Heavy Pile

We live on a hill in Baltimore. We’ve been there 16 years. The hill’s been there much, much longer, of course. So long that you’d think, over time, at least one of the city’s snowplows might have found it by now simply by — I don’t know, taking a wrong turn or something.

After a snowstorm, it’s a wrong turn for everyone.

So Shop Boy was literally sweating out the arrival of Mary’s folks for the holidays. The 20 inches or so of powder on the stairs and sidewalks wasn’t all that heavy per shovelful, but man, what a bunch of full shovels. Then Shop Boy had to dig out Mary’s beloved junker, the old Volvo, and create a path for it toward the icy center of the street.

That was plan A: Pray the Volvo up the hill and to the printshop for a few hours, then head to the airport, pick up Wayne and Mama, drive to the bottom of the hill and gun it, bouncing halfway up the block and slipping backwards into the cleared expanse that Shop Boy had dug. That is, if nobody else had taken it by then.

Plan B: Um, there really wasn’t one.

So Shop Boy stewed.

“Oh, it’ll be fine, Shop Boy,” Mary said smugly. “It’s a Volvo. They know snow in Sweden.”

They probably know how to plow hills, too, but don’t get me started. As Mary reminded Shop Boy, the mayor of Baltimore is looking at hard time on a felony rap. She’s not being re-elected. What does she care about disgruntled voters/taxpayers or cleared streets?

Harrumph!

Well, somehow that stupid old car got us up the hill, with Mary, again smugly, pointing out that she didn’t even need the car’s “winter mode.”

Double-harrumph!

At the shop, a heap of recyclables and full trash/rag cans awaited us from the late night before. Shop Boy ran those around the back of the building, returning to see Mary waiting out in the cold on the loading dock.

“I’ve got good news and bad news,” she called out.

Uh-oh.

“Bruce Baggan’s guys can move the presses into the new space.”

Awesome. We’d had friends offer to help, but you know how that goes. Something gets damaged, somebody gets hurt. Besides, these guys are the best.

“But they can’t do it till February …”

Shoot. We need the move finished by the new year.

“Or, they can do it at 8:30 tomorrow morning.”

Gulp.

See, one of the reasons we need the new space is that we’d gotten so cramped that, when not in use, the No. 3 and SP-15 Vandercook presses had been serving as tabletop storage for paper and supplies. With them out of the way, there might even be room for tabletops. And the No. 4, in storage across the hall, had itself been snowed under by the usual phenomenon that occurs in storage spaces during hectic times: Set it down, um, over there and we’ll sort it out later.

Did she say tomorrow morning?

I’ve found it best through the years to just go ahead and get the panic out of the way first. You know, scream, holler, throw fits, just basically freak out. It gets your energy up. Then you can get to work.

Alas, there wouldn’t be time for even a short freakout this time. Shop Boy bounced inside and began making mental notes about what was possible. We’d sort of mapped out where the presses would go in the new space down the hall. It was time to get serious. We measured the presses once more, then walked around the big space with the tape measure trying to imagine how they’d align best for our own production needs and for the foot traffic of the people we hope will come take classes in letterpress from us starting in, say, February.

Perhaps this means you.

Ahem.

Shop Boy and Mary poked their heads into the storage room, where the scent of lavender and the size of the job that clearly lay before Shop Boy were overwhelming.

But now it was time to pick up Mary’s peeps, so off we rolled. It was a real sleigh ride until we got to the main roads, Mary cursing all the dummies who clearly should have stayed inside rather than drive around scared and indecisive. (And, naturally, those who should have just bought an old Volvo like we did.)

We gathered up Mama and Wayne from BWI — great to see them — and turned for home, where the jalopy conquered the hill again easily, Mary guiding it back easily into Shop Boy’s cleared zone.

(OK, she can keep the car a while longer. Sheesh.)

So now we were 15 feet from getting Mary’s parents in without incident. Previous Christmases have featured various of us toppling over or slipping upon various obstacles. And of course, while we were away, snow and ice from the roof had crashed to the pavement, creating a bunch of slick spots. Shop Boy figured some gentle advice on navigating the icy sidewalk would be good, so I turned to Mary’s dad and said helpfully:

“I worked too hard to see you on your butt out here. Be careful.”

I think it inspired him.

Soon, Mama and Wayne were behind a steaming bowl of soup, and Mary and Shop Boy were off to the printshop, her to handle thinky stuff and make plates for a job that was looming and Shop Boy to clear the way for Bruce Baggan’s boys (with Mary’s guidance, of course).

And when the lavender powder storm had cleared at last, we declared victory — something of a miracle, actually — and retreated. Man, were we beat. Back home, Mary’s parents had gone to bed. We’d warned them not to wait up (and they run our house better than we do, so there was no worry about them entertaining and feeding themselves).

Mary and Shop Boy brainstormed a little more before going to bed, trying to work through any possible problems before the move — which could only be done once, after all.

It felt as though our heads had barely touched the pillows when Mama called down the stairs at 7 a.m. Mary groaned. Shop Boy couldn’t muster the energy to do the same. But soon the house was humming. Wayne wanted to come along for the move, even though chances are both of us — as guys — would be bored, and made to feel like weaklings, as John, Al and Jason did their thing.

The roads were a bit better, and we made it to the shop well ahead of the riggers, who’d had some truck trouble and ended up having to reload all their equipment onto a second truck for the journey. Then they hauled it all up the stairs to the Fox Industries building and — not being the types to mess around — had the little No. 1 Vandercook popped up on a pallet jack, down the hallway and into place.

Plan A for the bigger presses: Same as the first. Except the presses wouldn’t cooperate, size-wise, with the pallet jack. And they’d surely crush the wooden dollies. That meant these very clever fellows would need to get some different equipment. Or …

Plan B: Listen to Shop Boy, high priest of the carpet square — those little remnants that stores give out so you can see how the carpet will look with your furniture and walls. They’re rectangular, actually.

Well, turn them pile-side-down and …

“You know these presses will slide,” Shop Boy said to John. “Just put a carpet square under each leg and push. The floor’s smooth.”

He looked skeptical, but agreed to give it a try.

Boom. The SP-15, the lightest of the three larger Vandercooks, was in its new home. The No. 3 resisted a bit more, and I could see that the guys were sweating and breathing a lot harder than if they’d put the thing on wheels. But it sure was fast. Still, I apologized for the hard labor, and said they should just move the final, heaviest press the best way they knew how.

Turns out the best way was carpet squares again. But the No. 4 was a beast, Shop Boy jumping in to help push, and accidentally elbowing the cylinder gears-first onto Jason’s hand — yikes — as we maneuvered the press through a doorway and into position. More apologies all around.

“Oh, it’s no problem,” John said. “I just can’t believe we brought all this equipment and we ended up only using carpet squares. I gotta invest in some of these.”

Jason said he’s had worse injuries, which was nice. You know, especially when compared to clobbering me with his dented hand and all.

Done in an hour, and off they went to the next job. Another of Bruce’s crews was having trouble lifting some multi-multi-ton object onto a truck, and the boss was calling in the cavalry.

Hey, you forgot the carpet squares!

Sachet on Over

Where does a 15-pound bag of lavender sit?

Anywhere it wants to (ho-ho!), but preferably it will choose a room with good ventilation.

Dang.

It sure covers up the smell of musty old stuff in the storage room,
so that’s something.

The huge sack is part of a grand product scheme by Mary, which I guess Shop Boy’s been enabling. (Honest, I feel like Barney Rubble to Fred Flintstone or Art Carney to Jackie Gleason. OK, she’s had some great ideas. Blah, blah, blah.) As part of the first appearance by Typecast Press at an arts and crafts fair, we’d print little cloth bags — sachets — and fill them with, you guessed it, lavender. And did I mention the pine? The ginger? Orange peel?

A regular funk farm. Jeez, Shop Boy’s lungs were seizing up.

First order of business was the bags. We’d brainstormed how to adorn them. Mary had designed a gorgeous lavender plant for a wedding invite a while back, so that was a gimme. We even had some of the ink left. Ding-ding-ding! Then came the “stinky shoe” idea — you know, for guys’ smelly insoles. (Shop Boy did not take this personally.) Finally, a decorative thingamabob from an old, copyright-free book.

The bags were flat tweaky. Not flat, mind you, but tweaky for sure. They come 250 per order, all bunched together in a plastic bag, meaning Shop Boy had to all but steam iron the darned things individually to make the wrinkled edges stay in the C&P’s guides. Had to reeaaallllly slow the big press down.

The cloth actually took the impression quite well. Shop Boy had feared the ink would go through the muslin and make a mess, requiring me to stick a sheet of cardboard or whatever inside each and every bag and re-set all the packing. Talk about slowing things down.

In a couple of hours, I’d printed enough bags, in a couple of different colors, to get us through to the next millennium, never mind the craft fair, and Mary called in a couple of friends to seal the deal, filling each sachet with dried lavender or whatever noxious mixture Mary had stirred together in the potato chip bowl. “New in your favorite grocer’s snack section: orange peel and ginger-flavored chips!”  (We’ll clean it before your next visit … swear.) Tiny drawstrings closed the bags to prevent spillage and voila!

Shop Boy mostly steered clear of that mess, coming in at the end to knock out 50 or so lavender sachets of, as you’d imagine, the highest quality.

You know what? People bought ‘em. Not all of them, of course. We’ve got a ton left over, overflowing a couple of cardboard boxes like tiny sandbags ready to hold back a flash flood of foul-smelling liquids or something.

And we’ve still got half a bag of lavender. (Cough!)

“Do you think it will attract mice?” Mary asked.

Shop Boy’s thinking it’ll do just the opposite — send the little buggers running outside, screaming for fresh air.

Now, if you don’t mind, I think Shop Boy will join them.

Whew.

Rolling Back the Clock

It’s human nature, I suppose, when things aren’t going so well, to question exactly what you were thinking when you decided to become a letterpress printer. And Shop Boy, it should be clear to all by now, is unfailingly human.

So, when I had finally, officially, miserably failed in my exhaustive effort to make a worn and curled-up polymer plate print just one more time — please! — Shop Boy angrily cleaned the wasted ink off the big C&P, whipped the inky rag into the safety can, slamming the lid, pulled off the rubber gloves and kicked them into their bucket, slammed the factory door and stomped to his truck and …

Calmly drove home.

No, I did not lay rubber, sling gravel or any other signs of frustration. Driving is driving. It is not talking on the telephone. It is not a car-racing video game. It is not “taking it out” on anyone or anything. It is a privilege and a tremendous responsibility. Shop Boy is not a perfect driver, and neither are you. Knowing this should keep us honest. Be careful out there. Amen.

Where was I? Oh, fuming. Ready to kill letterpress and its whole family on the very night Shop Boy was to once again meet the woman who got Mary so fired up about this in the first place:

Carol Sturm.

She was an instructor at New York City’s Center for the Book Arts when Mary decided it’d be a kick for us to go and be printers for a weekend. Carol, a smart, wiry, sarcastic and no-nonsense dynamo, won us over immediately. Soon, she and Mary were riding herd, Carol expertly showing us how this Vandercook stuff worked and Mary choosing ink colors, paper and such and convincing our indecisive classmates that they’d come up with the ideas.

Mary always brags on Shop Boy for being chosen by Carol to proofread the poster we were creating — a word guy amid “artists.” Like a lot of printers, and fewer graphic designers, Carol was dead serious about grammar, spelling and punctuation. (In fact, these days she’s an English teacher in upstate New York.)

Anyway, through the years, her Nadja Press has produced limited-edition books of poetry and the like — absolute masterpieces of printing — so when Mary was thinking of a boffo guest speaker for the final class of the semester at the Maryland Institute College of Art, she kept coming back to Carol.

But it had been, like, a decade. She wouldn’t remember us from any of the million others who come through the Center for the Book Arts before and after us.

No matter. Again, Mary is, um, fairly persuasive.

And thus, steaming mad as Shop Boy was, he was also eager to greet (confront?) the reason for his current anguish. Mary called to say that the class was running late — they were having too much fun, harrumph! — and that I should meet them outside Dolphin Press, MICA’s printshop, at 10:30 or so. At least that gave me time to cool off.

Carol’s friendly hello and first sarcastic comment did the rest.

She’s a “pip,” as Shop Boy’s mom used to say.

Back at the house, I whipped up cocktails. (If you’re new to this blog, the url gwbgt.wordpress.com is short for Guy Who Brings Gin & Tonics. Man, Shop Boy is dangerous with a bottle of gin. You’ve been forewarned.)

Soon we were laughing about teaching, about that old class we took (Carol kept unconsciously referring to one young, tomboyish woman, Marie-Claude or something, as “Jean-Claude” — we were dying, even as the poor apopleptic student appeared closer and closer to going all Van Damme on the teacher), about drinking, about how cool it was to be back together.

Just like old friends.

Isn’t letterpress great?

Taking a Powder

Imagine buying a super-expensive sports car because you like the rear defrost feature on the side mirror. Well, Shop Boy swears that Mary bought the Heidelberg Windmill for the little drawer on the side.

You know the one I’m talking about, right?

The Barbie tool kit.

Oh, they don’t call it that in Germany, the machine’s birthplace. It’s the Brunhilde box or something. Anyway, it’s this tiny container that disappears into the side of the machine with its store of odd, teeny little doodad-y tools — for tweaking things on the windmill. Just Mary’s style.

And, thanks to Shop Boy’s, um, special arrangement with the
Georgetown Sephora branch, the box also holds the blush brush.

I’ve mentioned before that I’m a Beauty Insider, right? Well, now I’m like the king/queen of beauty insiders, a “BIP.” Swear to god. I’ve bought so many beauty products there (what, you thought this look was natural?) that they added a little sticker to my Beauty Insider card, meaning more free samples. Sparkly lip balm, eyelid lifter, perfume … whee!

Ahem.

See, one day, one of our interns, a guy, mentions that, hey, if you put a little baby powder on the tympan after you — doh!  — ink it, the powder dries up the mess and the offset disappears much more quickly. And to think, Shop Boy told Mary that male interns would never add up to anything. It flat works.

And the perfect vehicle for putting powder to tympan: a blush brush with a little reservoir to store the powder. Mary was so impressed with this trick that she immediately sacrificed her brush to the gods of letterpress. Which meant that the BIP was dispatched to procure a new one.

So I got two, slightly different models but with the same basic operation. Or so we figured. But when even Mary — a girl, for heaven’s sake — couldn’t figure out how to open one of them to put in powder, it quickly became apparent …

Shop Boy was about to get a one-on-one, in-store, BIP lesson in how to operate a refillable blush brush.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me, Shop Boy. Take it back and make them show you how to open it.”

Great. Being a dude shopping in Sephora isn’t a weird enough experience as it is. At least they’re always nice at “my” Georgetown branch. Take the large gentleman who, uh, clearly knows his way around a makeup mirror. The pretty lady at the checkout desk called him over when she couldn’t figure out the blasted brush either.

