The Misprint in the Paper Boat

The print shop opens at seven, but Jabu is always there by six. He likes the hour when the machines are cold and the floor still smells of last night's ink. He walks between the tables, touches the stacks of paper and listens to the building wake up.

Today, the first job on the board is a big one. A river club has ordered three hundred posters for its annual boat parade. The club's organiser is coming for them at five o'clock. She has already asked about them twice.

Nils arrives at half past seven with two coffees and a paper bag. He is new, and he has worked at the shop for only three weeks. Before that, he spent ten years behind a desk at an insurance office. He says he left because he was tired of reading things nobody wanted to read.

"What are we printing?" he asks.

"A poster with a big blue boat and a lot of words," Jabu says. "It has to be perfect. The club pays well, and they send us work every year."

Jabu has already prepared the proof on his screen. He shows it to Nils, who reads it slowly, from top to bottom. The headline says River Boat Parade in tall yellow letters. Below it come the street, the name of the club and a small map. At the bottom are the date and the time.

"It looks good," Nils says.

"It looks good because I have read it fifty times," Jabu says. He smiles. "Come, I will show you how to load the paper."

All morning, the press runs with a steady, heavy rhythm. Jabu teaches Nils to fan the sheets so they do not stick together. He shows him how to check the ink. He explains how to feel a dry roller and how to hear a change in the sound. Nils learns fast. He asks questions and writes the answers in a small notebook.

By noon, the first hundred and twenty posters lie in neat piles on the drying rack. The blue boat shines in the light from the window. Jabu picks one up, nods, and puts it down again.

"Lunch," he says. "Then we finish the rest."

They eat standing up, at the counter by the front door. Afterwards, Nils goes back to the press room alone. He finds a spoiled sheet in the waste box. It has a long grey streak across the corner. He smooths it on the table and begins to fold.

He does it without thinking. His fingers know the steps from childhood. Fold in half, fold the corners, fold up the edges, pull the sides apart. A small boat comes out of the paper, with a flat bottom and a sharp front. He has made hundreds of them in his life, usually in meetings that were too long.

He sets the boat on the table and looks at it. Something about it feels odd.

The folds have hidden the big blue picture and the headline. He sees only the bottom strip of the poster, folded into the hull. It shows two short lines in plain black letters. Saturday, the twenty-first of June. Parade starts at nine in the evening.

Nils reads it twice. Then he takes out his phone and finds the club's email, which Jabu forwarded on his first morning. He scrolls down to the third paragraph.

Please note that the parade begins at nine o'clock in the morning, before the sun is high.

He walks quickly into the office. Jabu is on the phone, but he hangs up when he sees Nils's face.

"What is wrong?" Jabu asks.

"I may be wrong," Nils says. "But I think the time is wrong on the posters."

Jabu frowns. He takes the paper boat from Nils's hand and holds it up. For a moment, he says nothing at all. Then he sits down heavily in his chair.

"Nine in the evening," he reads aloud. "Nine in the evening. How can that be?"

"It says nine in the morning in the email."

"I know what the email says. I typed it myself." Jabu rubs his forehead. "I must have changed it when I fixed the spacing, and I never saw it. I read that poster so many times that my eyes only saw what I expected."

"The boat showed it to me because it hid everything else," Nils says quietly.

Jabu laughs, but it is not a happy sound. He looks at the clock above the door. It is ten past one.

"A hundred and twenty are printed," he says. "One hundred and eighty are still to go. And they are all wrong."

"Could we stop the press?"

"I stopped it for lunch an hour ago. That is the only good news." Jabu stands up. His shoulders are straight again, and his voice is calm. He has been in the business for thirty years, and he knows that panic costs more than paper. "Come with me."

In the press room, he walks to the machine and runs his finger over the plate. The error is small, a single word on a metal sheet. He takes the plate out and carries it to the computer.

"First, we fix the file," he says. "Not just the time. I want you to read the whole poster aloud, line by line, from the bottom. Slowly."

"From the bottom?"

"A page looks different from the bottom. Your eyes cannot jump ahead because you have to read every word alone." Jabu lifts his eyebrows. "Your boat is a clever way to do the same thing."

Nils reads. Jabu listens. They find the correct time, and they find nothing else. Jabu makes a new plate, and Nils helps him lock it into the machine.

At two o'clock, the press starts again. This time, Jabu does not leave the room. Every ten minutes, he pulls a sheet from the tray and passes it to Nils. Nils reads it from the bottom up and nods.

When the three hundred copies are finished, Jabu looks at the old posters. A hundred and twenty beautiful sheets, with a blue boat and the wrong hour, wait on the rack.

"We cannot give them away," Nils says. "People will come at night."

"We cannot sell them either. But we can use them." Jabu pulls out a pencil and writes a short note on a card. "I will give them to the school next door, with the back side blank. The children can draw on the empty paper."

At twenty to five, the organiser arrives. She is a quick, energetic woman with sunglasses on her head, and she walks straight to the counter. Jabu has the new posters ready, wrapped in brown paper.

"Everything correct?" she asks.

"Everything correct," Jabu says. "We checked it twice. The second time, someone read it to me from the bottom."

She laughs, though she does not understand the joke. She pays, takes the posters and leaves with the bell ringing above the door.

The shop is quiet again. Jabu walks back to the press room. Nils is already there, sweeping paper dust from the floor. On the table, the little paper boat still sits where he left it.

Jabu picks it up and turns it in his hand. Then he walks to the shelf above the press, where he keeps his coffee cup. He places the boat in the centre of the shelf, with the mistake showing. Then he presses the green button and starts the next job.