Not a scale, mind you. Shop Boy doesn’t want to know what the thing weighs. See, Typecast Press is actually a series of four rooms. Three of them sit atop a concrete foundation. One does not. So when you’re talking — roughly — a ton, it begins to mean something, weight-wise, where you place it.

When the building manager says he half expects to see the whole shootin’ match in a pile of debris in the basement by morning, then winks, that means something too. If you said it means, “Cover your ears, cross your fingers, and load the darn thing in anyway,” well, golly, welcome to Typecast Press, Mr. or Mrs. Vandercook Universal 3.

From http://vandercookpress.info/

It’s really all Shop Boy has heard since we started acquiring TLC-needy Vandercooks some time ago. “If we can only find a Universal, we’d be set.” They’re like the Cadillacs of Vandercooks, apparently. Some of them even turn the crank and take the paper down the length of the bed for you, an idea that sort of freaks Shop Boy out even as it sends his fatigued right arm into ecstatic fits. Unfortunately, they never come onto the open market…

So the phone rings one day at the studio. Perry Tymeson, master printer and Vandercook restorer and relocator, has found a couple of presses Mary might be interested in looking at. They’re pricey by our standards, but we might be able to get a package deal. Perry knew that Mary was hoping to get a jumbo Vandercook at a good price for the Maryland Institute College of Art, new home for Globe Poster and a lot of its larger-than-life cuts. It’s awesome to have a hand-carved 26″ x 44″ wooden FBI shooting-range target plate, for instance, but a little less so if you can’t print the dang thing.

Perry had been called in by a New York City printer to help sell and move a 232 Vandercook, an absolute monster, and the Universal 3, a mere giant by comparison. He called Mary and, long story short, once the screaming subsided, the Maryland Institute College of Art owned a Vandercook that could make full use of all the poster cuts that came along with the Globe Collection … and Typecast Press had its Uni. With a counter. No small thing when your doing a run of a thousand or so. And pretty rare on a Vandercook (in Shop Boy’s admittedly rather limited experience). Oh, it’d cost us. But it was still a relatively awesome deal, and since it was the last press we’d ever need to purchase, well, who was Shop Boy to complain?

Right, Mary?

Mary?

Right?

So, Mary says, the next APHA conference is on the University of California-San Diego campus.

Shop Boy: “Are we there yet?”

Truth be told, Shop Boy loved his years on campus (all the while complaining about them — that’s just what you do). A young man of letters, I was … like “C,” for instance. At least until journalism came calling, with a chance to write about sports and hang out with athletic types. I’d never imagined myself as a jock or a writer, so this was quite the life turn. And the A’s flowed as I stumbled onto something I loved. My story’s pretty ordinary. There’s just something that screams “possibilities!” on just about every campus out there. An energy or something, I don’t know. Especially campuses as breathtaking as UC-San Diego’s. It’s in La Jolla, to be accurate, land of the $2 million average home. Estancia La Jolla is quite literally right across the street from campus.

Yes, yes, it’s the place I swiped the fruit from. Shhh!

So, the bear. It’s called “Bear, 2005″ by Tim Hawkinson. Strangely appropriate. We were wandering across campus back to the Estancia on our last full day in La Jolla, taking a route we hadn’t tried before. From the Geisel Library, down a path adorned by a fantastical snakeskin brick pattern, past a building topped by the work “Vices and Virtues,” where big neon words alternate to display them. You know, FAITH/LUST, HOPE/ENVY, CHARITY/SLOTH, PRUDENCE/PRIDE, etc. Of course Mary knew it had to be by Bruce Nauman, the dude who did the “Violins Violence Silence” neon piece at the Baltimore Museum of Art. Affecting stuff, especially as dusk began to make the colors pop.

We’d walked a little farther through an open courtyard when Mary squealed.

It’s funny how one little curve of an object out of the corner of an eye can suggest the whole. But  whatever, Mary grabbed Shop Boy’s arm and we tore down a side path. It opened onto a grassy knoll where we spotted Hawkinson’s sculpture. “I just knew it was a teddy bear,” she said — suddenly a little girl again — of the mammoth sculpture, which does look amazingly cuddly up close. A photo can’t really conjure the feeling of the piece. Just … peaceful. We stood and looked at the stone beast in the fading sunlight of a final day in paradise and just had a moment, you know?

