FAIRHOPE, Ala. — Ian Robertson sets the type by hand, using long tweezers to manipulate the tiny lead letters, placing them in a composition stick at his small shop in the garage of his Fairhope home.

“Not a thing is preplanned,” Robertson wrote recently about the process he uses. “As old printers say: you design in the stick.”

At his shop, Robertson, 82, talked about his career, while showing how he works and engaging in a conversation about his life as a printer and lover of the printed word that makes you hate to leave.

“It’s a voice, whispering over my shoulder,” he said. “If I follow it, what comes out mostly turns out well. But if I don’t listen to the voice, the results have been dire. I’ve never been completely satisfied with anything. But you just keep working at it, to figure it out, but you never get it all figured out. If you did, what would be the point of doing anything.”

He smiled at that, as he did often, while talking about printing and books and history, wearing an ink-stained apron, shorts and moccasins.

“I met him when I moved down here from Birmingham in the late ’90s,” said Paul Moxon, who owns Fameorshame Press, and recently was curator of a retrospective show of Robertson’s 57-year-long career. “We became best friends. He’s always laughing and fun to be around.”

That show — “Some Pages: A Retrospective (1952 to present) of Typography and Letterpress Printing of Ian Robertson” — ran throughout the month of January at the Mobile Arts Council.

“He definitely does it old school,” said Moxon, who himself has become an expert in the Vandercook printing press, and travels around the country giving workshops on how to maintain that machine first made in 1909. Moxon has a master’s degree in book arts from the University of Alabama.

“Ian had a very auspicious beginning of his career,” said Moxon, nothing that famous figures in the publishing, printing and design world such as Arthur Rushmore and Will Bradley were mentors of Robertson in his early years. “He worked and knew some of these printers that I had only read about. I thought he was unsung and that his work needed showing.”

Three printing presses are arrayed around his cramped but functional 200-square-foot shop: a small Sigwalt hand press he bought more than 50 years ago; a larger Chandler and Price more than a hundred years old; and one wooden press custom-built for him 25 years ago on the model of medieval presses used at the dawn of the printing age in 1450.

While Bach’s “The Art of Fugue” plays on a small CD stereo, Robertson shows how ink was applied to the plates on his wooden hand press.

“It’s called ‘knocking up the balls,’ he said, laughing, as he rubbed the two instruments together in his hand, showing how the ink would be spread between them and then applied to the plates (see photo on Page 1A). “That’s really the way it was until the 1800s because there were no rollers.”

Next to his CD player is an older Pioneer turntable with hundreds of record albums from classical to blues to the Allman Brothers. A CD of David Grisman and Jerry Garcia sits on top.

Books fill several shelves about the history of printing and other arcane texts on ancient techniques that seem out of place in today’s brave new Kindle world, where books can be downloaded at 10 bucks a pop.

“This is not a line to be in if you expect to be wealthy,” he said.

Robertson studied Irish literature and mythology at Sarah Lawrence College, where he had another famous tutor and mentor, one better known to most people: Joseph Campbell, who wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and became well known for his phrase, “Follow your bliss, and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.”

Campbell might have had Robertson in mind when he also wrote, “I think the person who takes a job in order to live — that is to say, for the money — has turned himself into a slave. The big question is whether you are going to say a hearty yes to your adventure.”

In Robertson’s shop, dozens of long drawers hold different kinds of lead type, what we would call fonts today. And hanging in the air is a pleasant, comforting smell — old books, maybe — and … Ink.

Many hundreds of gallons of ink, acres of paper and scores of years of craftsmanship and artistry must have been used in Robertson’s many shops and other places where he has worked to produce his unique books and publications.

“I’m now No. 2 in longevity among the guys at the Amalgamated Printers’ Association,” he said. “I never promoted myself, but now I’ve been discovered. I’m a printer, nothing more.”

Robertson set up his first press business in New Jersey and called it Windhover Press, named after the poem, “The Windhover” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which praises “the mastery of the thing.”

Fans of Robertson, who’ve held one of his books or pages in their hand and looked close at the time and skill that went into it, might say the same thing of his work.

Photos from the Mobile Arts Council retrospective of Robertson’s work are available at a Web site maintained by Paul Moxon:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fameorshame/sets/72157612373157011.