The Denver Post: As dry leaves scratched at the town’s streets, 73-year-old Saguache Crescent publisher Dean Coombs hunched over his keyboard behind a pot of gray molten metal on his 1920 linotype machine, typing news for his readers: trustees were about to jack up water bills.

He got up periodically to adjust the machine, one of the last in operation, a multi-ton cross between a typewriter and a foundry, complete with belts, gears, and chutes. His keystrokes triggered a rattling chain reaction that converts the 535-degree mix of antimony, tin, and lead into lines of type for stamping words onto paper. On Tuesday mornings, Coombs heads to the back of his canary-yellow building on the main street of Saguache (population 550) and fires up a 1915 printing press — work he began at age 12 — which churns out 380 copies of the Crescent.

Saguache residents say they couldn’t live without it. And Coombs, who periodically doubles as a plumber for the people he serves, sees no reason to switch to modern digital production and electronic delivery to smartphones.

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