There, at the end of a magical journey, it seemed the campus was making sure we didn’t miss things we might never be within hundreds of miles of again. The things that students pass every day, late for class, without a second thought. It happens all the time at Typecast Press. People who’ve stopped by for a tour or an appointment to talk stationery will fixate on some object or another in the studio and be, like, “Wow! What is that?”

And we’ll have walked right past the cool thing without a thought for months, or years even. It’s odd. We just sold one of the Vandercooks, a No. 1. We hadn’t used the press for some time. It wasn’t fair to the craft of letterpress to keep it out of circulation any longer. Anyway, when it was time for the press to go, Shop Boy had to disassemble an entire still-life tableau that Mary had created with a gorgeous brass oil can, an ancient brayer, a funky ink tray, that kind of stuff.

So now, there’s just an empty space in the corner.

It made me think back to the bear. Some day, in all likelihood, it’ll be gone from the UCSD campus. Perhaps it’s on loan, and the artist or owner will call it home. The science building will need to expand. Maybe it will simply age and fall down like everything and everyone does eventually. Some students will never have had any use for it anyway. It blocked the straightest path to the candy vending machines or whatever. Heck, we now have a clearer path to our original printing press, the Vandercook No. 3, a sweet piece of equipment itself. Still.

Shop Boy’s always had a love/hate relationship with Christmas. For one thing, my parents worked their butts off to pile up toys for seven kids to spend hours opening up on the big morning. It was overwhelming. Numbing, actually. A half-hour later, I couldn’t name half the awesome presents I’d received. Same with Mary’s incredibly generous parents, holidays or anytime. It’s just so hard sometimes to stop and … truly appreciate the possibilities that we’ve been handed through the years.

They don’t really teach you that in college, after all. Never too late to learn, I suppose. Perhaps Shop Boy should thank the Bear first of all.

Yeah.

“If you’re after getting the honey, then you don’t go killing all the bees.”

It’s a lyric by Joe Strummer, once of the Clash, then of the Mescaleros, and now sadly R.I.P. That lyric is from a song called “Johnny Appleseed,” which Spike loves and whose nature-respecting theme his restaurant sweats to uphold.

Anyway … Spike’s apparently got a musical soundtrack running through his mind 24/7. Turns out he’s also a fan of They Might Be Giants, a sometime rock, sometime kiddie-music band with a huge cult following. He tells the story of, in the way-old days, peppering the band’s manager with faxes (lol!) pleading for the boys to stop into Spike & Charlie’s, his first restaurant, when They were in town. Lo and behold, They — John Flansburgh and John Linnell, et al. — walked through the door one night, ate well (no surprise) and invited Spike to a Baltimore concert, giving him a shout-out from the stage. Fandom cemented.

They Might Be Unisex

Woodberry Kitchen had inherited some fairly so-so restroom accommodations at its inauguration a few years back. Not horrible or anything. Just not … special. Well, it wasn’t long before Woodberry was so special that it needed to expand, and it was decided that the restrooms should be spiffed up big time while the whole kitchen expansion/remodeling deal was underway. And that the restrooms should be for both men and women. Equality. No waiting. Cool, right? (Shop Boy wonders if they wondered whether maybe the guys’d be shamed into keeping a place they shared with women a bit tidier. Couldn’t hurt. Shop Boy had four older sisters, one younger sister. I learned quickly. Painfully.)

And so it was that Woodberry came to have three unisex restrooms. With fancy sinks, soaps and, tra-la-la, cloth hand towels. The three doors were given a distressed-wood look, smoked-glass panels and the walls around them painted a nice gray. Classy. But what of the signage? How to alert a newcomer that, yes, whether you were a man or woman, boy or girl, this was the place?

How about this:

OK, so-so photo, but you get the picture: The title of one of Spike’s favorite They Might Be Giants songs, “Women and Men,” on each of the windows and the lyrics applied to the surrounding walls by a real, old-school sign painter. The story of Mary’s hunt for the right painter is one for another day (guy named Bill Pickett, out of Richmond — a find), but for today we can just skip to the happy ending. It’s a gorgeous sight in real life. When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go see it.

Which is why I was somewhat less than friendly to the dude selling the hand-carved bone folders at the book sale portion of the American Printing History Association conference that Mary and Shop Boy attended at the University of California-San Diego. Nothing personal. But his wares were giving me the willies. I didn’t mind telling him so.

