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.

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 better be 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.

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.

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.)

“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.

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.

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:

***

“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?

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.

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?

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.