A fourteen-­year-­old boy in short trousers decides to look behind the curtain. He wants to be a journalist or writer – as yet, he sees no difference – one of the really great ones, anyway, or at least like the editors of the broadsheet news­­-papers they put out in Lehmkuhl’s café, with articles attributed to initials like A.P. or K.T. or O.S. His chances are slim. Non-­existent, in fact. But he has all these questions in his head, and the stubbornness of an old mule.

I got involved with the publication of our school magazine. We produced one hundred and thirty copies of the first edition; five students toiled away with carbon paper, making several copies at once. I was responsible for the ‘Miscellaneous’ section, which I filled with reports about playground fights and the weekly canteen menu. I always had a little pencil stuck behind my ear, which gave me an exhilarating air of industriousness. When I walked across the school playground, the others would watch me with a mixture of curiosity and contempt. ‘Hey, Dixon, you sniffing around again?’ they would shout. It was undignified and exciting.

After I finished school, I went to the local library and presented myself to the librarian. I said that I wanted to start a newspaper, and asked whether there might be someone who could help me. Oddly enough, she didn’t laugh. She looked at me for a while, then said, ‘Come with me.’

She opened a little door behind the stacks of cookery books, and a few steps took us down into the vaulted cellar. A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling, and our shadows roamed across walls that looked as if they had been carved straight out of the rock. The floor was carpeted in a thick layer of dust. ‘There,’ said the librarian, pointing to a corner. Between the boiler and piles of tattered books stood a huge black machine. ‘Do you think you can do something with that?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think I can.’

The machine was a Koenig & Bauer roller press that had once been used to print the parish newsletters. It was over a hundred years old, encrusted with a combination of lubricating oil and dust, and it took me almost a year to get it working. When it finally started up, with a rather vulgar noise, and the first pages rattled out from beneath the roller, I cheered so loudly that my voice cracked and a fine rain of plaster trickled from the ceiling.

Two months later, one icy winter’s night just before my nineteenth birthday, I typeset the masthead of my new paper for the first time: Der Paulstädter Bote. Font: Walbaum Fraktur, bold, twenty-­four point, anno 1812. My cloudy breath in the light from the bulb seemed to me like the spirit of a new age.

I ran the newspaper for thirty-­nine years and took on a whole string of employees, people with enough enthusiasm, at least for a while, to believe in the power of the written word: pensioners, housewives, school dropouts, unskilled workers, mechanical engineers, unemployed teachers, slackers, blockheads, geniuses. They came and went. I stayed.