Trouble is, Mary heard me too. “Oh, he’s so good with a bone folder,” she told the craftsman, Al Rodriguez (alrod@cox.net). “We had a contest: The winner got to finish the job.”

And has gotten to do every bone-folding job since. Guess who “won.” Total set-up.

She made me buy one of his bone folders. A real beauty, if you’re into such things. Sleek. Whittled out of an incredibly light bamboo, it looked like it’d be perfect … for keeping me up all hours of the night. I cursed under my breath and handed the dude 10 bucks. Figured I’d, um, lose the sucker in our luggage on the way back to Baltimore. Worth 10 bucks to dodge the next folding session, you know?

Then came this:

Don’t let the color fool you — it’s an orange. A California orange. Swiped, ahem, from a “lime” tree on the grounds of the impossibly landscaped Estancia La Jolla. (Travel tip: Stay an extra couple of days and the rate plummets. Shhhh! Just do it. Awesome getaway. Swear to god … go there. I’ve said too much.) OK, we’re easterners. The “lime” trees with the lime-green fruit are actually a disease-resistant lemon tree. And the identical-looking other trees with the lime-green fruit are orange trees.

I didn’t ask questions. Mary doesn’t like the taste of most tap water. Shop Boy needed to doctor it. “Lime” sounded perfect. Only problem was, there was no knife in the room. A request for a corkscrew — which usually means a gadget with a blade for cutting the foil that seals the bottle — brought only a plastic handle with the corkscrew part. Didn’t cut it. Literally. So now Shop Boy faced a quandary. Go down to the front desk and say that I didn’t need the corkscrew-corkscrew but rather a blade to slice up the fruit I’d stolen from the Estancia’s beautiful grounds. They’d have strung me up, and Shop Boy wouldn’t have blamed them, to tell you the truth. (Picture it: Mary sneaking a wooden bone folder in a cake past the metal detector at the prison so that I could — over the course of 20 years of late nights — tunnel my way out.)

Or, I could fake up a cutting tool.

Yup.

Bludgeoned the fruit a bit as I jabbed it with the bone folder, slicing a jagged circle around and then through the orange, which soon enough bared its guts. I bled it dry into our water glasses.

Looked a bit like a Jack O’ Lantern at Veterans Day when I was done. Sad.

But Mary was happy.

And I think I’ve got my Halloween costume all picked out for this year:

Hockey mask.

Bone folder.

Kinda gives you the willies, admit it.

Bob Cicero of Globe Poster has another name for me:

The Mouse.

I’m not offended (mostly). Painting the trim up to non-freakily tall people’s eye level is a reward in itself. I mean, how many people walk into your house and say, “hey, niiiiice ceilings.” If they do, they’re weirdos and it’s about time they leave, am I right? Besides, a lot of the magical stuff of Globe Poster’s past was waiting beneath something else … until Shop Boy/Low Boy/The Mouse got down on all fours and started poking and scratching around. All my crawling and digging brought some amazing stuff back into the light of day. So what can I say?

It felt a bit odd, then, that Shop Boy didn’t need to even bend at the waist to assemble the three plates that let me create … this:

In fact, I had to reach up for the black plate, which sat for years and years on a top shelf in the china/memorabilia cabinet out in Globe’s front office. Shop Boy had often admired the relief image of the snarling circus tiger but had never touched it. (Wasn’t dusty enough, I suppose.) Mary had a six-hour class to teach the next day, though, giving Shop Boy a free afternoon to play with the Globe stuff on the SP-15. Truth be told, I didn’t know much about running a Vandercook press before I took on the assignment of proofing cool cuts to be used on T-shirts to help raise money for the Globe move to the Maryland Institute College of Art and such. Mary would always set up the job, register the plates and do all the make-ready. I’d ink the press and provide the muscle to run the job and then clean everything. The system worked, but meant a lot of standing around for Shop Boy during set-up. And a bored Shop Boy is truly a printer’s devil.

