On a Tuesday in late August the shutters on Ferhadija 36 go up at six, as they have since 1961. Inside, a Heidelberg Windmill from the same year still throws its arm across the platen with a sound like a bicycle changing gear. Edin Kulenović, seventy-one, does not look up. He is counting sheets by feel, thumb against the edge of the stack, and he will tell you the count before the machine does.

The shop printed the city's theatre posters through the eighties, wedding cards through the nineties, and, for four years in between, nothing at all. What it prints now is mostly for people like us: small runs, heavy paper, ink you can feel with a fingernail. "Everyone wants the letterpress look," Edin says. "Nobody wants the letterpress wait."

His granddaughter Lejla is the apprentice. She is twenty-four, trained as a graphic designer in Ljubljana, and she came back to Sarajevo to learn a trade her tutors described as finished. She disagrees, but carefully. "The presses are not the business," she says. "The patience is. That is what I am trying to inherit."

The question, of course, is what happens to the shop when Edin stops. The building is worth more empty than working. The family has had the conversation exactly once, in 2023, and it ended with Edin walking out to check on a job that did not exist. Lejla has a plan involving a cooperative and a second-hand Risograph. Her grandfather has a plan involving not dying.

We printed this issue there. The cover you are holding took four passes through the Windmill and was rejected twice by Edin for a hairline of misregister that none of us could see. On the third pass he nodded once and went to make coffee. That nod is the reason this magazine exists.