He cheerily took the brush in his huge paws, taking time to explain the basic mechanism to Shop Boy as though there were no other customers in the whole store — stopping just short of explaining how to get an even color tone on my cheeks. Then he twisted the two ends in opposite directions … snapping the thing in two.

“Must be defective,” he said. “Let’s try another one.”

This one worked, but the big fellow was taking no chances, making me show him that I knew how to work the brush. Satisfied enough with my clumsy fumbling, he packaged it up and threw it into a Sephora bag with even more funny little free makeup samples.

Mary’s going to need a Barbie tool kit for the side of her dresser at this rate.

Shop Boy? Suffice it to say that I’d better go work on my speech for induction day at the Beauty Insider Hall of Fame.

Guide Dog

Sometimes you get in the zone, and maybe slip just a little bit into autopilot mode. On those rare days when the inking is going just right for long stretches, your back doesn’t hurt, the iPod’s hit a sweet stretch of music (hush, Mary!) and you’ve got, say, only another 45 minutes to go in a run of 1,000 or so menus, feeding one after another into the big C&P.

Reach, place, remove, stack; reach, place, remove, stack.

Well, Shop Boy has an expression for this zen state: “pounding the guides.”

In essence, you’re just trusting the gauge pins — and your hand-eye coordination — to keep the paper straight again and again and again. A nice, firm feed. Shop Boy was feeling so good he shared the good news of success with Mary as she entered the room to use the paper cutter.

“Whew, that was a good run.”

Mary picked up a menu and grimaced.

“What?”

By “pounding the guides,” I had actually managed to move the gauge pin on the right, knocking it loose from its masking tape bonds. Like, a half-hour ago, apparently.

The menus are two-color, meaning I would never have noticed the damage — about 200 menus wrecked — until the second color was applied. It was a subtle crookedness. But Mary picked up on it right away. Autopilot isn’t really her thing.

And this isn’t cheap paper we’re talking here. I felt like an idiot, especially since now I’d have to go back through the stack one at a time with a ruler to determine on which menu, exactly, the gauge pin first slipped.

As is my way in these situations, I began to pout.

“Don’t worry, Shop Boy,” Mary said, trying to cheer me up (and keep me working efficiently — nothing less efficient than a pouter, after all). “Just turn them into specials paper.”

I hadn’t thought of that. The menus are 12 inches square. The paper we cut for the restaurant’s nightly specials is 4 inches by 12. (Geez, it was almost like Mary had planned it that way or something. ) And since I had been printing only at the top of the menu sheet, I was able to turn the ruined pile of menus into two very healthy piles of specials paper, minimizing my mess-up by two-thirds.

Shop Boy, now two-thirds less pouty if not quite as serene as an hour before, set about cleaning the C&P for the second color. Forty-five minutes later, I was right back in the zone, pounding the guides.

With Mary checking about every fifth menu that came off the press, of course. Sheesh.

A Monkey’s Uncle

Animal poaching is cruel business.

Take cocktail monkeys, for instance.

Oh, you laugh. But this is serious business. I mean, $56 for 250
plastic cocktail monkeys serious. And that’s from a supplier in
Australia. Shipping fees, anyone?

See, Typecast Press needs these monkeys. We wear monkeys on our shop smocks, monkeys on our shop aprons, Mary’s more likely than not to have a monkey on her T-shirt, we even have the book All About Monkeys on our shop reading shelf — our tiki drinks are going to wear monkeys too, by gum.

And yet they are suddenly an endangered species. Try it. Find a batch on the Internet. Mary did, but not without a serious hunt. Oh, you’ll see listings for them. But they’re all out of stock.

Someone or some nefarious force has swept in and disrupted the market for cocktail  monkeys. Swear to god. Mary and Shop Boy spent the better part of two  hours seeking them … when there were much more pressing issues at hand, I assure you. And once we did find this rarest of plastic beasts, we did what anyone in our situation would do: hoard.

Wait. Doesn’t that makes us just as bad?

Hey, I said it was a cruel business. And now Typecast Press, at least
as far as what’s left of the vanishing cocktail monkeys is concerned, has cornered the market.

So the next time you absolutely must have a pink, blue, green or
orange monkey hanging by its plastic prehensile tail from the rim of
your tropical cocktail, let’s talk.

We’re cruel but fair.

The Old School Try

A photographer friend jokes about an “old school” button on modern digital cameras … OK, there are seemingly hundreds of buttons and dials and touchscreens on these suckers, but stay with the class. See, this button lets you take photos utilizing only, like, seven f-stops.

I mean, why bother taking a photo with that little choice?

All right, so Shop Boy’s a little geeky. Selectively, of course. But most of you are probably at least sort of familiar with the concept of aperture, right? No? This is the width of the camera’s shutter opening, which controls how much light gets through to the film — or digital recording device nowadays. It determines “depth of field.” You know, you can set it wide open to make the subject clear and everything in front and back of it out of focus, or you can close it up to capture your subject as well as everything for miles in front and back. The higher the number, the smaller the lens opening — and the more light you need to get the shot right.

On Shop Boy’s old .35mm camera, the settings are 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16 and 22.

Well, for these twitchy kids today, with their 37-button, quadruple-toggle video game controllers and text messagers that look like something out of NASA, only seven options is, like, WTF?

Ahem. Not to sound like a cranky old dude … but back in my day, seven buttons was plenty. If you weren’t good enough to work with only seven buttons, well, practice up!

All of which is to say that as much trouble as teens have narrowing their focus down, some of us now have expanding our focus out.

Our brains are stuck at f2.8 while these kids are at f90 or whatever.

Oh, yeah? Let’s see them shoot a basketball game in a dimly lit gymnasium with tall and fast players flying all over the place. Um, that’s right … they play video games while doing homework, taking photos, eating pizza and texting friends.

Shop Boy? Ask Maureen Hogan.

So here I am with this new Typecast Press digital camera, and the choices for shooting modes is mind-boggling. But I promised Mary I’d learn it in exchange for her letting me buy it, so Shop Boy’s doing something he promised himself he’d never do: read the instruction manual.

And there’s like, all kinds of information in there. Who knew?

Did I mention a deadline? See, Shop Boy has for too long — to some people’s way of thinking — been puppet dictator of a rebel province. Meaning this blog. Many of you who do read these stories don’t necessarily make the trip back to Mother Typecast Press, in whose service Shop Boy toils (not always as Mary might prefer to have it). OK, maybe that’s a weird analogy. But again, keep up!

And the folks who visit Typecast Press don’t necessarily find the eternal wonderment that is Shop Boy’s blog. I think I speak for all of us when I say that is a darn shame.

Sometime in December, all that will change … I mean, except for the “not always as Mary might prefer to have it” part. 

Shop Boy is going home to Typecast, thanks to the work of a very talented and patient web designer named Mike McNeive. We’ve loved our site — www.typecastpress.com, built by a previous designer — but haven’t really been comfortable enough technologically to update sample photos and the like. In typical fashion, I was afraid we’d break it. And since this blog started as a joke — shhh! — Shop Boy just used the easiest blog maker around, WordPress.com, and started blabbing.

Anyway, Mike is streamlining our site to ease navigation and let even us be able to post more recent photos and show you what, ahem, Shop Boy has been complaining about and, OK, celebrating all this time. And we’ll be better able to make a mental note of who’s stopped by. (Yes, we will be taking attendance, class.)

Not sure we’ll be bringing Shop Boy’s other blogs along for the ride. Can you imagine? More of all this Shop Boy magic that you’ve never experienced, at least by the looks of the visitor stats over there.

I’ll give you a heads up when the move’s going down. Meanwhile, back to the directions …

Hey! Did you know there’s something called a “smile detector” on here? If one subject’s smiling and the other’s not, the camera automatically senses it and speaks up.

Like, WTF?

Wonder if it can pick up unseen basketball players barreling toward you while you fumblingly shift from f2.8 to f22.

Could have used that back at Shop Boy’s old school.

No Blood, No Foul

Respect is not a four-letter word.

No, those come when you forget to respect a machine you’ve gotten a bit too comfortable with.

Take the other day, Shop Boy at the big C&P, Mary at the paper cutter.

“Can you stop for a second and get me a bandage?” Mary asked.

“Sure,” I said. “What happened?”

“I don’t know, but I’m bleeding.”

OK. So Shop Boy quickly ran through in his mind the possible medical, biblical, even science fictional reasons for spontaneous bleeding from the extremities. But I kept coming back to one theory:

“Do you think you might have, um, touched the blade?”

Not that she could remember.

And that’s the thing. That bugger is so sharp that your first inkling that you’ve been cut is blood on the paper.

Then it stings. A lot. And you swear.

We doused Mary’s hand with hydrogen peroxide, did the backwards counting to the last tetanus shot she’d had, applied a nice pink bandage to the sliced digit — it’s her shop, all right? — and she set right back to work, with a mostly harmless little reminder that these machines will kill you as soon as look at you.

It’s the lesson we preach to Mary’s visiting Maryland Institute College of Art classes, especially when they show signs of impatience at how slowly we’re running the powered clamshell presses or the Heidelberg windmill.

First of all, most have never used a clamshell press before.  It’s pretty exclusively Vandercook proof presses at MICA right now. Hurt yourself on one  of those and you’re just not paying attention.

Or you’re paying too close attention — Mary and her class this semester have already shared a lesson in removing long strands of hair from the rollers. Honest. Word is that the young woman didn’t even scream. You gotta be tough in letterpress, baby!

True story: Shop Boy’s dad built a neat red shed in the driveway. A teeny thing, but just tall enough, if you used your imagination, to hold a basketball rim. We could all dunk there, even though we were, like, 12 years old. It set our basketball skills back at least a decade since we all suddenly thought we were 8 feet tall or something. (Shop Boy was 5-foot-9 and the tallest kid in our circle after a growth spurt that very soon afterward stopped spurting.) And we had some rough basketball games in that driveway. How rough? No whiny foul calls. If the bone wasn’t showing through the skin, it wasn’t a foul. Get up and play, weenie! We were all fans of the Boston Celtics back then — football players in short-shorts, they were. And so would we be.

Fast forward to New Jersey, circa 1985. There was a basketball court built for young kids at a local school — rims only 8 feet above the asphalt. As soon as Shop Boy saw it, he knew: “I will dunk a basketball again in my lifetime.”

So it seemed like destiny the day I awoke, grabbed my brand-new, undribbled basketball, laced up my high-top sneakers and drove over to the courts to find them empty and … freshly surfaced. A light fog enshrouded the court as I dribbled onto it, staring with evil intent at the basketball rim at the south end. Summoning my 12-year-old self, I dribbled toward the basket, tentatively at first and then accelerating, leaping up, up, up (OK, up-ish) toward glory.

Whereupon I clumsily clanked the basketball off the back of the rim and, watching it bounce away, didn’t pay attention to the landing gear. My sneaker gripped the new asphalt and didn’t budge even as my knee buckled and I was suddenly down in a groaning heap, the basketball rolling slowly toward the corner of the courts.

Today, there’d have been a camera just waiting to capture young adult Shop Boy’s epic failure at the kiddie court. Back then, it was just me, my forehead resting against the asphalt, which still felt warm, afraid for a moment to look down at my leg. Luckily, there was no bone sticking through — no blood, no foul — meaning I could drag myself back to my car before witnesses showed up. (If it had been a compound fracture, I’d likely have gnawed the leg off for sure rather than be found like this.)

Anyway, I hope the kids who found it later got some good use out of that basketball.

See? It’s about respect, whether for gravity or for a machine with the power to, um, foul you.

One more quick sports thingy: Comedian Richard Pryor used to joke about what a tough guy football player/actor Jim Brown was. Supposedly, a tackler once stuck his fingers inside Brown’s facemask, and suffered serious bite wounds.

Brown’s explanation to Pryor:

“Anything outside the mask belongs to him. Anything inside belongs to me.”

That, friends, is the very attitude shared by printing presses, paper cutters and a lot of other heavy machinery.

It’s simple. As Shop Boy learned that day in New Jersey and continues to learn every day in the printshop:

Stay grounded.

Letterpress List No. 81: Jacked Up

One of the cool things about the Typecast Press printshop is the high ceilings. See, when you’re moving heavy stuff around a crowded storage area, it helps to have access to the airspace above things. All you have to do is — oof! — lift it — grunt! — high enough off the ground — ugh! — and you’re home.

Keeping an item aloft is not as hard as getting it there, in Shop Boy’s opinion. (Of course, be sure to save enough energy to lower it — oof! — back to — oh, man! — the ground afterward. Whew!)

It’s like at our house, which has 10-foot ceilings but one very skinny hallway between the kitchen and dining room, with a favorite old (frail) cabinet taking up half the width. This was a tea cabinet from Mary’s grandmother’s home that was in terrible shape when it arrived. (“You’re kidding, right?” Shop Boy said to Mary at the time. She doesn’t kid when it involves Grandmama’s memory. And Shop Boy should tread lightly here as well, seeing as how I was the first Yankee allowed into the family, thanks to Grandmama’s nod of approval.) Mary’s dad helped fix the old piece, while Mary and sister Melissa repainted flourishes on the face of the thing.

Perhaps most importantly, Mary’s mom made molasses bars with baking ingredients like those that would soon be housed in the “new” cabinet.

Which is now nice. But no less in the way.

So Shop Boy is constantly boosting chairs, baskets, boxes, upright fans and the like to the free airspace above it, walking carefully past and lowering the item to the floor.  (“Going the other way around” means either a.) walking out the front door, down the sidewalk, out to the alley behind the rowhouses and in through the back gate or b.) past the wacky dining room chandelier, two steps down to the front hall, up a curving flight of stairs past Mary’s favorite artworks, down a looong hallway and finally down a really tight, turning set of back steps to the kitchen.

The truth is, it gives me a little thrill to boost stuff above my head. And some day, if Shop Boy’s lucky, I’ll be a little old man unable to do stupid things like this anymore. That will make me cranky. (Just warning you ahead of time.)

Anyway, as we’ve discussed, I like moving impossible-to-move things. Always been like that. Shop Boy isn’t Superman or anything — more like The Blob. But I’m just strong enough, and clever enough, that if you don’t watch me, I’ll have that heavy thing over there over here before you can say, “Go get some help with that thing. Are you crazy?” It, ahem, helps to wait till Mary’s left the room.

So we know my fetish. Sue me. Shop Boy’s comfortable with who he is.

Here’s what scares me: Lately, I’ve heard Mary talking about getting a pallet jack. How we need some come-alongs and maybe a johnson bar.

Excuse me?

It wasn’t so long ago that Shop Boy had to teach her how to pry open an ink can without jabbing a screwdriver into her opposite wrist, and now she’s talking about doing some light rigging?

(Bruce Baggan, if you are reading this, please: Save me!)

Oh, nothing too heavy, she assured me. Just some paper that got delivered the other day. (Whew — false alarm, Bruce. We can leave the machine moving to you and yours.)