Anyway, I never said I was a real printer. But it was time for me to learn my own machines. And the tiger seemed a neat place to start, with the three plates requiring adjustments for registration. Green was first, at least the plate that I’d make green, using the first tub of ink that was handy. (I’d never seen the beast in printed form, so I was winging it.) So far, so good:

Orange would be next. I’d seen tigers at the zoo, so I was pretty confident about that color. But printing the orange on top of the green just made the whole thing look like a big blob. Shop Boy soldiered on anyway. Might as well make some awful art while no one’s watching. I could learn from the project and ditch the evidence before Mary got there. Shop Boy aligned the black plate, inked up and rolled, expecting very little. Well:

What astounds Shop Boy most — still — is that the guy who hand-carved the set of wooden plates (the late Harry Knorr, in all likelihood) could have anticipated how the black plate would bring the whole image together. Also breathtaking is how a set of wooden plates, used non-gently for years, then abandoned for decades, could create such a sharp, detailed image today with very little make-ready.

And that it would be me — Shop Boy — whose skills would bring the image back to life.

But there it was. I brought a copy of the image down to Highlandtown the next day to show to Bob Cicero as a surprise. He’d been lending us stuff to proof all during the move prep and hadn’t even noticed the tiger’s absence from the shelf. Not that he’d have fretted. Mary’d left him a note:

“The Mouse Is Proofing Your Cat.”

Shop Boy was up to his ears in dirt and dust, on an archeological dig at Baltimore’s old Globe Poster Printing Corp. In Mary’s latest installment of “Saving the World One Grimy Corner at a Time,” we were prepping and packing Globe’s collection of amazing old stuff for a move to the Maryland Institute College of Art for its next life as a teaching collection. These were the raw materials used to create not only famed posters to advertise big-name R&B and rock music concerts but also for carnivals, burlesque, Hollywood moving pictures, car racing and, yes, Baltimore drag shows. Though “only” an adjunct professor there, Mary had somehow, um, persuaded the president and provost of MICA to purchase the truly mind-boggling collection. (This will not surprise you if you know Mary, but that’s a story for another day.)

Shop Boy was dragged kicking and screaming into the act. I mean, I was having enough trouble keeping Typecast Press in order. “Are you crazy?” But Mary needed me, so I went on that freezing winter day to Globe’s blustery, unheated Highlandtown headquarters, with a big chip attached firmly to my shoulder. Under the 17 shirts and eight jackets, of course.

While Mary and Globe owner Bob Cicero discussed strategy for keeping the collection safe and together, Shop Boy mostly was left  standing around on those Arctic ice floes that were serving as concrete floors. (Did I mention it was cold there? I should.) To keep the circulation going, I began to explore the cavernous place. For years now, most of the action had been on the other side of the plant from the composing room. Globe had been mostly screenprinting plastic “Going Out of Business” signs for others while worrying about its own future. But the composing room was where all that letterpress magic had once happened. Bob’s stories of a buzzing crew creating perhaps 20 unique posters a day there got Shop Boy to thinking of his and Mary’s trippy young days in humming newspaper composing rooms. And as they went off to chat, I tripped again.

It’s tough to describe exactly what Globe’s composing room looked like when we got there. It was just … stacks. And stacks. And dust. And stacks. You stepped over and through openings to get to other openings. Not to criticize, but it had literally been years since a person had stood, or swept, in some of those spots.

And so I found myself on a part of the floor that hadn’t been looked over in a while, at least from this prone angle. I wiped the dust off my shoulder, cursed, then sneezed. Mary called out, “You OK, Shop Boy?” I was fine. I kicked gently at the thing that had brought me down. Just a broken mop handle or something. But what was that next to it? I’d dislodged an old “cut,” an elk head that was probably part of some lodge’s logo that Globe had once printed. It was from a drawer whose bottom had let go. I hadn’t noticed the drawers before. Or the cabinet, for that matter. But there it was, so I decided to take a peek.

Well.

Turns out that in this here factory, among the stacks of lead, mountains of metal, vats of ancient fluorescent ink, reams of fabulously aged paper and rack after rack after rack after rack of hand-carved maple letters and signs were the scattered bits of mid-20th century posters for the Indianapolis Clowns, a Negro Leagues team that, when it wasn’t playing some serious baseball, by all accounts (yup, Hank Aaron is an alumnus), was barnstorming the nation with African costumes, cornball comedy and … blackface. The poster pieces had been set aside long ago once Hammerin’ Hank and the other top black stars were grudgingly accepted into Major League Baseball.

Sports? Here? Shop Boy was all in. I took everything I could carry back to our printshop for proofing on the Vandercook, then packaged them up carefully and set them aside for Bob, who remembers his late dad, Joe Cicero Sr., talking about them, though of course it had been some years back.

Then came this:

Kind of neat, am I right? That’s Eddie Feigner.

