Door Prize

 

My chair came in first.

 

Then a bunch of others arrived and stole all the medals.

 

Serves Shop Boy right for getting his hopes up. See, I’m in a new job at the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, and kind of looking for ways to impress my colleagues. (Mary’s unimpressed by my lack of presence in the printshop, especially at lunchtime, but that’s a tale for another time.)

 

So right around Christmas, there was this contest for departments at the school. Whichever team created the coolest door decorations got a prize. Fun, right? We brainstormed, and Shop Boy threw out an idea: Every snowflake is different; so’s every QR code. What if you did snowflakes of QR codes that summoned fun things about how Christmas is celebrated around the world. (They’re very “global” here in East Baltimore.) We’ve got five doors and, thus, five displays. We did the teamwork thing, and improved the idea on the fly and … won. We got free breakfast sandwiches a couple of mornings. Hooray for the new guy, right?

 

OK, so even as all that was going on, we’d gotten involved in another contest: Whichever team can take a surplus chair from the cafeteria and turn it into something magical that can be auctioned off for a scholarship fund wins. Any ideas? New guy?

 

“Well,” the new guy says, “the chair has a cross carved into the back (that’s the symbol of Hopkins nursing). It looks kinda like the X on a ‘you are here’ map. What if we put everywhere the School of Nursing is in the world on the chair and say something like, ‘You are here. So is the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing.’ “

 

The concept was for Shop Boy to sand the chair, then the team to paint it. But you know how that goes. Many, many breakfasts had passed before I even got a chance to sand it, and now everybody was busy or had lost interest. The new guy had gotten us into this, and I guessed that the new guy was going to get us out of it.

 

Shop Boy won’t lie. What followed was fun. A ton of work, and pressure. Self-inflicted, but presure nonetheless.

 

And on the appointed deadline day, I dutifully and carefully set the chair inside the car and drove it to work. My knees were shaking with excitement as I dropped it off at the Student House. I was proud of the chair, thrilled to have made the deadline and relieved to not have dropped, dented or otherwise wrecked it on the way over. OK, I’m a little obsessive about deadlines. But I’d said it would be done and, by gum, there it was.

 

It looked good, all alone in that room.

 

 

The guy leading the contest said a few others were expected to trickle in over the next few days, but my chair looked like a solid entry.

 

Then a few others trickled in over the next few days.

 

Including this one:

 

 

What the … duck?

 

It’s an inside joke: A “Duck Point” is something students should assume would be on the next exam. Whatever, big yellow duck on a red background vs. a chair with all these nations so painstakingly drawn by hand. Chile, “the world’s backbone,” along the spine of the chair. Australia “down under” the chair. Cool, right?

 

 

Voting commenced, and it was apparently a landslide. My artist’s statement didn’t sway anyone:

 

The idea for the chair came during a brainstorming session at our weekly meeting. It sounded like a cool way to make a point that the sun never sets on the JHUSON. The nations were drawn free-hand, with an iPhone in one hand (Google search: “outline map of Thailand”) and pencil in the other. My sincere apologies for any Atlantis moments, a slip of the pencil lopping off 100 square miles of land here and there. The lettering’s meant to look stenciled/spray-painted as though on the side of a random military crate or CARE package shipped to the ends of the Earth. 

Blah, blah, blah. 

You are here. So is a duck.

 

Duck wins.

 

I’m not bitter.

It’s What’s Inside That Counts

It was an idea whose time had come. Right now, in fact. The muslin bags had arrived a few hours earlier in a bit of a heap, the delivery box a dented mess. But they’d been protected from the elements at least by a thick, clear plastic bag. Shop Boy could see that the bags needed some serious ironing, but there was little time for that.

These little beige bags, about 5 inches by 8 inches when flat, with a cute little orange string tie sewn into the top seam, were to be the wrapper for a line of goods – jams, roasted peppers and such – for The Gift Wall at Artifact, a caffeine-fueled offshoot of Woodberry Kitchen. You can’t miss it … it’s right next door to the big Pepsi billboard off I-83. Now serving dinner, prix fixe, different theme every week. Unbelievable. Can’t get in to Woodberry Kitchen? Artifact is a very worthy fallback. Just go. Now. OK, finish this first. But then go.