Shop Boy: “How much paper?”

Mary: “Oh, it’s just the poster board that I ordered. But you should have seen the trouble the guy had getting it onto the loading dock.”

Shop Boy: “How much paper?”

Mary: “Well, there was a minimum order …”

Shop Boy: “How much paper?”

Quick math quiz, folks: 550 kilograms equals X number of pounds?

(Yeah, Shop Boy cheated too. Aren’t iPhones great?)

1,200-plus!

The sheets are about the usual 22 inches by 36 or so inches, I’m guessing. And they’re stacked 5 feet high. Sitting on a pallet with reinforced feet! Minimum order? Yikes.

That’s a lot of printing.

But we’re assembling designs for a couple of late-fall, um, selling events, and I guess Mary just wanted to be sure not to run out of paper.

Shop Boy’s thinking that she can relax.

***

Letterpress List No. 81

I’ve almost forgotten how to do this list thing. If you’ve missed Shop Boy’s little exercise in mix-and-match musicality, sorry to have gotten out of the habit. If you hate it, sorry, but I’ve missed it myself. How about an hour’s worth of music to, uh, size up and ponder what to do with a 1,200-pound stack of paper by? At least until the pallet jack gets here.

Seven Nation Army — The White Stripes/Jack White (I could use the extra hands.)
Do It Again – Steely Dan (Go back, Jack. We’ve just found a new home for the stack.)
She’s Got the Jack — AC/DC (OK, enough. Besides, this is one song that even AC/DC fans would agree is just a touch too much.)
Touch Too Much — AC/DC (That’s more like it.)
Dreams — Van Halen (Higher and higher. Not David Lee Roth-era VH, but not bad.)
Yankee Rose — David Lee Roth (Ah, I feel better now. “A bottle of anything and a glazed donut … to go” always hit the spot. Did Shop Boy mention that Grandmama lived 22 steps from a Krispy Kreme? Ooh.)
Reach for the Sky — Social Distortion (A Yankee? Really…)
Runs in the Family – Amanda Palmer (Of Dresden Dolls fame. Mary calls it polka music. She’s no fan. More for us!)
Elevate Myself — Grandaddy (Bouncy b.s. Dude protests a bit too much about staying musically pure. Fun, though.)
Shoop — Salt N Pepa (“Straight up, wait up, hold up, Mr. Lover.”)
Straight Up — Paula Abdul (Again, sue me.)
Save Yourself — Stabbing Westward (From Mary’s former jar-opening technique.)
Real Live Bleeding Fingers – Lucinda Williams (Saw her recently here in Baltimore. She can still bring it.)
Scar Tissue – Red Hot Chili Peppers (OK, we get it, Shop Boy. Great song, though.)
Purple Haze – Jimi Hendrix (Excuse me while I kiss the sky.)
Pump It Up – Elvis Costello and the Attractions (Ooof!)
Bombshell – Powerman 5000 (Don’t drop it.)
Dude (I Totally Miss You) – Tenacious D/Jack Black (Genius or garbage? Either way, it’s cool with Shop Boy.)

Lousy Reception

“You’re evil and you want to rule the world!”

That’s the second thing Shop Boy said to Mary as she attempted to rouse him, face down, from the cot at 3:15 a.m.

It’s a line from a crazy Japanese cartoon I saw once long ago that was dubbed into English — a Speed Racer-type deal. Anyway, the line is spoken so rapid-fire in the dubbing, with the cartoon characters lips all out of sync … call me goofy, but I laugh demonically every time I think about it.

(By the way, the first thing Shop Boy said to Mary upon regaining consciousness, one eye open and the cot’s fabric pattern imprinted on his forehead: “Who are you, and why have you brought me here?” I’m surprised she didn’t just throw a sheet of paper over me and leave me there until morning. Oh, wait. It was morning. But you know what I mean.)

See, Shop Boy doesn’t watch a whole lot of TV. But the stuff I tend to watch tends to stick. Bulls “getting all up in the business” of the cowboys trying to ride them. Nature shows like the one where the rogue male lion, having chased off her mate, brings the female into heat by devouring her cubs. (Swear to god.) Then he mounts her (cue the British accent), “with the scent of her babies still on his lips.”

Then there’s baseball, of course. The NFL …

And Beavis and Butt-head.

Mary tries to give me a hard time about my shows. But she should talk: The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Orange County, NYC or Wherever … Project Runway. Top Chef. Yeesh! Point the camera and watch people be idiots toward one another to earn themselves more camera time. Why not The Real Housewives of Hampden? (That’s our shop’s neighborhood — and we’ve got some real beauts. For instance, the two ladies who scream the same obscene insults at each other over and over for a half-hour — rhymes with “itch” and “ore” — then just walk away, are perfect.) House. Burn Notice. The Closer, and Every Other Stinking Police Procedural Out There. She’s a total junkie.

Shop Boy likes to kid a real-life co-worker who doesn’t even own a TV — and hasn’t for years — about everything she’s missing.

You know, like the second half of every pharmaceutical ad that by law has to warn you of the potentially dangerous side effects: basically, that the company’s drug could do to you exactly what you’re trying to prevent or cure.

A sleep drug that causes edginess. A depression drug that can cause suicidal feelings. A heart medicine that may cause a dangerous elevation in blood pressure. The four-hour woody.

This is great stuff. And my co-worker had absolutely no idea.

Of course, she’s also been spared The Real Housewives, but still. No TV? That’s just nutty.

Which is what Shop Boy was trying to explain to Mary when we started talking about the new space.

Oh, haven’t I mentioned that? The furniture company ladies are moving out to, um, fancier digs. Shop Boy doesn’t know why. The space they’re leaving behind is awesome — and, come December, all ours at last.

(Wait. Didn’t we just expand across the hall? Yes I know, Shop Boy is evil and he wants to rule the world. Ha-hahahahahahaahaha!)

The studio is actually three offices and a central space, once the headquarters of DI, a company that installs custom sound systems for college auditoriums and other big industrial projects. And Mary has promised the glassed-in sound booth as Shop Boy’s office … and command center. (Translation: That’s where I’ll take commands from her.)

All we need now’s a TV. Look, we’ve got beer in the fridge. How could we skip the second half of the guyness? Am I right?

We are at the shop working all the time. What’s so wrong about sneaking a peek at the baseball playoffs or the football game while Mary is doing her thing? I mean, Shop Boy just gets underfoot while all those thinky parts of printing are going on. You know, she grabs the calculator, Shop Boy grabs the remote. Two brains, each operating at full capacity.

All we have to do is expand the office’s cable Internet connection to include basic TV stuff. It’s not like I’m asking for more than a few channels: Versus (bullriding/bass fishing), Golf (um, golf, golf, golf and golf), ESPN2 (junk mostly … guys chasing balls of every sort every which a way), ESPN (ahhhh …) and Animal Planet (baby’s blood cologne).

Well, Mary’s internal cable service must be out. Because she ain’t hearing a word of it. She did humor Shop Boy slightly by checking on whether just a few channels can be installed before she summarily dismissed the notion.

Then she summarily dismissed the notion.

I think she’s hung up on the potentially dangerous side effects.

Our Friends Are Your Friends

Shop Boy’s been tied up on a terrible real-world deadline.

But if you need a fix, check out this story of one of Mary and Shop Boy’s capers (with a nod to Mary’s book club for the inspiration).

“The Taste of Oregon” is the blog of our dear friends Vic and Charles.

And just as Shop Boy hopes that people who stumble upon his blog expecting real information on printing presses and ink might stick around anyway, you don’t need to be an Oregoner to check out their foodie blog.

Who knows? You might even stay for a second helping.

But come back. I won’t be silent much longer.

Making a Long Story Long

Let Shop Boy tell you a story.

Actually, let me tell you two stories. Nah, nah … three.

The first is a tale of deadlines, of an amazingly beautiful idea that was late to the party and thus watched as the glass slipper was placed on its ugly stepsister’s foot. Sent back home to sweep up the ashes of what might have been.

What, you don’t like hyperbole? Next blog over, please.

Besides, it’s the 100th anniversary of the Vandercook printing press this year. It calls for over-the-top celebrations. Like the idea of soliciting 100 printers worldwide to create 100 posters to mark the occasion. Mary was proud to be part of the exercise. Shop Boy was geeked for her. And over the fact that, if you sent in 100 of your posters, you’d get one each of the other 99!

At least until he heard the deadline.

But Mary already had a perfect poster in hand, an off-the-hook cover she had done for her Maryland Institute College of Art class project on the same theme: “Love Letters to a Vandercook.”

Mary’s concept — with her students’ input — was a type drawer filled not with lead characters but with chocolates. The goodies  were stamped with X’s and O’s, as if letterpressed. Sweet! Shop Boy just loved every single spot of ink on that baby. We’d just have to reprint it.

Then Mary checked the website for the project, and saw that another Baltimore entry had a disappointingly similar motif. Oh, the images were worlds apart — but the words weren’t. And since about the worst thing in the world is to be a knock-off, Shop Boy petted Mary’s masterpiece one last time and we began to brainstorm.

“I know, you’ll write me a bedtime story,” Mary said.

“But …,” Shop Boy stuttered.

“Yeah, you’ll come up with a story, and we’ll design it around Andy Snair’s illustration of our press.”

“But …”

“Oh, come on, Shop Boy. You like writing stories. What, my thing isn’t important enough? I bet if it was for your blog, you’d do it.”

Ooh. Did she just go there? So typical: Hero to zero in, like, 30 seconds.

But you put a red cape in front of a bull … and bull happens. Mary couldn’t have been prepared for the load of words I threw at her before sundown. You want a  bedtime story? Here’s your bedtime story:

***

“Vandercook: A Bedtime Story”

Then, there was a monster.

More misunderstood behemoth than evil beast, truly.

Once beloved, it had helped tell the world of the good and the bad, the amazing and the sad. It could paint a pretty picture, or present the stark truth in black and white.

And the world listened, amazed. For a time.

Until a newer, sleeker messenger called out. “Don’t listen to the old-timer. Too set in its ways. Look, can it do this?” Whereupon the newfangled offset press begin spinning and whirring, dazzling onlookers with a mad, saturated, dizzying kaleidoscope of color.

Well, it didn’t take long. Soon movers arrived, and the old Vandercook No. 3 could hear their excited chatter amid the grunts as they shoved it into a dark corner. “What do we need with this old thing? That one’s newer, it’s cheaper, it’s faster!”

The No. 3 sighed to itself. “But is it better?”

Soon, no one at all was there to listen. The No. 3 still had much to say, but its pearls of wisdom were like a whistle that only a dog can hear.

Then, late one night, from far, far away, two tumbling puppies did hear, having had a bit too much liquid from the bowl (if you know what I’m saying). “It’s perfect!” cried one. “But it’s huge!” yapped the next.

And soon it was theirs, the e-Bay gods smiling upon them.

And the moving men returned.

“What do they want with this old thing? There’s newer, there’s cheaper, there’s faster!”

All the way from Philly to Baltimore, strapped in the back of a truck, the No. 3 wondered: “Do they truly hear me? Will they listen for a while, then turn their backs?”

Its fears eased, just a little bit, but then only a little bit, amid the squeals of joy as the puppies tumbled over and around it.

Finally, it whispered, “What do you want with me? My kind … we’re … 100 years old.”

“Yes,” said one puppy. “And you will outlive us all.”

“You’ll see 200, easy,” yapped the other puppy.

And then they all went happily to work.

***

“Well, uh, that’s OK,” Mary said. “But the audience for these posters is going to be a bit more adult.”

Harrumph. So she wants more bull, does she?

And it struck me.

Vandercook. You roll the carriage. Rolled. The press had fallen on hard times. Booze. A redemption thanks to letterpress crazies. It was the story of Typecast Press and how we got started.

Turn me loose!

***

“Lockup: One Vandercook’s Road to Redemption”

When it came to in the back of a closed truck, far from home, the Vandercook No. 3 figured it had been rolled. Wasn’t the first time, wouldn’t be the last. Now here, shackled six ways to Sunday, it could only guess where it was headed. See, the No. 3 knew a thing or two about lockup. Hard work and hard time have run in the family for 100 years now. This was just more proof.

Granddad, the old Rocker, built to last. Revolutionary for his time. Time passes. No. 1 Pop? Greatest thing since sliced bread. For a while. The No. 3 was the great gray hope. Knew how to make a big impression. And could it ever kiss. Smooth. Like the best scotch. The No. 3 drank oil, mostly. Sometimes a bit too much, to be honest. OK, it had a problem. So the intervention should have come as little surprise.

One morning, the No. 3 found itself surrounded by those it considered its friends. They strapped it down and forced it into the program: eBay, it was called. They said it was a second chance. Maybe his last.

Still, the No. 3 couldn’t watch as the bidding increased for the opportunity to provide its rehab. Finally, from Baltimore’s Gin Belt, of all places, came the boozy bid that sealed its fate — from Typecast Press or something — and everything went black. And so here it was in the truck.

Hey, wait! This wasn’t a bad thing. This was it! The second chance! The press was so excited it nearly inked itself. (Then it remembered that it had no self-inking function.)

Mary and Shop Boy waited at the door. He seemed like a klutz. She was a bit intense. But in an instant, their excitement combined with the Vandercook’s, and 100 years of history came welling to the surface. This was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

All right, it was the beginning of a fairly clueless attempt at starting a letterpress shop.

But that was something. And at least the place was heated. The No. 3 surveyed its surroundings, feeling more alive than it had in 40 years.

“Happy birthday to me!”

***

“See? That wasn’t so hard,” Mary said, laughing at enough of the right moments that I decided to let her tone slide. Besides, zero to hero again was fine by Shop Boy.

Now, about that deadline …

We made the plates, mixed the ink, and Shop Boy started cranking. A few hundred rolls of the No. 3 later, its story was on paper. We dashed to Fed Ex. Whew. Mission accomplished.

Um…

If you go to the site, you’ll notice the end box with where to look for Shop Boy’s sequels, the stories of our other Vandercooks.

“You can just whip them up, too,” Mary chirped.

Is it just me, or does she not fully appreciate how much work it takes to be a genius?

Colonial Days and Nights

Louise at the Colonial Diner in Middletown, N.Y., had a great expression for a takeout order: “Put wheels on it!” Ancient. But sharp enough to draw blood, she was. Louise had been at this a while. And she’d been on her feet all day. And she probably hadn’t had a cigarette break in a while. And you know what you want when she wants you to know what you want … or she moves on to the next table.

It was like one of the favorite stories Shop Boy tells on himself: the one about the bagel shop in Brooklyn. Having finally reached the front counter one morning and with half of New York City pushing from behind, Shop Boy got a little flummoxed — I mean, there were sesame, poppyseed, wheat, salt (Oh my gawd … with butter … could you die?!?!), pumpernickel, those brown-and-white ones, caraway seeds, sunflower, and of course six kinds of lox and 23 flavors of cream cheese … the possibilities were endless.