Who?

The King!

No, really. As in, The King and His Court.

The long story of how he and his poster came back to life is more amazing, but I’ll give you the quickie version so we can all get back to our own lives a bit sooner.

There are eight pieces to the poster, an advertisement for the barnstorming softball team that would go town to town and, using only four players, beat the bejeepers out of any who dared to challenge them. Shop Boy had seen the act as a kid on ABC’s Wide World of Sports.

The poster worked like many at Globe: The main image would be printed, in several colors, for a big stack of posters. Later, wood type would be used to fill in the locations, dates and times of the shows in black ink. If the client were traveling all over the East Coast, say, the wood type could be swapped in and out to create specific posters for each stop.

Well, the pieces of this particular poster had been scattered through time to the far corners of the Globe warehouse, but suddenly began turning up under here, over there, atop shelves, inside a box, wherever they should not have been. Each time, Shop Boy was waiting. OK, so my main job at Globe was to sort, alphabetize and box the metal-on-wood photo cuts of R&B, rock and hip-hop acts for their eventual further cataloging by young artist/historians at MICA. In the rush to prep the collection for the move, there wasn’t time to worry about searching for the other pieces to a forgotten poster for silly old ballplayers.

Instead, they began finding me. Swear to god.

The black plate popped up first. Shop Boy saw it sitting atop a work table. It clearly depicted a baseball stadium facade with the words “King and His Court” reversed out of it. “Hey, I wonder if this was for ‘The King and His Court,’ ” Shop Boy wondered aloud.

“What was the giveaway?” Bob joked.

The red plate, an echo of the black facade that added a few pennants and a big star with a silhouette of the King’s head, had been snapped in two somehow and ended up at opposite ends of the building. By dumb luck I happened to carry one piece past the other one day, recognized the color of the ink stain on the wood, and … what do you know? The “yellow” background plate — which I obviously prefer as baseball-field green — was mixed among a carton of auto racing poster plates. The four-man lineup cut popped out of a dusty box at the bottom of a stack filled with carnival stuff.

But The King was nowhere. So many pieces of early Globe posters (this was from 1955, as the central pennant shows) had been sawed into shelves once the job was finished or gone missing in a series of printshop relocations that I deemed him a lost cause and got back to the more important task of documenting the key R&B figures whose heads had been in cold storage for too long and bringing them back to life with a little warm ink. I’d culled about 150 heads from a collection of maybe 15,000 that I either recognized from a Globe poster or that just looked cool and different and brought them back to Typecast to proof as well.

It was the ears that caught my eyes. Not the buzzcut in the sea of very fine afros of, say, Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, Roberta Flack and Bootsy Collins. “No way!” I picked up the little head and walked it over to the carved wooden star. The ears matched the silhouette! Yup, the King of Softball had long ago been sorted into the kings and queens of R&B. Funny.

The cartoon part of the poster, explaining the King’s act, lay at the bottom of a crate filled with ink-coated wood once used to fill out huge poster forms. A needle in a haystack.

And finally, after we’d cherry-picked all the best lead type “slugs” produced by the Ludlow, a kind of linotype machine — FUN + GAMES + RIDES and such — three huge containers got filled with the rest, to be sold as scrap. A few stray slugs had ended up on the floor, and had been pushed with a foot or whatever into a dusty corner. Don’t know why, but I dug through the pile.

Hello?

E-D-D-I-E F-E-I-G-N-E-R.

S-p-o-o-k-y.

(Also a bit eerie: This just moved on the Web while I was fact-checking myself. King and His Court to retire, like, this weekend.)

P.S.: Bob Cicero liked the story of Shop Boy putting the poster back together so much, he told me to keep the pieces.

Now, where the heck did I put them?

Kidding!

So why do the Kinko’s guys always doubt her? They should just hand her the mouse and turn her loose with the better machines — and all those printer options on the computer programs they do not understand — behind the desk. Or … they can stay late and get a lesson in printer persuasion as she leans on them till their attitude bends.

Because we weren’t going anywhere the night before a bride was coming to pick up her magnificent invitations. All that remained was copying two-sided pages for a teeny details book that would give prospective guests the lowdown on lodging, entertainment, gift registry and even the happy couple’s plans for starting their future together. Cool, right? The idea was a take on the unforgettable fold-out detail card that our pals Stacey Mink and Geoff Brown helped us create for their wedding. And it was so close to finished. Just copy the sheets of paper, cut them to size and staple them into a lovely cover.