Mary, of course, designed the paper goods for the place, using “artifacts” from a previous generation of letterpress to add an odd charm. Many of these came from “Mr. Wilhelm’s Shop.” This was the Timonium basement operation left idle, but never dusty, by the widow (Earcell Wilhelm) of an industrious hobbyist. Some years after his death, she needed to move and put the contents of the shop up for sale, everything-must-go style. We jumped at it, and what is now known as Typecast Press was born.

Strange and wonderful scraps from his life of printing have become bits of loopy eye candy on the Artifact menu and coffee-cup wrappers. Very fun.

Anyhow, Artifact sells great stuff made over at Woodberry Kitchen in small packages, like muslin bags. So Mary decided we should go ahead and print the Tuscan O that is Woodberry’s logo on each muslin bag.

We’d done similar jobs, so Shop Boy knew what this meant. The first problem is corraling the drawstring so that it doesn’t flop down into the printing area and get itself inked, thus wrecking the bag, or slip behind the printing area and cause a seam in the logo, thus … wrecking the bag. Not so bad. I simply had to brush the string to the side of the tympan as I fed each one. An elastic band I’d put over the tympan bales helped there, stopping the bags from sagging and also keeping the sticky black ink from pulling the occasional freshly printed one into the maw of the press … wrecking the bag. (Full-bleed coasters, ones inked all the way across, do that sometimes, because an elastic band can’t touch any part of its surface.)

Finally, this would require some tomfoolery with the impression lever. Sometimes you can overcome inking issues by bashing the gooey stuff into an object. And the big C&P can really bring it. But Shop Boy saves that for “last resorts.” This was merely a crisis. DEFCON 5, as it were.

Teachable moment: Many people use the whole DEFCON thing improperly, assuming that a higher numeral means a higher probability of nuclear war. Rather, think “Countdown to launch.” DEFCON 1′s actually the really, really, really bad one, if any escalation toward mutual annihilation can be called less than really, really, really bad. DEFCON 5 is a moment for deep concern and reflecting. DEFCON 1 is a moment for deep doo-doo and genuflecting.

Ahem.

Shop Boy also didn’t want to hit the bags too hard because the material is porous. You don’t want the image to “ghost” on the other side. On that note, I had to account for an unexpected layer of packing — a little sheet of acetate would need to be slipped into each bag to keep the ink from going through no matter how soft or hard I hit it. That meant cutting 25 little sheets, inserting them, printing 25 bags, pulling the sheets out, inserting them into new bags and printing 25 more. Repeat, repeat repeat.

Foo.

OK, so now came the experimenting. Another way to overcome light inking is to hit it twice, or to “trip” once to get a little extra ink on the plate and then hit it once. Sometimes it takes a little more. Here was my dance: Insert bag into guide, throw lever into trip mode for two passes, throw lever into print mode for three passes. Remove printed bag, put new one into guides, throw lever into trip mode, etc.

Now, normally Shop Boy is pretty good at counting to three. But you get the big press going and start dealing with flopping strings, wrinkles in bags, elastic bands, acetate sheets and, well, you’d better have some extras on hand. Because hitting a cloth bag three times in exactly the same spot is tricky under the best circumstances. Pull one out after only two hits and there’s just no stinking way to put it back in for the third … wrecking the bag.

You get the idea. Printing can be annoying sometimes. But you should see the bags.

In fact, go take a look at Artifact. Seriously, we’re finished here. Go.

OK, here they are:

Now go. I mean it.

Short on Time, and Cheer

 

 

One day, the company nurse was simply gone, laid off and replaced by the penny-pinching Scrooges in management with … a glass-encased defibrilator. It looked for all the world like a vending machine.

 

“What if I have a heart attack and don’t have 50 cents?” Shop Boy asked a colleague, only half-kidding.

 

“Or what if I fall down over there and the cord doesn’t reach? Do you promise to carry me to the hallway?”

 

He did not.

 

I was thinking about this late the other night in connection with Santa’s elves.

 

Not that Mary would ever let Shop Boy listen to holiday music while she’s nearby. And when she’s rushing around like she has been, I don’t push it. But earlier, I’d gone to make a polymer plate in another part of the studio and switched my Pandora account to Holiday Favorites or whatever. The first thing that popped on was an orchestral overture to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. You know, little snippets of all the songs blended together to give you a hint of what’s coming.

 

Call Shop Boy a sap, but one of the things that struck me — even through the panic of knowing Mary needed the plate NOW – was that every stinking song on that soundtrack is a classic. Brilliant, moving.

