I googled myself the other day. (Everyone does it. Fewer of us admit it.) What came back wasn’t a headshot or some LinkedIn ghost of a former job, it was Gene Gable, writing about me in 2008.

For five years I was the site manager at CreativePro, where Gene wrote a column called “Scanning Around with Gene.” He was late a lot. It never really mattered; the columns didn’t run on hard deadlines, so late just meant late, and when they landed they were always worth the wait. Gene is a wonderful writer. He was forever tinkering with old printing presses, running his own experiments and then writing them up in a way that made you care about lead type and letterpress and the whole machinery of getting words onto paper, whether or not you’d ever given any of it a thought before.

When I left, he wrote a whole column as a goodbye, and, this being Gene, built me a twelve-pound trophy out of parts he’d been hoarding in his garage for years, waiting for the right occasion. That was the kind of man he was: collect the odd beautiful thing, sit on it a while, make something out of it.

I hadn’t thought about him in ages. The last time I really did was ten years ago, on our year around the country. We were in Hannibal, Missouri, on a day of hard rain, walking the town, and we came around a corner and there it was — a Linotype machine sitting out on a pallet, exposed to the weather, looking about as sad as a beautiful old machine can look.

It stopped me cold. All that ingenuity, all those moving parts, out in the rain on a pallet. I thought about Gene the rest of that day.

And now, still googling, I find there’s a book — a whole collection of his writing, in print. I probably won’t spend the forty-one dollars on it. But there’s something right about it: a man who spent his life fascinated by printing presses, set in print for posterity.