Mary 1, Kinko’s 0.

OK, so the staples. We have an old saddle stitcher, or at least that’s what we’ve been calling it perhaps ignorantly. It’s a big old, foot-pedal-powered stapler is what it is. Rather neat-looking, we think. And rather not up to the task, our pleading and coaxing falling upon deaf cast-iron ears. What we were hoping for is to avoid the big bends that the tines of most common staples end up forming on the inside of the paper, like a big bow or something. It’d be bulky in such a little book. And Shop Boy could not convince Mary that all we needed to do was staple through the cards and insert sheets into something soft, then fold the tines down neatly one at a time. There were 200 of the the things. So? We’ve done tweakier stuff, as Shop Boy will get to in a moment.

Mary remembered suddenly a favor that she had done for the folks at Alpha Graphics, an awesome shop around the corner that regularly does negatives for our plates and, on one recent occasion, had borrowed our drill press to create nice, neat holes in some bit of stationery or other. Alpha has an automatic saddle stitcher, so quicker than you can say “calling in an owesie,” we were sitting in the pleasantly air-conditioned Alpha, Shop Boy folding the printed sheets into the cards and handing them one at a time to a wild-eyed Mary, who was just a little too into the “bang” of the contraption each time she tapped the foot pedal, if you ask me. Had “emergency room” written all over it.

But we cranked them out, noticing partway through the blue line painted along the spine of the staples. Not sure if it helps the machine’s brain line up the punch or what. But on the individual staples, and on the back of the cards, it created a blue dot.

Shop Boy (in denial mode by default): “Who’s going to notice that?”

Mary: “Everybody’s going to notice that!”

Shop Boy: “OK, you’re right. But we can just take an emery board and …”

Did I mention tweaky? Yes, I believe I did. Shop Boy and Typecast interns/friends Allison Fisher and Ingrid Schindall once spent the better part of two days buffing the cotton hickeys off the edges of separate business card orders. Thousands of cards each. See, sometimes a cutting rule will dull in one spot and tear rather than slice the cotton papers that Typecast favors. Thus, when Mary does a die-cutting job on the windmill — currently above Shop Boy’s pay grade — the air is filled with cotton puffs, the machine is filled with oil hole-clogging dander … and the edges of the cards can be left a bit rough.

Not in our store, you don’t.

Some folks use sandpaper or a similar rough surface to fix the peachfuzz effect, lining a bunch of cards up all at once. That’s good for bigger printed objects, in Shop Boy’s book, but when the fuzz gets between the cards, the sandpaper ain’t going to reach it. And so we buff.

On the blue polka-dotted staples, however, none of the above treatments worked. The emery board tended to stray from the staple and make a mess of the cotton booklet’s spine. And anyway, it didn’t get all of the blue off. So Mary handed me the dental tools. Honest to god, Shop Boy sat there with a miniature rasper — with the bride due any minute by this time — filing smooth each staple’s backside. No pressure. And if you think a slip with an emery board can chew up a cotton booklet’s spine, wait’ll you see my, um, handiwork on a couple of booklets that ended up in the sample drawer instead of the bride’s box.

Might match the unexplained nicks, gashes and grooves you find one day on the ever-recalcitrant copiers at your neighborhood Kinko’s. Mary’s tried everything else to get her money’s worth out of that joint. We’ll just call it the blue dot special.

Fun, right? For Shop Boy especially. No heavy lifting! Though I do think they could have airbrushed out the double chin and perhaps deepended my voice a bit. What are they teaching these people in film class at UB, anyway?

This, which is, ahem, more than a little charming.

That’s Josh Harless’ version. We’re still waiting on their other two, by Karen Summerville and Dean Nettles. Perhaps they will be more about Shop Boy. Honestly, the crew was marooned with me alone for an entire day of shooting when Mary was called away … and that’s it? I merely helped them work out the lighting and stuff for when Mary got back, I guess. They kept saying how great I was doing too. Sigh. Not bitter.

I’ll post the other films when I get them. (In the meantime, thanks, Josh. All kidding aside, that was a cool experience.)

By the way, I keep saying this, but Shop Boy hopes to be a more regular contributor to the blogosphere again soon. Got a million stories to tell. And that’s only the Globe Poster part!