 

Just that quick, I was up to my elbows in polymer-scented rinse water and awash in nostalgia.

 

And I thought, “I wonder if any of Santa’s elves ever had a heart attack on the job while racing toward the Christmas Eve “drop-dead” due date for the toys?

 

(In newspapers, when asking for the “real” deadline for a story vs. when the editor [me] would prefer to have it in hand, reporters were in the habit of asking, “So, what’s the drop-dead on that?” They wanted to know how many minutes and seconds they could stall before I’d walk over to their desks and tell them, “Your story is no longer required or desired: Drop dead!”)

 

Don’t know if you’ve seen old Shop Boy around lately. But a new (awesome) desk job and too much potential exercise time spent instead catching up at Typecast Press have left a bit of a belly that, yes, shakes when I laugh, like a bowl full of jelly.

 

OK, OK, there’s an extra cookie or tw…elve in that “to blame” file as well. Picky, picky. Who ever heard of a skinny Shop Boy?

 

(That’s paraphrasing Rudolph — Mrs. Clause telling a stressed-out Santa he has to eat something.)

 

The point is, it’s been a little stressful, and adding “pre-holiday mode” hasn’t helped. So I was taking a mental timeout, just sorta thinking what kind of Elf health plan Santa’s got at his shop.

 

I mean, surely a few of the elves are huddled right at this very minute outside the toy factory’s front door, fresh snow covering for the moment an ugly sidewalk full of discarded cigarette butts. They’re huffing and puffing about their names ending up in the wrong column of the Naughty & Nice list, about the reindeer constantly flying over and pooping on their windshields (and then it freezes!), about the company 401k, about Tim Tebow getting dissed by the Jets. (It’s Christ-mas, after all.) And the Angels! What on earth are they thinking, paying Josh Hamilton all those millions to play baseball? With his bad habits!?!

 

Mostly, they’re just blowing smoke, stressed about being so stressed. So close to finished, so close to putting their feet up, so close to a cocktail at Clarisse’s Tavern and … so close to taking a goddamn hammer and …

 

Surely, one of them has simply keeled over on occasion.

 

Right?

 

Oops. That’d be Mary calling. Sounds stressed. Better put Pandora back on the Dirge and Drudgery station. It’s going to be another long winter’s night.

 

Happy Holidays, everybody! Hope to see you there.

 

Once More From the Top

Not to be melodramatic, but Shop Boy’s very existence is at risk.

Honest.

You might have noticed the dramatic falloff in the number of posts here (or maybe you haven’t missed them — hmmph!). Part of that’s natural. This blog started as a chronicle of the funny, nutty stuff that just happens when you’re starting a business on a whim. Especially a business that can be so emotionally and physically challenging. So, we laughed (or tried to) and learned here at Typecast Press. We’ve been doing this letterpress thing a little while now, though, and most of the ridiculous gaffes that so often took our legs out from under us in the first couple of years have stopped cropping up. Mostly.

(Ever lock up a Heidelberg windmill? Shop Boy now has. In the dumbest way imaginable. I’m not the religious sort — if you are, that’s cool — but I’ll tell you that Shop Boy was praying that he hadn’t cracked the impression collar, once I was through praying that we could even get the darn thing open ever again. Prayers answered: Impression collar intact, impression bar unbent, Shop Boy … recovering.)

Anyway, Mary’s been so distracted with saving the world – of Globe Posterat MICA – that Shop Boy has been spending an awful lot of time alone in the printshop. This, normally, would be a recipe for disaster. Instead, I’ve had to learn more than I ever thought I’d want to about printing. Now, don’t get crazy — this isn’t my printshop. Mary handles ALL of the design, ordering and finances of the place, as well as the fine printing jobs. And when the look of the place gets a bit too, um, “Shop Boy,” Mary lays down the law and “her way” is restored.

Let’s just say instead that Shop Boy’s role has moved past simply carting heavy stuff from here to there and standing in front of a press hand-feeding all day long.

Shop Boy has to be responsible. I can’t just laugh off a Keystone Kops mistake and run to the computer to tell the funny story of how it went down. Now I have to “own” it, as Mary likes to say I don’t do well enough, and fix it.