“You. What’ll it be?” barked the oldest of the eight guys working the deli counter this beautiful day.

“Uh…,” Shop Boy stammered.

The guy waved me away dismissively. “Eyyy, who knows what they want? Next!”

Ouch. Paved over like a pothole on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. But that’s another story.

By the time one of the younger deli guys took pity on me and agreed to take my order, I’d had another 10 minutes to practice it. And Mary asks why I order the same thing every time at restaurants.

For instance, let’s head back to the Colonial Diner. The menu had lots of great greasy spoon fare on there. And breakfast dishes all day. Salads and all kinds of fixins, too.

Or so I’m told.

The top item in the center panel of the menu: Colonial Beefburger.

Louise never let me get any farther. It got so that I’d blurt it out every time she even glanced our table’s way. Still, we kept going back.

Who doesn’t love a good burger, right? And the fries were dynamite. Besides, Shop Boy was convinced that the cheesecake would keep Mary alive. See, if you couldn’t tell, Mary loves antiques, houses of a certain vintage and, ahem, printing presses that have seen better days. Stuff that Shop Boy likes to describe as “old and wrecked.” Louise was her idol. And I swear … the chair fetish. Ooh. I’m afraid to sit down in my own home.

Anyway, there’s nothing more old and wrecked than Newburgh, N.Y. Mary fell for it at first sight, even though it was a full 30 minutes down the highway from Middletown. She didn’t have much use for me at first, though. She mistook my shyness for arrogance. Also, back then, Shop Boy was not quite so old and wrecked.

But she decided to give me a break, after more than a few nights at the diner. Shop Boy worked from 5 p.m. till 2 a.m. at the local newspaper. Mary worked there from roughly 10 a.m. till … Shop Boy pulled her by the arm toward the exit. (Shop Boy should have known then that he was in for some late nights with this one. But you know what they say about love … it can’t tell time or something.)

There was no way I was letting the girl drive home without a little coffee … and cherry cheesecake. And my charms, such as they were, wore down her defenses. We agreed to date. But only for a week, setting a deadline for the next Friday when we could either chuck it and walk away with no questions, or re-up for another week.

Then it was a month.

Then a year.

Then I asked her to marry me.

Which happened 20 years ago this week, October 1, 1989.

And Shop Boy has never looked at another item on the menu since.

Bel Air Witch Project

Deep down, we all know that there really isn’t such a thing as fate. Same for omens and most other things we’re superstitious about, right? God, or whoever else stranded us here, had the kindness — but perhaps the lack of foresight — to give us humans a free will: a choice of actions and reactions that will bring us great joy or sadness, riches and fame or anonymous subsistence, etc.

All of which is to say that, when you’re a mile or so from the end of a 50-minute journey, with threatening skies and two cabinets full of wooden trays of lead type in the pickup’s bed beneath a sketchily arranged tarp, go ahead and whisper, “Whew, we dodged that bullet.”

See? Free will.

And don’t blame God when the heavens explode in a biblical downpour that not only threatens your cargo but perhaps your very existence.

It’s just a coincidence.

A little spooky, though. Then again, Shop Boy had a bad feeling about this one all along.

We had signed on to help clean out an old printshop in greater Bel Air, Md. (Pronounced locally as “Blair” — go figure. But we’ve made enough fun of the locals’ linguistics. Perhaps they’re right and we’re wrong. They were here first.)

So off we chugged for Bel Air on a hot and humid afternoon. Our mission was to pick up the aforementioned type cabinets — one for Typecast, one for the Maryland Institute College of Art — and a Vandercook No. 1 and a Chandler & Price Pilot press for MICA’s Kyle Van Horn. But first, we just had to meet the good woman behind the good man who had run the printshop so many years ago.

Doris is no witch, but she is enchanting nonetheless, with shining blue eyes. We chatted a bit as she relaxed in a sunny housedress on the shady back deck of her home, unbothered by the constant traffic on the road out front.

She said she’d been out to the garage/printshop a few days before, the first time she’d set foot in the place in a decade. It had brought back good and bad memories. Once, it had been largely her domain. While her husband, Michael, ran the linotype machines, Doris ran the tight little shop’s Kluge,  big C&P, and the Vandercooks.

Mary complimented Doris on what was a pretty rare achievement back then, a woman who was a trusted partner, someone without whom the shop couldn’t function. A printer’s printer.

“Oh, I wasn’t a printer,” Doris said. “I just ran the presses.”

(Shop Boy got a chill — I mean, that’s what I always say!)

And as she talked more and more about working out there … I gotta tell you, it was getting a little creepy.

She looked at Mary, then back at me.

“Just don’t let her get you into that 3 a.m. business.”

I gasped and turned to Mary, who wouldn’t make eye contact, then back at Doris.

“Oh,” Doris said wistfully.

And suddenly, even as the skies grew gloomy and humidity began to close in all around, it was clear as a sunny day. Shop Boy was standing before his doppelganger … Shop Girl. Singing my life with her words, she was.

We even found — stuck behind a drawer — a neat little cheat sheet for sorting type that is eerily similar to the one Shop Boy drew up. I probably should have run screaming.

Instead, Doris wished us luck (especially Shop Boy), and waved as we headed for the garage.  The basic plan on the lead type was to empty one cabinet of drawers, load it into the truck bed, replace the drawers, then back the other emptied cabinet up against it to secure the trays from sliding out during the bumpy ride back to Baltimore. Then, reload the trays into the second cabinet and strap a two-by-four section against it to keep its drawers from sliding around. Sounded like a snap.

Or was that Shop Boy’s back?

Now, I couldn’t tell you the font (Barnum or something), but I can tell you the point size: 72. Whole big, full drawer. The 48 point was no picnic either. Oof! Drawer after drawer after drawer of this stuff. And soon we were soaked to the skin with sweat, a funny bit of foreshadowing in retrospect. Mary and Shop Boy threw a tarp over the cabinets, weaving a thin rope through the eyelets and tying the whole thing down just so … so-so, anyway.

We figured it’d be fine unless it really started to rain.

Ahem.

We also figured we’d better get going. But you know how that is. John, Doris’ musician son, began telling fascinating stories of his dad, his mom and the road. We’d probably still be there if not for the thunder that began rolling in the distance. And if not for Shop Boy’s eloquent answer when Mary got a little too interested in an old guillotine cutter and started making those cooing sounds.

“Are you crazy? Get in the truck!”

Besides, Shop Boy was a little spooked by what was behind the cutter: a brown sack covering all but the feet of …

“Is that, like, the Virgin Mary or something?” Shop Boy asked John.

Swear to god — oh, sorry — it looked like the statue had been kidnapped from wherever it had stood blessing passers-by and shipped off to Abu Ghraib. Saints alive.

“Oh, they’re all over the place in here,” John said.

Turns out Doris had a side gig repairing religious statuary, and in the years since her health had failed her they’d been in limbo. Shop Boy looked again at the Virgin, whose deteriorating feet looked like they must be sore.

Angry spirits. Just what we needed.

Well, by the time we’d said our goodbyes, it was looking like the skies would burst open. Lead soup was on the menu for sure. (At least maybe it’d clear off some of the mouse poop, right?) I pointed the truck toward home and tested the brakes a few times — between the light rain and all that lead in the back, stopping distances were all Mary could talk about.  I was thinking about how long it takes to get the mildew smell out of old, wet, wooden trays.

But the downpour didn’t come. And somewhere just outside of shouting distance to Typecast Press, Shop Boy relaxed.

True story: I’m sure I’ve told you before, but in Denver, my colleagues called me Rain Man for my ability to pick absolutely the wrong time to take a walk for lunch. The two- to three-minute, out-of-nowhere torrential downpours would leave me a wet rag sloshing back to the newsroom. That’s how rain works in Denver and much of the West: three minutes of hell and high water, then back to our regularly scheduled sunshine.

It rains differently in the East, but this was something else.

“Pull off!” Mary shouted. “You can’t even see! You’re scaring me!”

Shop Boy pulled into a gas station, figuring that by pulling up tight to the pumps, we could get some cover from the flimsy canopy. And it worked. A little. At this point we had no idea what the load in the back looked like. But we could hear the tarp whipping in the wind, and we of course feared the worst. Because the rain wasn’t close to letting up.

After a while, we just couldn’t wait anymore and decided to go for it. The storm was still roaring as we drove into the parking lot, so we decided not to unload and just backed the truck under a tree. Then we dashed to Mary’s car to go grab some dinner and wait.

Finally, the deluge ceased. Fat and happy on southwestern breakfast dishes, we rolled back toward the printshop, backed the truck up to the loading dock, and pulled back the tarp. Well, torn and tattered — and poorly arranged — as it was, the tarp had somehow kept the water off the cabinets.

It was like the rain had never touched the back of the truck.

Who could explain it?

Maybe it was Doris, the Virgin Mary or whatever hooded saint in the garage who had seen fit to spare this very old stuff. Maybe it’s just Shop Boy’s fate to keep amassing tons of equipment and lead, thinking I’ve finally finished, then seeing another pile where the previous one stood.

The Sisyphus of letterpress. A curse on my very soul for ever asking the gods, “Why me?”

I mean, if you believe in all that.

But we know better.

Right?

1,000 Points of Light

The perforator had sort of punched holes in the idea that if you bring something pretty into the printshop, it will automatically stand out and be noticed. It was about time it had its day in the sun.

We’d driven all the way to Richmond, Va., to get the thing, after all — the Route 95 corridor being its usual bundle of giggles — and it was serving no purpose in the corner of the studio aside from a spot to hold the tea kettle.

And dust bunnies.

A proud old machine like this can’t go out like that. Still, Shop Boy had to convince Mary to try the contraption — black cast iron body and gorgeous wooden tabletop with a row of what seems like a thousand needle teeth and a treadle that brings them down and through the paper — out where it could be better seen.

See, the machine was covering up a wall blemish. But it was doing such a great job of camouflage that it had become all but invisible itself. Nobody ever asked about it when we were giving tours. And let Shop Boy tell you, you cannot normally walk by this thing and not wonder, in these modern times, “what in the world is that?”

That is a perforator, a device designed to poke a line of holes in something. You know, to create a tear-off coupon or whatever. We’d been told by a wise old printing type that the FBI once kept track of who owned these machines, as they were essential to the creation of counterfeit stamps. Ooh! Shop Boy on a poster in the Post Office! Believe it or not, that’d be a first.

Nowadays (actually for many, many years), a perforating rule does the same trick, but much less awesomely. OK, because each of the pin holes on this antique sucker was drilled by hand, the line poked into the paper can get kinda crooked. Fine. But come by and try it and you’ll be hooked.

Shop Boy’s counting on it.

I mean, I hope I didn’t carry it all this way just because it’s cool …

Oh, wait. That’s my job.

Sleepless in … August

When you hang around old printshops and falling-down garages that once were old printshops, not to mention eBay — um, Mary, we have to talk — you can end up with a lot of funky treasures.

Just one of thousands we’ve somehow acquired is this crazy old die for cutting out a card in the shape of a milk carton. Not sure what it was used for but Shop Boy immediately thought:

“Have you seen me?”

Sick, right?

But I’ve felt like a missing person these past couple of weeks. So I thought I’d check in. Man, we’ve been busy. Whee!

Right?

Well, yes, but Mary is about toast, and Shop Boy is only a little less fried by the pace. This blog, in case you can’t tell — pay attention, folks — is a sort of therapy for me. And we don’t want Shop Boy off his meds for too long. Besides, I’ve got so, so much to tell you.

Let me catch my breath a sec, and I’ll be right back with evidence of what we’ve been up to. Promise.

Until then …

Class Tripping

Mrs. G said she could tell we were a special class 35 years ago, and that she was very excited to hear everything we’ve done.

I told Deb V that though she’s driving a minivan today, I could tell she still had that Camaro she drove in high school somewhere inside her.

Liz F had to tell us all to be quiet during the announcements, just like our old teachers had to …

Except for Mr. C, who told me that he probably could no longer jump atop a schoolkid’s desk and slam his feet down to make a point. (I didn’t dare test him.)

I told Denise S to bite it. (I’ll explain.)

And when my old best friend then enemy now friend again Shawn G told the dapper Dan B, “I hope I don’t have to kick your [behind] tonight,” I checked my watch.

And that was the Daniel D. Waterman reunion in a nutshell. More firewater than Water Fire — is it my round? — but all in all a completely charming experience.

And what does any of this have to do with letterpress?

Let’s start with Shop Boy’s dad. Now, when you put one guy who’s obsessed with being on time with another guy who’s equally or more obsessed, it’s not simply 1+1=too (early). Nope. The earliness grows exponentially. Which gave Dad and Shop Boy a little time to kill before the Sunday brunch that was meant to conclude the festivities. Dad was dumping me off at a place called Julian’s in Providence — the school is in Cranston, but Water Fire was a cool excuse to have the reunion one town over — from which I could walk to the Amtrak station for the ride home to Baltimore.

As luck would have it, the Federal Hill restaurant is right around the corner from Knight Street, where Dad grew up. His father owned a grocery and convenience shop nearby. “Yeah, this is where the house was,” Dad said. “And this was the printshop.”

Honest. My dad lived next door to a letterpress business. Shop Boy nearly wept.

I suggested we grab a cup of coffee at another local joint (so as not to make Shop Boy look too geeky arriving pre-promptly), then Dad drove me to Julian’s, where Liz was waiting outside for the rest of the group to show.

And we waited. And chatted. And waited some more.

Yup, we decided, they probably all were home with ice bags on their heads. Whatever, more eggs for us. (Got to tell you folks, if you’re in that area at brunch time, check it out — 318 Broadway.)

Liz and Shop Boy hadn’t had much time to chat the previous night as she was running around organizing stuff, so this was cool. She talked about plans for a book, about how she’d done some printing (!), career conniptions and how funny life is.

Shop Boy talked about how he already writes books (Liz did remark on the, ahem, thoroughness of my blog posts), has done some printing, etc., etc. Then it was time for show-and-tell. Shop Boy produced a packet of favorite Typecast Press samples. I’d lugged them all this way and had not bored anyone else with them, so Liz was going to have to suffer alone.

As we got toward the bottom of the pile, Liz looked down at the table and laughed.

We hadn’t noticed that the tabletop was a thin glass sheet over … old magnesium- and copper-on-wood die cuts, all artfully arranged into a perfectly square collage. All the big Rhode Island brands were there — Del’s lemonade, the Ram from the University of Rhode Island logo — and Shop Boy couldn’t help thinking that these all came from Dad’s neighborhood printshop.

This was getting weird. And we’re not even to Denise. No, she’s cool. But I promised to explain. (Almost there.)

I’d been struck dumb the night before when Deb said her main profession has been that of a mechanical arts teacher — shop class … you know, like wordworking and instructing kids on how to set lead type. And this was before she realized she was standing with, dun-dun-daaaah!, Shop Boy!

