You can still smell the ink and see the black smudges and crinkled-up stock paper in Brian Brigham's print shop, but the inks don't soak the air like they used to and the smudges on the walls and equipment are fewer and pretty much confined to the cluttered back rooms.

And while Brigham still has loyal customers, they, too, are fewer and don't spend anywhere near the amount of money they used to at his Piñon Fast Print, 1107 B Pen Road, just a few steps away from the railroad tracks.

"People are still coming," said Brigham, of wiry frame and quick wit, "but it's not like it used to be." Business has plummeted from about half a million bucks in the heydays of the 1970s and '80s to about $100,000 now.

"I used to sit at the front desk for hours, just taking orders," he said.

Piñon Fast Print, like countless other businesses that are teetering on the edge or are already defunct, can blame its fate pretty much on two factors — computers and the Internet; the lousy economy hasn't helped either.

Whether it's business and greeting cards, wedding invitations, newsletters or bumper stickers, people now create and print them on home computers or find them on the Web cheaper than Brigham can produce them — Internet sites everywhere from California and Florida to China.

"The last bumper sticker I printed was "Impeach Nixon," Brigham said, only half joking.

Brigham, 72, opened the shop in 1972 after a career as a machine tool lobbyist in Washington, D.C. "I was tired of selling my soul."

At one point, he employed six workers five or six days a week. They bustled about setting type on linotype contraptions, then printing on offset presses, or hand trimming wedding invitations and business cards on a 100-year-old iron paper-cutting machine, which Brigham still uses.

Now it's just Brigham and part-timer Joe Medrano, 78. This day, Medrano, who has been in the printing business since 1961, was stamping invoices. "We call ourselves The Old Fart Fast Print Shop," Brigham quipped.

Bookkeeper Judith Burns occasionally stops by to update the owner on just how bad things are. And then there's Sophie, the mixed-breed "shop dog."

Besides bemoaning the business downturn, Brigham even more painfully laments what he considers the decline of the creative process in printing.

"Printing used to be an art form," Brigham said. "There were so many variables that went into making things come out good. It was like an equation with 17 things on one side and 17 things on the other."

He cited the ink and water,
the paper quality, the variances of the metal type itself and ultimately the printer's eye, agility and skill.

"Computers have taken all the beauty out of typesetting, just making it functional, not really pretty and sharp," Brigham said.

Computers offer "crazy looking fonts that nobody would ever use," and have standardized even the more unusual fonts.

"It just doesn't look as good — it's taken out a bunch of stuff. The letters don't really look carved out like they used to be. ... The type faces are all imitations now. There are no more metal foundry types. They are really gone."

He cited the demise of Baskerville type, which has been noted for its simplicity and elegance and used to convey a sense of dignity with style in conveying one's affairs. "You can find it on the computer, but it's not the same."

Brigham figures that in a 21st-century way, he and other true printers are much like the medieval monks who, fasting and doing penance in their lonely monastic cells, translated and copied the Bible and other manuscripts in beautiful illuminated script, only to be replaced by the banality but copious ability of the Gutenberg press.

"It's an old-style shop where I try to keep up with the times," Brigham said.

But, he concedes that like the monks' work, it's likely a passing endeavor.