But I’d like to fix this blog, too. The lack of new stuff, you know? So here we go. I’m back. Not with a bang but a whimper — like the eerily un-loud sound of a Heidelberg locking up. Those you who still check in on occasion for my updates, thank you.

I’ll be back at you soon. Promise.

I Have Trouble Finding the Words

Mary was sitting up in bed way too late … or was it way too early … it all runs together sometimes, when a vocabulary lesson broke out. Apparently, by not standing up, screaming “no, no, no!,” lighting myself on fire and running away down the street in the altogether, I had given my “tacit” approval to participate in a project.

By tacit, she meant that because I remained three-quarters asleep and unable to communicate my disapproval, my approval could be “assumed.” Like she had the “power of attorney” or something simply because Shop Boy was what in some states would be legally declared “comatose.”

Well, Shop Boy could huff and puff till he was blue in the face, but Mary had me by the dictionary.

(OK, that was a dirty little pun, but by making me do this with no advance notice and then by not watching Shop Boy’s every keystroke, Mary has tacitly given her permission for me to throw off the shackles of good taste and manners. And that’s enough of that.)

So here goes:

Andy Snair is a Baltimore illustrator and jolly good friend of Typecast Press. Inspired by wood type in our type cabinet one day, he asked if it’d be cool if he printed the letters and put charming or funny mugs on them, creating “Type Faces.” A, O and K by us!

Well, when Mary was asked recently to “sub-curate” an art show at a gallery called Case[werks] here in Baltimore, and bring along the work of artists we’ve been inspired by or loved collaborating with, Andy Snair was in. (Yup, there’d be Globe Poster stuff too, the old and the new that Mary and Bob Cicero have worked to get created as letterpress teachers at the Maryland Institute College of Art. And Glenn Dellon’s 2011 calendar — too good for that year, if you ask Shop Boy. Cool stuff, all. You’ll see.)

Andy’s an idea guy, so when Mary informed him a week before the show that he, too, had granted tacit approval for inclusion in the show (and all the last-minute work that this entailed), Shop Boy could just about see Andy’s brain gears start turning. Mary wanted him to mount the individual letter cards on wooden bases, then carefully paint the bases’ sides to match the colors we’d printed the letters. (He’d done a few a while back … they’re awesome. But the whole alphabet? In a week? The boy’s got a job.)

Unless he could come up with something better, of course.

We knew he would.

And so Shop Boy is here to tell you that a “reglet” is a very thin piece of hard wood used as spacing between images, letters or lines of type in a backward-reading “form” to be printed.

You need to know this because you have seen or will soon see Andy’s “word search” puzzle at Case[werks] — that’s him and part of it above — as well as the little sheet that Mary has printed for you to keep score on. (You weren’t just about to write on the actual art, were you?) If you can find them all, you get one of Andy’s letters for free! Anyway, on that score sheet, Mary had printed instructions on where to find more information about the words in the puzzle. (Ahem, on a blog that we’d need written by … oh, how’s your afternoon lookin’, Shop Boy?)

You’ve got “reglet” already, right? Oh, come on. I can’t tell you where it is. But I can tell you that it might read backwards, diagonally, vertically, or be staring you right straight in the face. Then again, all of Andy’s letters are doing that, aren’t they?

Shop Boy’ll give you a hint: A “quoin” is a metal device that expands with the turn of a quoin “key” to lock “type” and “reglets” in place. “Hamilton” is a famed old Wisconsin maker of wood type like the stuff that inspired Andy (a “Gothic” face) … and Globe Poster for that matter. A “Vandercook,” as you surely know, is a “proof” press, used back in the day to give a printer a chance to look for any errors on a “proof” of an individual page before the whole book or newspaper was transferred to the big press, whereupon finding an error would create hardship, heartbreak and significant cost (perhaps even one’s job). Nowadays, a Vandercook is the press of choice for book artists, designers, and poster printers who all relish the fine work it never got full credit for in its previous life.  The “tympan” is a coated paper that holds the packing in place and thus controls how much pressure is placed on the “form” to create the depth of the impression. The tympan is also famous for its annoying habit of getting in the way, picking up an unintended “ink” smear, and then — ooh! — marking the back of 15 or so sheets of paper before the printer realizes there’s a problem with “offset” (which we didn’t have room for in the puzzle).

Those are hints about what they are, not where they are in the puzzle. Hey, Shop Boy’s not going to find them for you. But you have my tacit approval to look as long as you like.