In fact, she still doesn’t know that. But that’s OK. Steven S was good enough back then and it’s good enough now. Besides, I’m not sure how they’d take all this. Was I talking with them, or just listening for tidbits that I could use in the blog? Oh, heck, I’ll probably just come clean with it on Facebook, where I’m friends with several old school chums.

Which brings us to Denise.

See, back when we were, like, second-graders, Denise would sit next to me in class and jab me in the arm with a sharpened No. 2 pencil. Over and over. I was smitten. She’d forgotten all about that, of course … until Shop Boy reminded her during a Facebook meet-up.

Well, as I walked up at the reunion to say hello after 35 years, Shop Boy winked at Denise and began jokingly rolling up my shirt sleeve to expose the flesh. She giggled, and said she had something for me. A No. 2 pencil, dagger sharp. (I rolled down my sleeve.)

Shop Boy looked the pencil over. Just like I remembered it, except for one little thing. No teeth marks. I had never seen a pencil at Daniel D. Waterman without some kid’s teeth marks on it. Think back to grade school, people. Am I right? Denise laughed … then graciously obliged. Now that’s a souvenir!

Speaking of which, the whole K-6 reunion thing ended up a front page story in the little local newspaper, the Cranston Herald.

How old school is that?

Letterpress List No. 80: The Man in the Mirror

Now that much of the hoopla has subsided, Shop Boy felt it was time to weigh in on the whole Michael Jackson deal. (I know you all were holding your breath.)

Specifically, there was one thing that really bugged me, from a blogger I read often. His thesis — and he wasn’t alone — was that death was Jackson’s best career move ever. It reawakened an appreciation and an appetite for his music.

You know, like the early departures of Elvis, Jim Morrison …

And Kurt Cobain.

No he didn’t.

First off, Cobain was a megastar at his peak when he dispatched himself. He didn’t need any comeback.

Secondly, death was very bad for Cobain’s legacy. I mean, he selfishly ended his own misery by making a widow and an orphan out of his wife and child. What a jerk, right?

And thirdly, without Nirvana around, we could really see how immensely talented his drummer — the drummer! — Dave Grohl, is. Today, the Foo Fighters are better than Nirvana was. Tell Shop Boy that Grohl wasn’t a huge part of Nirvana’s flannel-melting creativity, for which Cobain got sole genius credit.

On that note, how much of an influence was Courtney Love on Cobain and Nirvana?

Of course, if you’re married to a crazy woman … ahem … you become incredibly creative as a matter of self-defense. See? Mary inspired this blog. Shop Boy really can take no credit — or blame.

And believe me, becoming Shop Boy was no great career move. Besides, Shop Boy is more Fat Elvis than Dead Elvis.

Though who knows? Like the original caveman paintings, perhaps some person of the future will stumble across the scribblings on my iPhone — where I do most of my writing — stare in awe and wonder …

What Neanderthal wrote that?

But he’ll also know by then, as history books will be written about the topic, that Kurt Cobain’s death was very poor career planning on his part. Oh, what might have come next …

And speaking of the Fat Elvis, there’s a wacky little store by that name in the neighborhood surrounding the Typecast Press letterpress world headquarters. It’s filled with all kinds of oddities and a whole bunch of nostalgia.

Awwww ...

But you don’t have to go to the Fat Elvis to get your nostalgia fix today. Yeah, that’s Shop Boy’s kindergarten photo.

See, Mary has long argued that if this blog had photos, it would also have readers.

Harrumph.

She recently went so far as to barter a deal where she’d print a guy’s wedding invitation and take part of the payment in training for Shop Boy on adding images here.

To which I say: What could be more colorful — or more of a draw — than Shop Boy’s use of the English language?

Am I right?

Just call me old school.

Which is kind of funny, since Shop Boy has a class reunion coming up … a bunch of kids who went to Daniel D. Waterman Elementary School in Cranston, R.I., from kindergarten through sixth grade.

And since Liz (Sidel) Friedman, the brains behind the reunion, decided that recent pictures of ourselves for the Then and Now book must be fairly recent — geez … picky, picky — here’s the man who will represent that cute little boy (my mom told me so) from so long ago:

The fat man prepares to go down the chimney (reindeer not pictured)

Baltimore looks great, huh? Shop Boy? Um …

Not so much.

You know how most people diet and work out to get all fit for the folks who haven’t seen you in years and years? Well, Shop Boy’s taken the opposite approach. Hey, you commute two hours each way to work every day, then do a late shift at the printshop, rinse and repeat for weeks on end and see if pretty soon even your mama doesn’t start calling you ugly.

That chimney, by the way, is atop our rowhouse. As you can see there next to the big fellow, it collapsed one day, sending bricks tumbling across the rooftop and scaring the residents inside — me and Mary — half to death.

Anyway, you want images? You get images.

The writer as a young sportsman.

Hey, this is sort of fun — well, if you forget the embarrassment and depression that come from pictures not telling lies and all that stuff.

I mean, for a rounded sort of fellow, Shop Boy isn’t all that shy …

Grrrrr ... or something

This is the face that engaged the former mayor of Colorado Springs, Colo., in a lively conversation on water rights in the West and in the world. Then it took about 15 gallons of wasted water to get all that paint off.

Don’t get me wrong: When Shop Boy is, um, fully loaded for bear, there are days when I feel strong enough to pick up and carry a Vandercook printing press, which is handy. Besides, many of the kids from Waterman remember me as a bit of a fatso in fifth and sixth grade. So maybe they’ll be all like … “You haven’t changed a bit.”

And I’ll run away and cry in a corner. Ah, just like old times!

But enough about Shop Boy, who’ll soon begin getting himself fit once more. (Mary promised me time off for good behavior.)

We’re here to look at pictures. And what increases Web traffic more than pictures of girls in bathing suits?

Are you still here? But that was the last photo for today.

OK, if you’re sure that’s cool … oh, heck, here’s one more anyway. As always …

***

Letterpress List No. 80

Hey, how about an hour’s worth of music to jog or do crunches (!) — or download images — by? This post, by the way, was done before Shop Boy had any training on photo manipulation for blogs. So either I’m a genius (if the pictures show up) or this isn’t as hard as Shop Boy had made it out to be. In that case, I hope you like photos.

Celebrity Skin – Hole (Exhibit A.)
Monkey Wrench — Foo Fighters (Exhibit B.)
Pennyroyal Tea — Nirvana (Pain in naked form.)
Teddy Bear — Elvis Presley (Awwww.)
Alive — Pearl Jam (The Flannel Parade. Oh, yes, and weren’t we all a bit worried about Eddie Vedder “going Cobain” for a while there?)
Foundations — Kate Nash (Shop Boy’s is in danger of cracking.)
Fight the Power – Public Enemy (Fat or skinny Elvis? Please. “Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps.” Although later, a few of those heroes proudly did get commemorative postage. )
Fire Woman — The Cult (One of the reasons the reunion date was chosen is Water Fire, a pagan sort of deal in which fires are lit all up the middle of the river. My mom loved it.)
My Old School — Steely Dan (OK, I’ll go back, but just this once.)
My Name Is … — Eminem (There’ll be name tags, right? Hate to just walk around saying, “Hey, man, good to see you” all night. )
Who Can It Be Now? — Men at Work (You’ve been there, right?)
Edit — Regina Spektor (At my mom’s funeral, a boyhood chum, Richard Martin, came over to say hello and do the whole “I’m sorry for your troubles” thing that always makes Mary giggle at Rhode Island funerals. I gave Richard my business card and said he should get in touch. “Editor?” he said. “Whoever thought you were smart enough to be editor?”)
Mr. Blue Sky — ELO (Love this song. Shop Boy was singing it — loudly — in the printshop the other day as Mary rolled her eyes. She wondered how someone who strays toward the, ahem, dark side could so adore such happy, peppy music. Then I started hitting the high notes and she was like, “I don’t even know you anymore.”)
Rainbow in the Dark – Ronnie James Dio (Shop Boy can do this song, too, but the flab tends to spill over the black spandex these days. Sigh.)
Train in Vain — the Clash (Shop Boy’s chosen mode of transportation, to R.I. or anywhere else.)
Gonna Hitch a Ride — Boston (No reason — just a beautiful song.)
The Man in the Mirror — Michael Jackson (Hey, “Michael Jackson” gets you Web hits, too.)

Clue-Like Symptoms

Samson pulled down the temple. The Titanic vanished beneath the waves.

Oh, and there were, like, thousands of boobs.

But that was nothing, um, relatively speaking, compared with the next night’s main attraction, Cirque du Soleil.

I mean, when you’re flying and flipping five stories above the floor, your first bad day is your last.

What reminded me of this trip to Las Vegas — and Mary’s insistence that we see the girlie show/spectacular at Bally’s — was her recent illness. Oh, she’s OK, but man, was she out of it for a few days. Swine flu? We wondered there for a bit. Actually Mary wondered there for a bit, as Shop Boy’s tremendous capacity for denial had left me almost as loopy, nursemaid-wise.

“Do I feel feverish to you?” she’d ask.

“Nope. You’re good.”

Anyway, here’s the thing. Mary always says that she never gets sick. Right. She gets sick as often as any normal human being — she’s married to a stinking mass-transit commuter, for heaven’s sake. But unlike the Titanic, Mary’s been fairly unsinkable.

This time … glub, glub, glub.

You could tell it from the polymer plates she made while ill. You didn’t think Shop Boy would let her just lounge around the house — I mean she didn’t even have a fever. (Kidding … I told Mary to stay away from the shop. She wouldn’t listen to reason or denial.)

The polymer plates were, um, how to say this nicely … psychotic.

Mary: “Oh good, I remembered to put crop marks on there. But for what?”

Indeed. The plates were largely shot, and here Mary was, a week lost, with three separate wedding invites due.

You guys have been there right? I mean, Shop Boy gets sick? Well, I’m just dumb labor anyway. But when the brains of the operation get fuzzy? You’re in deep.

The ship was going down. You do not miss deadlines on wedding invites. Period. So as soon as she started feeling even a little better, Mary started bailing and didn’t stop.

And very slowly, the Titanic rose to the surface. The temple was restored. The lost week was just a bad memory that will fade. (Mary’s already telling folks, “It was so weird. I mean, I never get ill.”)

The thousands of boobs?

Mary will never be feverish enough to let that happen again.

Letterpress List No. 79: Hedge Your Bets

Don’t they know who I am?

Yes, apparently they do. At least, they know my truck.

Which means there’s no place to hide.

Look if I was truly putting somebody out, I’d address that. “Parking for PK” painted on the wall? I’d never park there. Paulina, a treasured lifetime employee of Fox Industries, gets a pass. Besides, she’s mostly nice.

In fact, Shop Boy so hates inconveniencing people that wherever the truck must travel, you should look for it in the space that’s least ideal and least convenient. Which is how I got crossways with the Hedgehog. This is what Mary started calling her because of her amazingly high, spiky hair. Mary and spiked hair … you should see the big dude at the hardware store. She has got to pat his head every time we go in there. It’s obscene. So “Hedgie” isn’t necessarily an insult. Unless you smoke messily on the loading dock, act surly … and jump on Shop Boy for accidentally parking in your spot.

I didn’t notice the “Parking for Hedgehog” sign. And why did she want to park there everyday? Major bird poop zone. But after I’d used the spot for a few days, word got around that whoever the hell owns that black truck better move it out of my spot.

Shop Boy can take a hint. But she could have been a bit nicer. Mary, of course, thinks she’s too cool for school. Harrumph.

One reason I leave my truck at the shop so often is that we’re there so late many nights that either I’m too tired to drive home or Mary’s too tired. So we take one car. And we take a really sketchy back way home from the Hampden neighborhood. Along the river. Right by the old mills. Murderville at that hour. I mean, we left the studio at 3:30 a.m. the other day and bicycling past us was a pretty young woman on a bicycle. “Oh, honey …,” Mary and Shop Boy said at the exact same time. Bet she never forgets to arrange a ride home from the bars again.

Anyway, my Ford Ranger has been a huge boon to Typecast Press, which wasn’t even a twinkle in Mary’s eye when Shop Boy talked her into letting me buy it brand new. But we just don’t drive very much, period. So it sits a bit, which hasn’t been much of an issue with most of the Fox Industries building’s occupants.

Yet the parking issue has come to a head again recently because our studio’s neighbors, the furniture people, have been importing tons of pieces — and some scary insects — from some factory or another in Indonesia or Malaysia.

OK, enough with the bugs, Shop Boy. But this one flying dragon Mary found dead by the studio door was unimaginably terrifying. I was worried for the local rat population. Between the creepy crawlies inside the factory and the ones waiting outside the door each night … ugh.  Shop Boy made Mary promise the other night that, no matter how much I beg, do not buy me a flamethrower. It won’t end well for the vermin, or most of the surrounding neighborhood.

With their apparent success, the furniture folks now take up way more room inside and outside the building than they had. Parking is thus at more of a premium. And last night, Mary started fretting that my little old pickup truck was beginning to get more notice. Sigh. Time to take it to our Bolton Hil neighborhood and park it on the street, where the residents are always complaining about … the parking shortage. (Maybe if they were a little better at it? Hmm?)

So the lone, proud sentinel of the wee hours at Fox Industries — Shop Boy’s cute little truck — has to call it a night.

And it’s too bad.

The vandals are really going to miss it.

Maybe Shop Boy will sneak a “Graffiti Artists Suck” or “Hampden is for Hillbillies” bumper sticker on Hedgie’s ride.

***

Letterpress List No. 79

Yes, I had to look up what number we’re on. It’s been a while. Just this once, Shop Boy will spare you the details. Anyhow, here’s about an hour’s of music to celebrate one of Mary’s favorite times of the year: Baltimore’s Artscape weekend, this time featuring one of Shop Boy’s favorite bands (in case you haven’t yet guessed): Cake. Oh, there’ll be tons of other bands of all shapes, sizes and styles on three stages — and all within footsteps of our front door. You think the Bolton Hill residents complain about parking in normal times? Invite a million or so guests over a three-day period. Whee!

(And did I mention it’s always the steamiest weekend of the Baltimore summer? Oh, yes, there will be sweat.)

Alpha Beta Parking Lot – Cake (The lines are there for a reason, pal.)
Are You Bad — Glitter Mini 9 (Totally rocks. Mary’s over the moon about this song. I just hope Courtney Love doesn’t hear it and go beat up the whole band — and its management, and its fans …)
Dancing in the Street — Martha & the Vandellas (You betcha.)
Better – Regina Spektor (OK, Shop Boy’s late to the party on this singer. The first time I heard her music, I wrote her off as a weirdo. Now, she has eaten my brain.)
Re: Your Brains – Jonathan Coulton ( )
Smoke Detector – Rilo Kiley (Tobacco kills, folks.)
The Blues Are Brewin’ – Billie Holiday (Baltimore’s own. Artscape has a singing competition in her name each year.)
Never There — Cake (Shop Boy’s favorite from the band. Hey!)
Sunshine in the Shade – the Fixx (Oh, boy. One of those MTV moments we’d all like to forget.)
Mr. Blue Sky — ELO (But don’t forget the sunscreen.)
Summertime Girls – Y&T (Total cheese, street vendor style. Hot peppers with that? Why not? It’s Artscape.)
Smartbomb — BT (Make that gut bomb.)
Please Don’t Bury Me — John Prine (“Give my stomach to Milwaukee if they run out of beer …”)
(Love Is Like a) Heatwave — Martha & the Vandellas (Again, why not? Check out the dogged reporting by the emcee. Dude, let it drop. I half expected him to scream: Tell me what “Vandellas” means or you’re not going on stage!)
Satan Is My Motor — Cake (For Chub — hope he makes it with his crazy car and heaven-and-hell art this year.)

