s grandfather passed away in 1935, his grandmother ran the paper and his mother operated as editor, whereas his aunt set apart of residing the form.

Hand-surroundings had been the most straightforward printing technology readily available from Gutenberg unless 1886, when linotype became invented. Linotype became a form of mechanical typesetting, and it became four times sooner than hand-setters. Hand-surroundings intended the movable steel form all wanted to be put again after it became extinct, and likewise you moreover needed to grab it. The Linotype made its comprise form, for factual the worth of lead. Coombs explains, “Whenever you did a e-book, you set apart of residing the e-book in handset after which you needed to grab the e-book apart. But whenever you set apart of residing it in Linotype, you factual put it away after which reprint it from that. It dropped the worth of books vastly and made newspapers larger.”

When Coombs’s mother married, his father stepped into the role of printer, eventually shopping a second Linotype for the alternate. “He obtained drained of waiting for my mother to ranking off the machine,” laughs Coombs. In 1971, they purchased a second, extinct Linotype outright for $1,200, plus $1,000 to ship it from Denver. Besides to to the newspaper, they moreover printed business-work jobs, making the second machine a solvent resolution.

When Coombs’s father died of a coronary heart attack the day after Christmas in 1978, it became twenty-six-year-gentle Dean who stumbled on himself all of sudden the creator of the Crescent. Already realizing school became not the advise for him and having spent four years outside of Saguache doing real jobs, Coombs became not insecure of onerous work. “It’s more difficult to ranking out of the newspaper alternate than to take care of in,” he explains. “We pushed on and put out the paper the day he died.” Coombs needed to swiftly learn the elegant information of the Linotype machines now in his care. The mechanical machines are produced from many racy parts and many of screws that can loosen to the level of stopping the machine. Says Coombs, “You don’t need an engineering level. It’s mechanical. You stay and ogle.”

Linotypes birth with brass mats, short for matrices, that are the rest you may maybe maybe well be ready to produce one thing out of, admire molds. The machine lines up the matrices and places them precise into a casting advise, which injects molten lead into the molds. This ends in what’s is named a slug, or a total line of form—therefore the title Linotype. By difference, hand-surroundings became a boring direction of, especially when it came to inserting puny spacers between the letters and words to invent the newspaper regular of justified textual impart material (that implies the paragraphs lined up on both the left and the excellent).

The Saguache Crescent is a four-web page paper, which begins out as a 30” by 22” sheet and is then folded down to 15” by 22”. A single font is extinct for the textual impart material, though Coombs admits to a exiguous of a font dependancy, accumulating 250 fonts for his comprise library. The paper mails each and every Wednesday, with a Thursday newsletter date. An in-county subscription prices factual sixteen bucks for a total year.

The majority of the earnings doesn’t near from subscriptions, on the other hand. Saguache County has so noteworthy


deepest property, and with that comes frequent shopping and selling. Tax gross sales are advertised in the paper, after which the titles must be printed as smartly. The county will pay for the precise notifications to be printed.

The entrance web page is news, but most attention-grabbing correct news, a custom Coombs’s mother started and he’s upheld. The again web page is commercials and classifieds. The aforementioned precise publications snatch in a single inner web page, and the quite a lot of gives fundamental knowledge, admire a e-book sale listed by a museum or a quilting club asserting its meetings. The Crescent doesn’t attain any of its comprise reporting, but it does maintain some regular contributors, admire the college essential as smartly as a man with a penchant for history articles. Coombs himself has most attention-grabbing written one article at some stage in his tenure: an yarn of his family’s history to commemorate their a hundredth anniversary of owning the Crescent.

He credits his stubborn personality and his distaste for replace as sources in phrases of operating the newspaper. There’s no stay in the newspaper alternate, especially a puny, family-owned outfit, and one must be committed.


“When my mother became alive, she became interviewed on television, and he or she acknowledged, ‘I don’t know. I factual shuffle to work.’ And I belief, ‘What a uninteresting reply that became.’ But twenty years later, you know, she’s in actuality excellent,” he concedes with a giggle. It’s not probably to grab per week off. He’s most attention-grabbing missed eventually of work, and that became on yarn of food poisoning. Living subsequent door helps as smartly—you may maybe maybe well be ready to’t beat the short jog.

Coombs has no plans to prepare somebody to grab over the newspaper, joking that there’s nobody he dislikes ample to give the paper to. He hasn’t determined when he’ll retire, but he reckons there may maybe maybe well maybe be a million-buck yard sale of kit (and fonts!) eager. For now, he’s chuffed to maintain the shop to himself, waving the occasional tourists inner for an impromptu tour and a history lesson.

To send a letter to the Saguache Crescent:


Dean Coombs, P.O. Box 195


Saguache, Colorado 81149