Old Enough to Know Better

When Shop Boy was a young lad of, say, 20, he worked Sundays in a Glen Rock, N.J., delicatessen called Wilkes’ that catered to … every single person in New Jersey, it seemed sometimes. On football Sundays when either the Giants or the Jets were playing at the Meadowlands — the football teams rotated, as they do now in a new stadium built for both — the line was out the door all morning. Tailgater after tailgater after tailgater after tailgater needed morning egg and cheese sandwiches to hold them while they sat in game-day traffic. They needed it on rye, they needed it hot, they needed it, like, right now. It was already stop-and-go on the turnpike. And gimme a large coffee, light and sweet. (Good call … we made really lousy coffee.)

And without fail, right in the middle of the endless line was someone who wanted a mere quarter-pound of deli roast beef, sliced thin, from the rarest part of the hunk, for lunches they’d bring from home to eat at their desks during their work week. Poor things … meaning Shop Boy and Robert, the other guy who worked the Sunday shift. Robert was the veteran. Taught Shop Boy the ropes. He was lightning on the eggs, whether frying them up on the stove or stirring them into a styrofoam cup and sticking them into the microwave. Robert, thus, handled the egg sandwiches; Shop Boy handled as much of the rest as he could. It was a great arrangement. You wanted me on that slicer. You needed me on that slicer. As quick as Robert was on the eggs … turn Shop Boy loose on the slicer.

Then the roast beef order brought down the whole house of cards.

Now, if you’ve ever worked in a delicatessen, you know that there are meats that were meant to be sliced. Salami, say. Hard salami … yeah. Shop Boy could absolutely fly through an order, handing you a beautifully sliced, beautifully stacked, beautifully wrapped paper package of that stuff, at exactly the weight count requested. Boiled ham … you bet. Turkey … no problem, boss. Head cheese — oh, man … yuck, I mean, Coming right up! But roast beef was, quite literally, a different animal.

Those other meats cut into a solid sheet, mostly. Roast beef didn’t want to do that. And the more moist and tender the section of the hunk, the less it wanted to conform into anything that could be easily stacked, wrapped and dropped into a paper bag.

So if Shop Boy was the Leonardo da Vinci of the salami, he was more like the Jackson Pollock of the roast beef. A blood-splattered mess. Robert tended to have a bit more success, being a seasoned deli guy, but even he hated the roast beef. And he was on the eggs. The roast beef was all Shop Boy. Sliced thin? I gave them shards o’ beef. Oh, the moaning from the customers. And the people behind them! I’d re-do the order. Same pile of beef shrapnel. I felt horrible. Like a complete failure. Deli dodo. Meat-counter muttonhead. But what could I do?

Overcompensate, that’s what.

When that customer would at last take the package from the counter, he’d separate a shoulder as about 3 pounds of roast beef — for the price of a quarter pound — surprised him. I’d wink, and ask who was next.

They complained, right?

Baloney. They’d be back the next Sunday for their, ahem, quarter-pound of rare roast beef. Sliced thin. Wasn’t hurting the owner. We hustled a ton of product out the door and a ton of money into the till every Sunday, without fail.

Thirty years can change a lot of things. But not everything. I thought my friend Jan, who got me the job at Wilkes’ Deli, would always be around, that we were best buds. Life happens. Haven’t seen her in a decade or more. But if we ever do happen to be in the same room again, I’m sure it’ll be like those years never happened. Mary and Jan’s spouse will be, like, “Who are you people?” We’re not those best New Jersey buds, anymore, really. But of course we are, sorta, you know?

And today, as a printer, Shop Boy still on occasion has the “roast beef reflex.” If I’ve done something I’m not sure quite hit the mark, I push it so over the top that you’d never complain. Mary’s like Robert with the eggs. She’s good, man. Gifted. Dogged. Very smart and resourceful. Shop Boy’s fast, accurate, and can stack whatever Mary wants printed into beautiful rows to be packaged. But I choke on the trickier jobs. Mary’s been the lead printer for so long that she sometimes assumes that Shop Boy’s absorbed all that she has and thus has the same skill level as she does.

Then sometimes I’ll remind her not to make that assumption. Not on purpose … but neither was the roast beef, eh?

Take Jan’s 50th birthday card. You’re not 50 every day, right? Over the years, it had gone from flowers for the birthday, to phone calls for the birthday, to e-mails for the birthday to, “Hey, honest, I remembered your birthday, but Facebook was down.”