A Bolt Out of the Blue

Turning tricks to keep the operation going…

This is not what Shop Boy had imagined when he got himself drafted into this letterpress mess.

Yet there he was, bent over the machine, grunting, sweating, using dirty words and … man.

That’s the last time I’ll do this kind of favor for anyone.

See, Shop Boy was alone in the studio, trying to meet the demands of feeding menus to a restaurant whose chef is so darned creative that he keeps changing things. Mary was pretty beat from meeting a bunch of her own consecutive deadlines, so Shop Boy had left her at home on the couch with her computer to catch up on some design work. We’d already decided we would switch out the blade on the big paper cutter later in the day, but the one in there was still sharp enough to chop menu paper, not especially fine work.

I’d gotten a pretty big head start the day before, so there wasn’t much paper left to cut and there were only a few hundred menus to print on the big C&P, so Shop Boy was done in no time.

Unfortunately, this left some spare time to think.

Shop Boy (on the phone): “I did something really bad, Mary …“

Mary: “Oh, my god, are you OK? What happened?”

Shop Boy: “Well, I think my heart has stopped. But mostly I broke the paper cutter.”

Mary: “What were you doing?”

Shop Boy: “Putting in the new blade. I wanted to surprise you. Oh, I feel really awful. The machine is …”

Mary: “I don’t care about the cutter. You could have been hurt. Are you crazy? You’re there, alone, on a Sunday in an empty building. What part of this makes sense?”

Shop Boy hadn’t had time to think that deeply. I was just going to give Mary a break, and leave a fresh blade waiting for her on Monday morning. Now, she was mad.

And just that quickly, I shrank into a little boy … one who now had to go and get the belt from the closet so that Mom could use it on his rear end, except in this case I had to drive home to pick up the angry parent who was going to scold me some more for sure. Mary didn’t disappoint on that end. It’s nice to know she’s looking out for me, just like Mom was, but geez.

Here’s what Mary saw when she arrived: The bolt that adjusts the right side of the blade had snapped off, flush with steel cutter arm. Shop Boy wasn’t being macho or anything, despite all evidence to the contrary. I had merely been tightening the bolt to force the blade down a hair. But without witnesses, I might as well have been guilty of using a hammer to whack the end of the wrench that broke the bolt.

So now what?

The new blade is a bit shorter bite end to butt end than the one it replaced, so it slipped a bit each time I lowered it. Rather than shear through the paper, it receded just enough to leave a dent where a clean edge should be. To make it hold its line, we needed that broken bolt out of the stinking hole and a replacement bolt screwed — ahem, very gently — into its spot.

The replacement is the easy part. Clearing the bolt? Not such a snap.

We did what we usually do in these situations, calling Mary’s brother-in-law, Tom Beal. He thought about it, and offered a couple of alternatives: Hire a machinist to come drill out the bolt, and make another hole in our wallets, or somehow get it out ourselves. That much we’d sort of figured out. Of course, Tom, having snapped a few bolts in his career as an engineer, machinist and just very bright and handy guy, surely had a clever suggestion to offer.

So Shop Boy smartly shut up and listened.

Sure enough, it turned out there was this trick where, if I took a metal punch — anything sturdy and pointed, really — and created a depression between the center of the bolt and the threaded outer ring, I could maybe stick a screwdriver in there, tap it with a hammer and, ever so slowly, coax the bolt counterclockwise until enough of it was exposed that I could grab it with pliers and turn it the rest of the way out.

Sounded easy enough.

Of course, it always does.

True story: Shop Boy’s dad was forever searching for his tools. One of his seven kids, very often me, would borrow a tool from his shed, play with it a bit — you know, killing ants with a hammer, throwing screwdrivers at a target (“Duck, GI Joe!”) to see if we could make it stab the thing like in war movies, or whatever — then simply walk away from it when one of the neighborhood kids yelled for us from down the block. Dad would find it later … often when the lawn mower hit it.

“Brats! You can never keep anything nice around here,” he’d hiss.

Shop Boy can still hear that grumbling in his head every time a tool goes AWOL in the letterpress shop. Meaning that I think of my dad quite often.

Like, where is the stinking nail punch? I just used the stupid thing to tap in some finishing nails on the new workbench. Or, because the angle at which the bolt was set required a longer screwdriver with a smaller head, where the heck is the stinking long screwdriver with the smaller head? You get the picture.

So now Mary was frustrated with me for taking so long finding tools, and I was angry and blaming my brothers and sisters for somehow raiding my toolbox from hundreds of miles away (Brats!), and the long night I had hoped to prevent with my good intentions was turning into a long night because of my good intentions.

Let’s just say I wasn’t very confident as I finally approached the bolt with my makeshift arsenal of almost-the-right-tools. To make the depression that would become the foothold for a screwdriver I had selected a small, thin whatchamacallit with a pointed end … that snapped in two on the second tap. Shop Boy’s next two weapons were more sturdy, but chiseled rather than poked, shearing away a little more of the bolt. Heck, I even tried tapping a screw into the surface. The screw slipped, naturally, slicing the equivalent of a triple paper cut into my finger.

But finally, using the longer screwdriver and a tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap with the hammer, Shop Boy raised a tiny ridge atop the bolt’s stump. And for the next hour, I switched out tool after tool, seeking one that could move the ridge rather than shear it off.

It was maddening, to say the least. Nothing seemed to work.

Shop Boy stomped out of the room. I needed a sip of beer from the fridge in the main studio space, figuring that might work a whole lot better than any tool so far. Well, I stood there for a few minutes with the bottle cap in my hand, holding it between my index and middle fingers and my thumb and then crushing it between them until it bent in half with a point at both ends.

Hey, maybe …

Yeah, Shop Boy was a bit punchy. But who’s to say it wasn’t genius? The world will never know. For as Shop Boy, with the bottle cap in my pocket just in case, approached the bolt one final time with the screwdriver … it moved. On its own. (And yes, I’d had only one swig of beer.)

With the tip of the screwdriver now magnetic, Shop Boy was able to hold the tool over the bolt and move it counterclockwise. Not far. Just enough for me to get my fingertips on a ridge of one of the bolt’s damaged grooves. I coaxed it a little further, my hands slippery with sweat. “Please, please,” I whispered. “Just a little more.”

And up it came, spinning freely out of what was to be its tomb.

“Boy, that’s a bit of an anti-climax,” Mary chortled.

Unbelievable. Apparently several thousand taps were enough to sort of shake loose the old dirt and debris that held the bolt firm.

Shop Boy held it aloft like Excalibur and mimicked the angel voices through the clouds with a falsetto La-laaaahhhhhhhhhhh!

Now, who knows what other parts of the machine Shop Boy shook loose with all that banging? We’ll learn in time. But for now, I was redeemed.

In no time flat we’d very … carefully removed the bolt on the other side of the cutter arm and used it to balance the blade. We tightened all the bolts, set down some paper, threw the safety, dropped the blade and bingo.

Shop Boy was back in Mary’s good graces.

Quite a nice trick, if I do say so myself.

Philly Fanatic

You know, it’d probably be easier and a whole lot cheaper at this point if we just moved Typecast Press to Philadelphia.

I mean, what in the name of Benjamin Franklin (yes, that’s him as a young printer) were we doing bouncing down Broad Street toward Philadelphia’s University of the Arts yesterday?

Of course I know that we were there to pick up a Vandercook SP-15 we had purchased. What I mean is:

What in the name of the Liberty Bell were we doing buying another Vandercook from Philadelphia?

Baltimore was for years a hotbed of letterpress printing. Mary can’t find any printing presses here? (Oh, yeah … that’s right, five and counting.) But this one, she insisted, was so sweet and well maintained, it could be brought online immediately … assuming, naturally, that we could rent a 16-foot truck, drive the two hours to Philly, load the press aboard, drive it back home to Baltimore and somehow boost the 700-pound press onto a loading dock too high for standard delivery trucks to reach. Then, we’d need to get the Vandercook No. 4 (bought and transported from Virginia … geez … up on dollies and wheeled very carefully through the studio and across the hall to a storage space. Once that was settled into position, the SP-15 could take its rightful spot.

Wait … did she just say it could be brought online immediately? Only 700 pounds? Heck, most of our presses, the No. 4 included, are twice that.

Sold!

A great addition to Typecast Press. Or so I kept telling myself as we sat and steamed, quite literally, at the weigh station. Not even out of Maryland yet, and Shop Boy was doubling up on the expletives.

Now, Shop Boy’s fear of scales is well documented, but this was a topper. Two long lanes of 18-wheelers, and us, crawling toward the main inspection building. Neither of us had ever been through a weigh station before — have you ever even seen one open? What did this mean? Did they think we were drug smugglers, or hauling human cargo? Hazmats?!?! We’re going to jail!

Mary, not wanting her parents subjected to the dulcet tones of my ranting, told them she’d call them back and got to the job of calming me down by questioning why in the world I had pulled off in the first place.

Shop Boy: “Because when the state cop tells you to get over there in line, and when you motion ‘Me? What for?’ and he points at your grill and exaggeratedly waves you — yes, you! — into the weigh station lane, you do it.”

Mary: “Oh, god. You’re so law-abiding. If you hadn’t been so worried about being in the right lane for the toll, he wouldn’t have even seen us. Besides, he couldn’t have meant you. He didn’t wave any other small trucks … oh wait, there’s a van. Whatever. I told you to stop worrying about special lanes at the toll booth. See? They charged us the car rate there, Mr. Big Rig.”

She was right. And wrong. The next bridge toll was triple for us, as a truck. And I made a huge point of smugly making Mary take more money out of my wallet for the lady. That’ll show her to be all smartypants.

Back at the weigh station, it was finally our turn. Our weight was fine. (We’d skipped breakfast.) And soon we were free, bouncing back down I-95.

Literally bouncing. This truck was a menace. It was hopping so much atop the span across the Susquehanna River that  Shop Boy thought we were going into the drink. Forget texting while driving. I was ready to distract myself from all that troublesome staying-in-your-lane  and maintaining-your-speed business by praying with the rosary beads … a text message to god, as it were.

Mary got word by this point from Perry Tymeson that he’d fulfilled his end of the bargain in Philly. The press was on the sidewalk waiting. And so it still was an hour later as we blew past Perry and Laurel Schwass-Drew, the printer/instructor in charge of getting the university’s press placed in a good home. The school has its eye on a more expensive machine, and Typecast Press was providing the down payment.

It turns out Laurel is, ahem, a fairly regular reader of this blog, which Mary found out to her dismay when they met on Mary and Perry’s advance scouting trip to check out the press. Dismay is too strong a word, but Mary can get a littled bugged when she does all the work and Shop Boy gets the glory. I just blush — then in a fake deep voice announce: “Yes, I’m worldwide … heh-heh.”

Anyhow, Laurel, Perry and Shop Boy boosted the press onto the lift gate and Mary carefully guided us aloft and into the truck the Vandercook rolled. That was a snap. Perry strapped the press to the side rails, we ran to grab a quick bite, got a promise from Laurel that she’d stop in for a visit if she’s ever in Baltimore, and soon we were bouncing back toward the freeway. (It didn’t help that Shop Boy cheated on a couple — or three — turns on the way out of the city and hopped the curb.)

Long story short: We made it back to Baltimore at 4:05 p.m. Fox Industries, which owns our building, locks up the forklift at 4.

Well, poo!

There were now two possible outcomes: We could rig up a ramp and somehow shove the press up about a two-foot incline onto the loading dock. Or, we could wait until the forklift was available the next morning, paying a second full day’s rental for a truck that had nearly shaken loose all our teeth.

No …

Stinking …

Way.

So with Option 2 off the table, Shop Boy decided to simply play the two aces in his hand in Perry and Kyle Van Horn of the Maryland Institute College of Art, who’d arrived just in time. (We’re sheltering his dream Vandercook as it awaits a ton or two of TLC.)

Shop Boy might not have put money on us either, but quicker than Mary could say “I can’t watch,” Perry had turned a pallet, a couple of two-by-fours and a few thin metal plates into a ramp. (Guy’s good.) And with Perry steering and tugging from the loading dock while Kyle and Shop Boy shoved from below … bingo. Two seconds flat. Where do you want it, lady?

It was almost a letdown. I mean, after all that? What could Shop Boy whine about now?

How about Perry going on about the new press the University of the Arts was purchasing? Seems there was a guy near Philly who had a jones for printing and the wherewithal to assemble a printshop from nothing but the best. Now his stuff, in pristine condition, had begun to come onto the market.

Shop Boy could hear the gears turning in Mary’s head.

Now what in the name of cheesesteaks did he have to tell her that for?

Embarrassaurus rex

Used to be that the family trees of any number of animals were on the tip of my tongue. You know, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, species. In the Latin, the last category is lower case.

We, for instance, are Animalia Chordata Mammalia Primates Homonidae Homo sapiens. Then there’s my personal favorite in college, the chimpanzee: Ditto Ditto Ditto Ditto Ditto Pan troglodytes. Not that we’re related to or descended from monkeys or anything. And not that we’d call them troglodytes to their faces.

Little boogers can be a tad, um, violent in their natural habitat. OK, really violent. Another Family resemblance.

Anyhow, Shop Boy’s been thinking a lot about science like this since a very significant discovery was made about me. See, Mary works in a crazy old turn-of-the-last-century printshop. Still, as it turns out …

Shop Boy is the dinosaur.

My professional industry, journalism, is just waiting for the final meteor to hit. And I worry, a lot, about what’s next for a democracy whose subjects seek out only news sources — and, ahem, blogs — that exclusively feed their preconceived notions about politics, religion, etc.

See, there’s where I’m standing and there’s where your standing. The truth is somewhere in the middle. But when someone plops down the truth, to me it looks like they’re putting it too close to you. Your vision is just the opposite. The truth doesn’t change, but soon we’re so busy calling “no fair!” that the truth becomes immaterial. And this great, dirty, difficult, complicated, ugly and — yes — beautiful experiment in freedom stalls. It’s troubling no matter what your political stripe. And we should all worry about that.

More importantly, though, we should worry about what happens to Shop Boy.

Um, right?

No matter. I worry enough for myself and several other people. Just ask Mary. Or, better yet, ask to borrow one of her enneagram books. You know, The Enneagram, The Enneagram in Love and Work, The Enneagram in the Printshop. (OK, I just made that last one up.)