Shop Boy's take on a classic

It’s sort of like letting your screwball neighbor borrow the Hope Diamond to cut glass for a home-improvement project.

But there was Shop Boy, holding out his arms as Bob Cicero of Globe Poster piled on the priceless, hand-carved wooden plates to an old four-color rodeo poster. The original, a wonder, hangs at the front of the old Globe shop. The gesture was kind of a reward for all that Mary had done to broker the acquisition of the Globe collection by the Maryland Institute College of Art, and to commemorate the good time Shop Boy had given himself rooting through the old stacks of Globe paraphernalia in the mammoth and wacky old space in weird old Highlandtown that Globe has called home … while Mary did all that hard work.

True story: Mary and Shop Boy had this running discussion/argument the other day about which old blue-collar Baltimore neighborhood is more, um, eccentric, Typecast Press’ Hampden or Globe’s Highlandtown. Shop Boy said Hampden, where a trio of chain-smoking early teen mothers might be crossing Roland Avenue against the light, nary a glance left or right, leading with their baby strollers while a delivery truck is double-parked (next to an open parking space big enough for it and a twin) and a Brink’s truck approaches M&T Bank from the opposite direction and double parks as well, blocking the whole freaking main thoroughfare, 36th Street (“only be but a minute or two, hon”). Meanwhile, a drunk dude wanders across the intersection sipping a coffee (plus whatever was in the flask) from the RoFo, as they call the Royal Farms stores in these parts, a newcomer baffled by the “rear-in only” parking on 36th Street simply stops cold, leading stupidly impatient motorists behind him to pull over into oncoming traffic for a standoff of epically moronic proportions, a white dude dressed like a gangster thug in a music video and holding a crazed pit bull (on way too flimsy a leash) hawks drugs, a hooker drags herself home from a trick and a cop eats a pizza and cools his heels. Wait, is that an ambulance siren?

“OK, you win,” Shop Boy admitted as we fought our way past an even nuttier scene in Highlandtown. “Jesus God!” as Bob Cicero is prone to exclaim. That place is a piece of work.

But back to Globe and MICA. Now, Mary is a persuasive person, to which we must now add “legendarily,” as in:

“Jesus God, how do you argue with that?“

Since the acquisition is as official as these things get with lawyers still present, let Shop Boy tell you a little bit about how it went down.

Mary heard that Globe was about to shutter its operations and needed to sell off its stuff, mainly hundreds of drawers of beautiful wood type, great old “cuts” — the metal-on-wood blocks that became the circus and carnival figures, the go-go girls, the R&B acts, the daredevil racers — and thousands upon thousands of classic posters from a shop that churned out more than 20 unique versions per day at peak production. Bob had little idea that anybody gave half a darn for the old stuff that had made the Ciceros (Joe Sr., and brothers Bob, Frank and Joe) such a magical act all those years. There were a few hardy friends who thought otherwise, hoping that Globe could be preserved as a whole and kept, somehow, in Baltimore.

What they needed was a crazy person visionary, someone willing to champion the cause at any personal cost. Mary’s cost included having to hear Shop Boy scream “no, no, no!” at the idea of her taking this project on, then eventually having to hear me scream “no, no, no!” as she tried at the end of another long day to pull me out of the Globe shop, which of course had become my personal playground. What a cool place. I mean, you know me, chicken to the core, scared stiff of what might lie in wait in that dark spot at the back of a cabinet that hadn’t been touched in decades. But there went Shop Boy’s bare hand, reaching for whatever that was. The discoveries! OK, they were the “Christopher Columbus discovers the New World!” kind of discoveries. (Really, you were the first person there, CC?) The coolest thing? Bob Cicero was so amused at my zeal that he let me take all this stuff back to Typecast Press to play with on our presses. Shop Boy was not shy about doing so. Thus, Typecast suddenly has stacks and stacks and stacks of proofs pulled from the mostly forgotten cuts. To tell you the truth (another Bob Cicero-ism), Globe had not made posters the letterpress way in some years, its 24,000-pound Miehles silent since a move from South Baltimore in the Eighties. The trade-off is that I’d clean years of dust and dirt off before I used the cuts, “repair” broken ones and then bring them back to await their fate as Mary pitched the “collection” to MICA.

