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Pleat Street
Type: Street
City: Frays End
Known for: The Pleat Street Press, The Daily Yarn, and the smell of hot starch and fresh ink
Status: Pressing on
"Hot off the iron, or not at all."
-- Motto of the Pleat Street Press
Pleat Street is the heart of news, printing and journalism in Threadbare. A narrow, steam-wreathed lane in Frays End, it folds back and forth on itself like a pleated skirt, so that a short walk from one end to the other always takes longer than it should. Every building on it is a press, a newsroom, a paper store or an inkhouse, and on a busy night the whole street hisses, thumps and glows.
It is where The Daily Yarn, the broadsheet of record for Frays End, is written, set, pressed and folded, along with a good many smaller and far less respectable rags.
On Pleat Street, news is not printed. It is pressed. The great presses are enormous steam-heated flat irons and mangles, as tall as houses, and every page is fed between their hot rollers, inked, starched and pressed with a crease sharp enough to cut a thread. A page that comes off the iron with a single wrinkle is fed straight back in.
The people who work the presses are known as Pressers. New apprentices are called Wrinkles, until they can press a page perfectly flat.
Pages are pressed onto fine linen spun from FoldFlax in LinenVille, and inked with ink from The Ink Well, bought from the InkKeepers and steeped with MordantMaples bark so that the news holds fast and never fades. Freshly pressed pages are hung on lines strung across the street to dry, like washing, which the RagPies of Frays End find impossible to resist. More than one headline has gone missing from Pleat Street in a RagPie's beak.
The largest press on the street is the Pleat Street Press, home of The Daily Yarn. The paper is printed daily and delivered weekly, every Monday, on KnitWitch Standard Time. No one on Pleat Street can explain how a daily paper arrives once a week, and the Pressers stopped asking long ago.
The Daily Yarn gathers news from right across Threadbare. Its regular features include Faction Watch, Fray Sightings, the Classifieds, and the Void Forecast, issued by the Forecast Division of The University of the Unseen. Its writers include:
- Inga InkleWell - Senior Journalist
- Tibby TattleTwill - Town Correspondent, who knows every lane in Frays End, including the ones that were not there yesterday
- Rufus RagRibbon - who covers WonderWings, WonderBlooms and other curiosities
At the weekend, the Press also turns out The Tapestry, a magazine of longer stories.
The Daily Yarn is not the only paper pressed on Pleat Street, only the most reliable.
- The Loose Thread - a scandal sheet pressed after dark, full of rumours that are never quite finished.
- The Weekly Weave - a sensible round-up of the week's news. Thanks to KnitWitch Standard Time, it arrives every morning, and nobody on Pleat Street can explain that either.
- The Snagged Stitch - a paper of complaints, mishaps and grumbles, where every story is about something that has gone wrong. Its letters page is the longest in Threadbare.
- The home of news. Any newspaper, pamphlet, poster or broadsheet in Threadbare can be traced back to Pleat Street.
- Pressed, not printed. Lean on ironing, steam, starch, creases and pleats rather than ordinary printing.
- Rags and records. The Daily Yarn is the paper of record. The other rags can be unreliable, gossipy or simply wrong, which makes them useful for misunderstandings and rumours.
- Quest hooks. Missing headlines, misprints, deadlines, runaway pages and rumours that need checking all start here.
- Frays End - the city Pleat Street winds through
- LinenVille and FoldFlax - where the linen for its pages is spun
- The Ink Well and InkKeepers - where its ink comes from
- MordantMaples - whose bark keeps the news from fading
- The University of the Unseen - whose Forecast Division issues the Void Forecast
- RagPies - persistent thieves of fresh headlines
- The World of Threadbare - the lore, landscape and denizens of Threadbare
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