Basically, the enneagram is this system that assesses your defining characteristics, assigns you a number (1 to 9) and places you on a satanic-looking chart. From there, your compatibility with others and future prospects at just about anything can be assessed.

Mary has informed Shop Boy that he is a Six: The Loyalist.

Which is sort of cool because I grew up a loyal Boston Red Sox fan and Rico Petrocelli, No. 6, was my favorite player on that team.

Not so cool: A Six is apparently, uh, kind of nuts. Passive-aggressive, embarrassed-arrogant, manic-depressive, bipolar kind of deal. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

And not that Shop Boy believes Word One of this tea leave-reading, crystal-gazing mumbo-jumbo.

I mean, check this out from the Enneagram Institute (where you can seek your own number if you dare).

Sixes are reliable, hard-working, responsible, and trustworthy. Excellent “troubleshooters,” they foresee problems and foster cooperation, but can also become defensive, evasive, and anxious—running on stress while complaining about it. They can be cautious and indecisive, but also reactive, defiant and rebellious. They typically have problems with self-doubt and suspicion.

That’s just silly. I mean, you do like and believe in Shop Boy, don’t you? Really. I’m sure you do, right? Please tell me you do. Will it really kill you to say so? We had a deal! I don’t care anyway. You’re not the boss of me. In fact, you’re an idiot! Sorry, I didn’t mean that. Still friends? Thanks.

Key Motivations: Want to have security, to feel supported by others, to have certitude and reassurance, to test the attitudes of others toward them, to fight against anxiety and insecurity.

Like I said, that ain’t Shop Boy.

Of all the personality types, Sixes are the most loyal to their friends and to their beliefs. They will “go down with the ship” and hang on to relationships of all kinds far longer than most other types.

The perfect guy to be left holding the bag. Great.

Sixes are also loyal to ideas, systems, and beliefs—even to the belief that all ideas or authorities should be questioned or defied. Indeed, not all Sixes go along with the “status quo”: their beliefs may be rebellious and anti-authoritarian, even revolutionary.

You mean, like the idea that we can leave the printshop before 1 a.m. sometimes? Anarchy! Call the authorities!

In any case, they will typically fight for their beliefs more fiercely than they will fight for themselves, and they will defend their community or family more tenaciously than they will defend themselves.

If anybody is going to say anything negative about Mary’s lack of respect for sleep, it’s going to be Shop Boy. Don’t even dare. I’m tired and dangerously cranky.

The reason Sixes are so loyal to others is that they do not want to be abandoned and left without support—their Basic Fear. Sixes come to believe that they do not possess the internal resources to handle life’s challenges and vagaries alone, and so increasingly rely on structures, allies, beliefs, and supports outside themselves for guidance to survive. If suitable structures do not exist, they will help create and maintain them.

Which explains Shop Boy’s imaginary friends.

They say hello, by the way. Hey, which one of you forgot to clean the ink plate again?

Sixes fear success almost as much as they fear failure. … The old Japanese adage that says, “The blade of grass that grows too high gets chopped off” relates to this idea.

True story: Shop Boy returned home from D.C., late one recent night to find Mary glumly slicing corners off this fancy blue paper with an X-acto and a pica pole. “Whatcha doing?” Shop Boy asked innocently.

Mary: “I didn’t want to tell you. We need to line some envelopes.”

Shop Boy: “Um, OK, how many?”

Mary: “Uh, 125 … but then we need some samples.”

Shop Boy: “Um, OK, how many have we done so far?”

Mary: “Uh, like, zero. But you’re so good at this type of thing, I know it won’t take you long.”

Shop Boy: “Um, OK, how long do we have?”

Mary: “Uh, I told the guy you’d drop them off on K Street in Washington at 9 a.m. But we only need the first 75 by then.”

Shop Boy: “Um, OK, what does it entail?”

Three different, yet-to-be-cut lengths of double-stick tape, one placed inside the envelope just beneath the fold and the other two on the inside of the flap. Pull the non-adhesive strip off the lower sticky part, shimmy the blue paper past the glue into the envelope, check the straightness of the piece against the flap and, with the thumbs, press the blue paper onto the sticky tape. Now, without bending or otherwise shifting the flimsy blue paper, remove the non-sticky strip from the other two lengths of tape, check the straightness one last time, smooth out paper first with thumbs, then with a full hand. Set aside a moment. Then, fold the envelope flap and press the hand solidly across the back of the envelope, creating the clean fold of the blue paper. Bingo. Shop Boy, the ultimate conveyor belt guy, had a system mastered within, oh, an hour or two. Then, it was an envelope per minute or so.

Mary: “I knew Shop Boy would do this better than I ever could. Remember that last project? You were awesome. Do you mind finishing?”

Sixes are like a ping-pong ball that is constantly shuttling back and forth between whatever influence is hitting the hardest in any given moment. Because of this reactivity, no matter what we say about Sixes, the opposite is often also as true. They are both strong and weak, fearful and courageous, trusting and distrusting, defenders and provokers, sweet and sour, aggressive and passive, bullies and weaklings, on the defensive and on the offensive, thinkers and doers, group people and soloists, believers and doubters, cooperative and obstructionistic, tender and mean, generous and petty—and on and on. It is the contradictory picture that is the characteristic “fingerprint” of Sixes, the fact that they are a bundle of opposites.

Sort of explains the love/hate relationship with those beautiful envelopes. (Yes, they did turn out great — cooked my own goose once again.)

Psst! Did Shop Boy mention that the bride is in the Obama administration? Which just means I’ve got at least three and a half years to forgive and forget. I will.

And, as usual. I’ll give Mary a pass.

Loyal? Sure.

Somebody’s got to be, I guess.

Besides, it apparently runs in the Family. The enneagram family, anyway.

What Happens in Rhodamine Red, Stays …

There’s this giant Korean grocery store a few miles down the road that offers a shopping experience that’s truly from another world.

Between ordering your whole fish (seemingly every species, normal and freaky, is staring back at you) and shouting a number that corresponds to which filleting process you’d like followed to vast displays of frozen stuff you’d never imagined putting in your freezer — never mind your mouth — to a football field-sized table of fresh string beans to fruits grown to  the size of your head, the place is just a maze of enchantment and wonder. And then you get to the appliances and knickknacks.

You know, mostly, oh, Hello Kitty toasters, Hello Kitty alarm clocks, Hello Kitty salt and pepper shakers, Hello Kitty TV sets, Hello Kitty phones, Hello Kitty flashlights, Hello Kitty lamps, Hello Kitty mirrors, Hello Kitty lip gloss, Hello Kitty water bottles …

Mary’s eyes get huge at the explosion of pink. She loves Hello Kitty as much as she used to love Paul Frank’s stuff … before Frank’s business partners forced him out of his own business and tried to take his name away from him. Now, in his honor, she wears only monkey face T-shirts made while he owned the company. Hey, what’s right is right.

Last night, then, Mary was right in her element.

With her very own walking, talking Hello Kitty Shop Boy.

Then there were the Hello Kitty Heidelberg rollers, the Hello Kitty ink plate, the Hello Kitty rubber gloves, the Hello Kitty ink knives, the Hello Kitty apron … I mean, wow.

That Rhodamine Red ink sure does leave its mark.

Forget the name … the stuff is ppppiiiiiiiiinnnnnkkkkkkk! And it’s a bear — OK, a large pink bear — to get off a printing press. Believe me, Shop Boy tried everything short of plastic explosives. Still, the ink stained the pristine blue rubber rollers. And it got on absolutely everything.

You know how when you maybe miss a spot, like a mini dab of ink is left in the smallest crevice? A “holiday,” some room painters like to call it. No problem. You’ll get it next time.

Well, neon holidays are the order of the day until Mary’s done with this Rhodamine Red craze. And if Hello Picky can see it, you might, um, want to go over that spot just once more.

Geez. Did I mention that Mary borrowed her portion of Rhodamine Red ink — after trying in vain to reproduce the color normally — from one of our favorite local printers, Vince Pullara III? Shop Boy used to like that guy.

And did I call this a craze?

Mary just e-mailed to say excitedly that she’d purchased more gloves, more environmentally sensitive press wash, a die for cutting business cards … and her own tub of Rhodamine Red.

Sigh.

Looks like the Kitty’s out of the bag.

The pink horse has left the barn …

More Words to Letterpress By

As the school semester was about to end, Mary thought it might be kind of fun to give her Maryland Institute College of Art letterpress class a quiz. You know, just to see if they’d been listening, or if they were simply suffering Mary’s chatter until it was their turn on the press.

To her surprise, they’d absorbed a lot. Shop Boy wasn’t all that shocked — Mary always gets her message across loud and clear.

But they didn’t get everything.

True story: I’ve mentioned in the past that Shop Boy was a science major for two years in college. Well, one of the requirements was a class in botany. And the only professor teaching botany back then was a bored-rotten blowhard of a dude famous for failing, like, three quarters of his students. You know, the whole “I’m doing this for your own good — if you’re not smart enough for my botany class, you’re not smart enough for a career in science. Might as well learn that right now.”

You should have seen the final exam. Botany? Please. It was astrophysics. Appropriately, Shop Boy was “in the weeds,” as they say of lost souls, and this professor was driving the lawnmower.

Scored 27 out of 100, and the only reason I got past zero was the essay section. I had no idea what the enzymes of the carrot broke down into — must have been a paragraph I skipped in the 13th required book for the class. But I did know my Bugs Bunny. And in that 25-minute, frenzied term paper of an answer, Shop Boy somehow blathered, bleated, bloviated, blustered and bluffed his way to a passing grade. (Yes, graded on the curve, 27 was a D-plus. Looney Tunes, for sure.)

As he handed me back the exam, hand shaking and still about to wet his pants by the looks of things, a friend whispered to me: “He’s laughing at you. That’s BS!”

“Oh, you don’t know the half of it,” Shop Boy responded.

So there was the stack of Mary’s completed quizzes. Pretty good stuff. No botany majors, mind you, but well done.

And then I saw it. Next to a section on letterpress terms was an adorable little drawing, really a masterpiece of simplicity (hey — it’s a college of art), of a fox-like animal with a caption that read: “The Common Reglet.”

“Kid gets an A,” I said.

After all, what does the word “reglet” mean to anyone who’s never assembled type in a chase for printing? Not a whole bunch. These kids were all about polymer. And that, my friends, is what we call a “teachable moment.”

And so is this. For those who might have stumbled upon this blog while looking for something, um, very different — I can see the keywords that got you here, you bad boys and girls, but I won’t tell Mom — a reglet is a strip of wood used as spacing material between lines of type or to help lock your form in the chase, or metal frame, for moving to the printing press.

Now, Shop Boy’s not as cantankerous a cuss as that old botany dude, but while I’ve got you here, what do you say we make sure we’re all a little more up-to-date on our letterpress words? Then next time somebody asks you, the answers will be on the tip of your tongue. Oh, don’t thank Shop Boy. Consider it a public service. Let’s begin …

Common printshop expressions and their meanings:

Taping the rails: Amtrak’s track-maintenance program. (Sorry, a little commuter humor there. )

Leveling compound: generally, gin, tonic and a wedge of lime. But there are many brand names and variations.

Used to loosen Shop Boy up before delivering the news about the latest press purchase. Also useful outside the shop. For instance, when Mary needed to persuade Shop Boy that a three-story Baltimore rowhouse wasn’t too much space for two people, that Shop Boy wouldn’t be a slave to the dust bunnies, that the fact it smelled like her Grandmama’s house was a good thing … she really poured on the leveling compound. Suddenly it was very clear: I had no vote.

By the way, Grandmama’s house in Raleigh, N.C., was a donut’s throw from an original Krispy Kreme stand. Oh, my. The stampede down the front steps when the neon “Hot Now” sign lit up. Back then, you could buy two dozen and get one dozen free. I mean, what would you do?

Dust bunnies: After a certain point, Shop Boy just likes to think of them as thick, gray, shag carpeting.

Pulling a negative: This is when, usually late, late at night after a long, frustrating day (or a whole weekend) — when your feet hurt, your head pounds and you realize that bedtime’s just a dream — you become something like the opposite of your true nature. Some, including Mary, have labeled this phenomenon “being a jerk.” While this seems a bit simplistic to Shop Boy, she’s got a raised pica pole and a whole bunch of “uh-uh, not tonight, pal” on her side.

Depression: This is when, usually late, late at night after a long, frustrating day (or a whole weekend) — when your feet hurt, your head pounds and you realize that bedtime’s just a dream — the impression you have is still something like the opposite of the one you are seeking.

Bible bump: This is praying for that little extra push to get you through the night — without pulling a negative — and mercy and deliverance from this deadline.

Actually, this is a fun expression, taught to Mary and Shop Boy by a compositor at the newspaper where we met. The woman was clearly having tremendous pain in her hand at the spot of this big lump. We asked if she was OK. “Oh, that’s just a little Bible bump,” she said, explaining the cure she’d undergone for previous bouts: You put your hand on the counter, somebody grabs the Bible, raises it above their head … and smashes it down on your hand to break the cyst. Relief is yours. Um, after a while.

Gulp.

Talk about putting the fear of God into someone. Which brings us to …

Digitalis: From the Greek for “injury to fingers or toes, which turn red, swollen and angry after being smashed between two heavy objects.” Mary about gave Shop Boy a heart attack the other day when she forgot to let go of the tail end of a card and slammed her fingers in the Vandercook.

A for effort. D for dumb … we’ve all been there before, haven’t we?

An Insider’s Look

Hey, for those of you who haven’t seen this item at Design*Sponge, have a look. (Our friends have been very nice about sharing it around. And it’s fun to get the attention.)

If you haven’t seen the Typecast Press studio, the pictures will give you a little taste of what the place is like. Oh, and you get to see the flat files/work table you read about a while back — the one Shop Boy built with his own unsteady hands.

Hope you’ll take a peek and read Mary’s descriptions of why we do what we do.

And do drop in sometime.

Now where was I? Oh, writing the next blog entry.

More soon …

Letterpress List No. 78: Bucket Brigade

It all comes down to a difference in plumbing.

Which is how Shop Boy once again found himself in the ladies’ room with a 10-gallon bucket.

Oh, it’s not what you think … whatever it is you might be thinking. Mary had recently gotten a hands-on tutorial in the use of our Jet platemaker from her partner in crime at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Kyle Van Horn. And suddenly we were ready to burn our own polymer plates. Our roommate’s departure had left a perfect little office of its own for the Jet. Whew. Polymer plates can be kinda stinky to create. And with Mary’s super-sensitive nose, it just wasn’t working out to make plates in the main space. Now, if the plates stink, just close the door and turn on the exhaust fan.

Anyway, bringing this machine online is something that’s been way overdue, so that’s exciting. A visit from the plumber to our studio is way overdue as well, however.

So Shop Boy frequents the ladies’ room. Oh, it’s not a bad place to hang out.