This was touchy business. Mary, as a mere adjunct professor of letterpress printing at MICA, needed to awaken a school (all the way to the president’s office) to the possibilities that taking on a dusty, indefinable, and just plain vast assortment of letterpress stuff would present to the school. Oh, and the school would have to buy the collection …

Shop Boy can’t find the words to describe my pride at Mary’s efforts at persuasion — and those of the MICA folks to see in time what she saw and felt so passionately all along. And the MICA seniors … kids who’ll never get to actually use the collection. How they rallied for it! You could cry, really.

There have been a few bumps, of course, even now, with the deal so close to done. As I keep telling Mary, when you move mountains, chances are you’re going to have to set them down on someone’s toes. (I thought that statement fairly profound — Shop Boy will have to some day look up who I stole it from.)

Mary will never tell you that she saved the Globe collection (though she will say how much stronger this has made her belief in the power of a tiny, committed group to make a big  difference). Neither will Shop Boy (though I will quietly always believe it). Who cares, right? The Globe collection is saved.

Who could have imagined that six months ago?

And after all this, how hard can it be for Mary to turn Shop Boy back into a contributing member of society and build Typecast Press into the household name that I believe, ahem, it should already be?

It ain’t her first time at the rodeo, after all.

That was odd. Shop Boy had come across the hall to scout for a background form — a type-high block (8 by 10 in this case) for printing a solid block of color — and lazily left the door open behind him. It was mid-afternoon on a Thursday, not a high-traffic time for the Fox Industries Building, and I’d only be a sec. Mary needed the block pronto for a demonstration over at her Maryland Institute College of Art letterpress class. We’d been moving everything imaginable around in the studio recently, but Shop Boy had a basic idea where such a thing might be.

Just as I pulled open a file drawer, there was a weird sound behind me. Somebody else was here. Shop Boy looked around for a heavy, blunt object just in case.

OK, every stinking thing in a letterpress studio is a blunt object capable of inflicting bodily harm. I might be dead before I could choose among potential weapons. Shop Boy summoned his courage and peeked sheepishly around the corner.

“Are you the Grim Reaper?” I asked.

OK, I asked that in my head. Mostly I just stared at the figure who’d wandered through the open door. But it was definitely what Shop Boy was thinking: My escort to the next world had arrived. She was the picture of calm, her long, white hair framing a serene, smiling face.

Shop Boy was struck dumb. I grew up on the Grim Reaper of the Monty Python sketches, the black-clad, skeletal Death with the scythe impatiently gesturing toward the salmon as the killer of all the dinner guests as the hostess quite literally dies of embarrassment.

The older woman was silent for a moment as well. Then she spoke …

“I have been coming here for years,” she said.

Gulp. Death had been stalking me. Waiting for this moment. Why this one? Was it the deli turkey?

Now, I’d always told my late mom that she wouldn’t die anytime soon, that she was too mean for a heaven-type atmosphere, that God didn’t want any part of her until she mellowed. Shop Boy figured the big fella saw me as someone who had a few issues to work through as well before I could even get a tee time at St. Peter’s Country Club, never mind pulling up a bar stool at the ultimate 19th hole. Guess you never know.

“Are you an actual museum?” she asked with a smile. “I get a shiatsu massage down the hall regularly , and I’ve never seen the museum sign before or seen the door open.”

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. The sign next to the door. We were thinking of a demarcation for the studio, something that would be fun. Mary and Chris Hartlove came up with the words: “The Old Printers’ Home and Museum of Mostly Useless Antiquities.” Shop Boy had come up with the idea of a “right-reading” copper-on-wood printer’s plate. A normal plate would of course read backwards so as to print correctly. The plate maker, Owosso, thought it was all a cute idea, too.

“Um, hee-hee, that’s kind of a joke,” Shop Boy stammered. “Our old roommate was a photographer who used actual film, and we use these crazy old presses. You know, it’s all outmoded stuff no sane person would, uh, be caught dead using to try to make money nowadays.”

She looked around for an uncomfortable moment, turned and floated back toward the exit, as Shop Boy — still a bit shaken, honestly — realized he’d probably seemed kind of rude to his, um, guest.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just, uh, surprised to see someone here.”

The woman grinned. Then she was gone.

Spooked, Shop Boy grabbed the background block for Mary and decided to knock off, uh, cash in, er, stop working … for the day. Not, like, forever or anything.

And I drove home very cautiously, pausing only to pay $53 for 14 gallons of gasoline, an oddly reassuring reminder that this truly ain’t heaven.

Whew.