Most ladies’ rooms tend to be better equipped than the guys’. And for a factory restroom, this one’s pretty fancy-schmancy. Flowery couches, cool old free-standing pink sinks, curtains, clean stalls …

And the utility sink?

Yep. Guess they figured if they put it in the men’s room, guys would just pee in it or something. The sad part is they’re probably right. Geez. The men’s room across the hall has a couple of urinals, two truly scary stalls and a cheap-o formica countertop with two little sinks protected by — oh, let’s just say that most guys couldn’t reach to pee in them. And they’re tough to get water out of, too. That’s why Shop Boy needs the utility sink. Did I mention the men’s room trash can with the sign over it that reads: “No Trash: For Recyclables Only”?

Excuse me? Recycling in the restroom? Takes all kinds, I guess.

The ladies’ room utility sink has hot and cold water, meaning you can blend them to create the right temperature, like high 70s F or something. Then, off you go down the hall to where the Jet awaits, dump in the first gallons, then back to the ladies’ room. It takes about 15 gallons between the Jet and the rinse basin, by Shop Boy’s estimate.

But Shop Boy won’t complain much more than I already have, for even I can see how lucky we are.

Mary, Shop Boy and Typecast Press inhabit the space where Noxema was invented. For real. In fact, many of the locals still refer to Fox Industries as “the Noxema Building.” Cool by us, since our main suite consists of the Noxema president’s office and that of his executive secretary. Honest, we’ve got pictures. Not sure they’d have liked how we’ve painted the place. White to lime green can be an adjustment. They’d have liked the cocktail lounge, though.

There’s an old poster above a door that says helpfully: “Your whiskers are ‘dead.’ It’s your skin that hurts.” In that spirit, the company would give tons of the goop to workers with their paychecks. Judging by the looks of some of the older folks in our Hampden neighborhood, most of the boys sold the Noxema for smokes. OK, that’s mean. But there’s a local watering hole called Zissimo’s in which the real, vanishing, um, characters of Hampden pass the time. So, the city passes a no-smoking-in-restaurants law. Yay! Now all the folks from Zissimo’s begin venturing out to the sidewalk — and into the sunlight — for a puff … and immediately there’s talk of granting the bar a waiver from the law.

Swear to god.

But back to Noxema headquarters. Because he was the big boss, the president’s office — and now our printshop — includes a personal restroom with its own presidential “throne.” As for the secretary, she had her own washroom too, less exalted but pretty handy. And this is the space that our photographer roommate had long used as his darkroom. It wasn’t until he moved out that we could really see that the toilet and sink were still there.

For better and worse.

The worse is that it’s kind of gross right now.

The better is what the plumber’s going to deliver: a hose for filling the Jet, and a drain for emptying it afterward. Yes, those buckets of wastewater have to be lugged back to the utility sink. (Basically, it works like this: Lay the negative against the orange piece of plastic, turn on some high-test, ultraviolet lights to expose it — avert your eyes, kids, or you’ll go blind — and then what’s exposed hardens. The scrubbers remove the rest, which becomes part of the wastewater. And off Shop Boy goes.)

Oh, yes, and there are a number of ladies working in the building. So Shop Boy knocks. Even if it’s 2 in the morning. And sometimes I make Mary go in first.

I mean … they might be recycling in there or something.

***

Letterpress List No. 78

Hey, any day now, the letterpress family will be welcoming a new little printer into the world. The other side of the world. Lou at Poppy Letterpress is about to, well, pop. Check out her blog entry announcing she’s shutting down operations in Canberra, Australia, until the baby’s born. Now, I only know Lou and her hubby in a virtual sense. But please send wishes for an easy delivery her way if you get a chance. As a longtime reader of this blog, she’s suffered enough.

(Of course, Shop Boy can say that about all of my regular readers, but we won’t go there, will we? Thank you.)

So, for Lou, how about an hour’s worth of music to chase away the labor pains? Video links are courtesy of YouTube.

Tom Traubert’s Blues – Tom Waits (With a Waltzing Matilda chaser. Oddly lovely.)
Just a Girl — No Doubt (For the most beautiful parents on the planet. Sorry, Lou … I mean Gwen and Gavin. But it was close.)
Adrenaline – Gavin Rossdale (Here’s to exciting times for us all.)
Ladies Room — Kiss (Knock, knock. Who’s there? SB. SB who? SB a pain in the butt, yo. When’s the plumber coming?)
Baby — Stephen Lynch (He’s such a bad little boy.)
Stay Up Late – Talking Heads (Good luck with that.)
New Sensation — INXS (Indeed.)
Detroit Lullaby — Hamill on Trial (Enjoy your crib time, kid. It’s a tough world out there.)
Wild World — Cat Stevens (You betcha. It could make you a little crazy, even.)
London Still – the Waifs (Saw the Aussie band at Baltimore’s Artscape. Fell hard for the voices.)
Lightning Crashes — Live (OK, I’m a sap.)
I’m My Own Grandpaw — Willie Nelson (He was smoking something when he wrote this, god bless the old doper.)
Sweet Child O’ Mine – Guns N’ Roses (Not a very good boy, either. Probably pees in the utility sink.)
52 Girls — the B-52s (For the ladies of Fox Industries. OK, there are more like nine. Whatever.)
Gone Like the Water — Freedy Johnston (7.5 gallons at a time.)
Girls – Beastie Boys (Who could ask for more?)
Business Time — Flight of the Conchords (Recycling is not part of the foreplay, but it’s very important.)

Connecting the Dots

There are many things that Shop Boy did as a junior high school student.

He drank way too much beer for the first time and got early lessons in how to drive — not simultaneously. You think I’m crazy?

A buddy usually handled that part.

Annoyed by the repeated nuisance of standardized tests, Shop Boy would skip the questions and instead think of a visual pattern and carefully, with a perfectly sharpened No. 2 pencil, fill in the circles that would create it. Or, he’d think of a song and try to complete one line of the test per drum beat.

What? Tell me you never did that …

Shop Boy often turned a small pimple on the chin into a gaping wound visible for miles through an, um, overreaction to its presence. (“No, it isn’t a zit. I simply got grazed by a bullet last night in a very heroic situation.”)

Then there were the clumsy first steps toward what would become a post-college love affair that ended so clumsily … ugh. Let’s just say that Shop Boy can count on one or two fingers the women who truly dislike him — if they think of him at all. Shop Boy earned the hatred of both in the span of a week and has been trying to make it up to women, and himself, ever since.

Shop Boy also set lead type, carved linoleum blocks and ran a treadle-powered old C&P in printshop class.

Most of the silly things you do in junior high you outgrow.

Ahem.

“I’ve got a present for you,” Mary said. “Close your eyes and hold out your hands.”

Now, Shop Boy once plopped a live rabbit into Mary’s hands after saying the same thing, so …

I looked the box over and suddenly remembered a discussion we’d had a week or two before. Being reminded of Shop Boy’s junior high industrial arts days, Mary had wondered aloud whether he should try his hand once again at the linoleum block thing. “I guess so … I guess.”

Now, Shop Boy isn’t usually superstitious or worried about “signs” from the gods or whatever, but:

Inside the box of five Flexcut linoleum carving tools of varying blade shapes and sizes was another smaller, brightly colored container.

For Band-Aids.

Did I mention that my “experience” with linoleum blocks was carving out a little, happy sun with bright, sharp sunbeams spreading out all around the sphere. Except for that one spot where the tool had slipped and created a flattop haircut.

Regular Picasso of the linoleum block, little Shop Boy was. Hey, wait a minute. Maybe I’d been channeling him all along.

Either way, this should be interesting. We bought a couple of cheapo blocks so that Shop Boy can work on reawakening any latent artistic spirit that might be lurking back there somewhere.

But what should be my first amazing bit of linoleum block art?

I did see this really neat pattern one time on this standardized test.

Rube … Goldberg, That Is

If John Ottina, the late, truly great husband of Mary’s Cousin Mollie, is peering down on us today, he’s got to be looking like he swallowed some bad pasta as he says to the angel next to him:

“Mollie gave all my favorite power tools to that guy?”

“Not to worry,” his fellow angel will reassure John. “It simply means he’ll be joining us shortly, and then the tools will pass into more deserving hands.”

Gulp.

Yes, Shop Boy is about to attempt a rare solo building project at the studio. And Satan’s probably licking his chops, too. See, there is this 10-foot stack of flat files in one of the rooms we occupy, six five-drawer cabinets altogether, and it’s long been Shop Boy’s dream to take four cabinets, place them side by side, and build a top and a base so that the whole unit would become not only a place to store paper but a clean workbench for packaging deliveries and trimming out the fancier papers for envelope linings or whatever.

I’m also a bit tired of the high-wire act it takes to fetch stuff from drawers at the top of the current stack.

Anyway, my usual ringers — Mary’s dad Wayne and brother-in-law Tom — are inconveniently, ahem, unavailable this weekend, when the deed needs to be done. So, here I go.

By any measure, the assignment should be a snap. Build a base with two-by-fours to raise the cabinets to a comfortable working height, then cut the top from thick plywood and add quarter-round as a finishing border and an edge to keep it from sliding off the top of the cabinets. Piece of cake.

For somebody else.

Heck, Shop Boy is not completely un-handy. And I’m quite clever in spots.

True story: About Mary and Shop Boy’s third week in Baltimore, we had just settled down to a nice dinner when a racket arose in the breezeway.  We pulled back the curtain of the large dining room window to be greeted by a large, squealing mama rat on its hind legs, its front paws stretched out across the glass before us as if to say, “Help me!”

Did I mention it was Shop Boy’s idea to move to Baltimore?

As we clearly were not about to gather it up in our arms, the rat at last turned and ran beneath an old rain guard that the previous owner had placed against the base of the house to ward off basement leakage. Obviously her babies were in there.

Hmm.

Mary: “Oh, my god … you’ve got to get that thing out of there.”

Shop Boy: “But it’s full of rats! I ain’t going near that thing.”

I convinced her that it was foolhardy to go confront the rodents at night and promised I’d clear the furry family the next morning. Shop Boy was pretty bummed when the next morning actually arrived — oh, just for a minute or two. But by then I’d thought about a way I could  lift the rain guard without being physically present when the rats bolted.

Do it from the air.

As Shop Boy cannot yet fly (I’m working on it … sheesh), I would need to rig something that could reach down into the breezeway from a second-story window and hold the rain guard aloft to send the message that perhaps the rats weren’t welcome.

Broom handle (check), bungee cord (check), screw-in ceiling hook (check), one-by-two edging board (check), chain (check), rope (check), duct tape (natch). So here I am, hanging out a second-story window, dangling this fishing pole contraption, Mary’s laughter echoing from the first floor.

Now we were making so much noise that Katharine, our beloved former neighbor, came to the breezeway to find out what these two nutburgers were up to now. From about a foot away from the rats’ hideout, she leaned in to witness the action. Heck, she’d once had a rat run up her bare arm from inside a trash can. This was nothing.

Soon, she was laughing at the sight of the Shop Boy Airborne Ultrasonic Load Lifter (Patent Pending) as loud as Mary was.

Well.

I’d show them. On the first try, Shop Boy hooked the rain guard and, yanking on this whatchamacallit thingy in my hands, gradually lifted the whole thing off the ground. Katharine didn’t even flinch. Man, she was ice.

No matter. The rats were long gone. Must have slipped away in the night. It was almost disappointing.

Still, victory was in the air. Mary laughed, but my trick worked. And now, whenever Shop Boy looks over a complex problem and says he has an idea for hooking up … something … to get the job done, Mary has to at least listen.

Which is why all of John Ottina’s fancy tools scare me a bit. As long as Shop Boy’s employing some crazy, jury-rigged, Rube Goldberg contraption, you can excuse the occasional crooked corner. Now, no more excuses.

Dang. How do I fake this?

Letterpress List No. 77: Short-Sheeted

Hey, write this down …

Huh?

Oh, that’s right. You’re at Typecast Press. Nothing to write on.

Hmm. Uh, Shop Boy will find you a sheet of paper. There’s one here … someplace.

There was some over there just the other day — nope. That’s for gift tags, etc. That stuff? Are you kidding? Do you know how much your little deckle-edge scribble would cost? And that other pile is packing for the platen. Leave that where it is. Wait! Don’t touch that. It fell under the press and got oil on the corner. You’ll spread it everywhere.

OK. Here you go.

Yes, Shop Boy knows it’s a paper towel. It’s that or the back of your hand, pal.

Now, take this down …

A pen? What does this look like … a stationery store?

***

Letterpress List No. 77

Yes, Shop Boy gets a bit frustrated at the lack of note paper within easy reach at the printshop. Mary’s got a system that works for her. Darned if I know what it is. Shop Boy’s nearly messed up a job or two as, being given information over the phone, I grabbed for the top sheet on a pile only to realize just in time that, yes, it was a wedding invitation-to-be. So, while we’re casting about for an unclaimed sheet of paper, how about a little music to search — or wash ink off the back of your hand — by?

Little Red Book — Ted Nugent (Stationery? Burt Bacharach? This is not the Nuge that Shop Boy knows and loves — even had him write an essay for me in my real job a couple of weeks ago. It was like Beatlemania in my office when he agreed.

True story: I dragged Mary to Ted Nugent’s concert here in Baltimore. We walk in, and the stage is filled with machine guns. And here comes old Ted waving them around. The crowd is rough and ready. And he’s egging them on. The whole concert, Mary insisted we stand by the back door, just in case. We ended up leaving early to go get Mary a soothing cocktail. That man likes his guns. Shop Boy? More a First Amendment guy than a Second Amendment dude. In other words, if you can say it like Ted does, Shop Boy might not agree, but he’ll listen.
Words – Missing Persons (I used to think as a very young man that this singer, a Playboy bunny, was quite hot. Now, under Mary’s tutelage, I recognize her as fake, airbrushed and shallow. I feel dirty. Thanks a lot.)
Paper Roses – Marie Osmond (Ditto. )
You’re Speaking My Language — Juliette and the Licks (Rules. Her and the Nuge … great double bill that would be. Maybe she could borrow his raccoon tail. Ooh.)
Paper Planes — M.I.A. (The Nuge will like this one.)
The Letter – the Box Tops (She wrote me a letter … on a paper towel.)
Take a Letter Maria – R.B. Greaves (Don’t use the Crane’s!)
Girl Don’t Tell Me (You’ll Write) — Beach Boys (Don’t wait by the mailbox, bub.)
Hot for Teacher – Van Halen (“I got my pencil… gimme something to write on, man.”)
Original Prankster — the Offspring (The joke’s on you.)
Feelgood Inc. — Gorillaz (Awesome. Can’t write that enough.)
Paper Bag — Fiona Apple (She looks oddly … merry here. Not like her at all.)
Every Day I Write the Book — Elvis Costello (That’s a lot of sheets, fella. Where’d you find them?)
Kiss My Glock – Ted Nugent (And order is restored.)