Shop Boy had an idea: I’d make — start to finish, by myself (Mary was crazy busy) — a simple but fun card with an image on the front, an image on the back, and a pithy birthday message on the inside, using wood blocks and lead type already hanging around the shop. I wanted to do it almost as much to surprise Mary with how proficient I’ve become at the Vandercook as I wanted to let Jan know that I’d remembered her well — well before her big day.

Nothing says, “I thought of you, but not until it was almost too late,” quite like a rush FedEx envelope through the mail slot on your birthday.

Anyway, part of Shop Boy’s, ahem, genius is starting way ahead. It leaves lots of time to correct for, ahem, stupid mistakes. Mary doesn’t tend to make stupid mistakes, so she’s never been in the habit of leaving too much extra time. Whatever. So a week before the appointed time by which the card needed to get to the post office, Shop Boy had already run the first color, both sides of the card. My idea was to build a form on the bed of the Vandercook SP-15 into which I could easily swap some gorgeous lead type — Stymie, Mary says it is. We’ve got four sizes of this stuff. Heavy as heck, because it’s so thick. But it prints beautifully. Shop Boy’s been getting into the lead type scene a little bit more recently, partly because it’s so easy to manipulate on a Vandercook bed vs. locking it up in a chase and carrying it carefully over to a C&P. I’ve had a chase collapse and drop a heavy metal Boxcar base … NOT on my foot but close … and I can’t even imagine … OK, yes I can … how horrible it would be to painstakingly set some poetic language in lead, space it all out just so, and then have it dump into a big pile on the floor, or “pie,” as they say. The flat Vandercook bed allows no such dumping.

I’d cut pieces of 110-pound Crane Lettra long enough to accommodate a 5″ x 7″ card with a fold. I did the math myself. (Foreshadowing alert!) The idea was to build a form for the first color using non-printing spacers to mimic the size of what would sub in for the second color, in this case the words in lead. I set the lead type, measured the space it would take up, blocked in the space-holders and printed the red images — bits of the old Globe Poster collection. Then I cleaned the press, put on the black ink, swapped in the lead and used spacers to mimic the area previously occupied by the Globe cuts and, voila! It looked, well, lovely. I cleaned the press again, stuck a proof in the truck to show Mary and headed home.

She loved it. Said I’d nailed the printing. Shop Boy beamed with pride.

Which comes before a fall, or so it is said.

Let it be written.

For, a day or two later (we got distracted with a project), as I used a bone folder to crease the paper, having cut it to the perfect size with an X-acto knife, Shop Boy realized that he’s not so good with numbers sometimes. Oh, the card was perfectly registered front and back, but the fold was a full, honest-to-god half-inch off.

Shop Boy was near tears. Honestly. Crushed. It was a bloody pile of worthlessness. All that effort for nothing. Mary saw the panic on my face. She had guests at the studio, but I couldn’t help letting out a little “no, no, no” from where I worked, and she came over.

Too late to reprint, and she couldn’t really afford to help. But she did have a great idea … make it even better than a simple folded card. Take each of the panels, mount them with double-stick tape on beautiful backing paper, drill holes at the top and tie it all off with a big bow of red-and-white baker’s string.

Jan gonna complain about that? Nope. She’ll give me the business once she hears the story, naturally. That’s cool. So’s the card.

Might have saved me hours and hours of work had Shop Boy thought of that right off the bat. But I’m sure Mary didn’t mind me spending all that time on a 50th birthday card for a woman from my past. Right?

Um.

Mary: “Boy, my Valentine had better be something else.”

I’m dead meat.

The Last Thing We Need

At least it has a counter.

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?

Getting in on the Ground Floor

Shop Boy’s 6-foot-4 father-in-law calls him Low Boy, meaning I’m responsible — when we’re tackling a painting assignment, say — for getting the floor-hugging trim and other “low” stuff while he covers the ceilings and tops of walls.

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.”

King’s Ransom

Who are these clowns? And how in heck did they find me here?

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!

The Devil Is in the Details Book

Look, Mary once got paper made of rocks or something to feed through a copying machine in her position at the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities. If she can’t get the copier to run a job, it simply won’t run that job.

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.

Movie Time

OK, so these three students from the University of Baltimore decide to make their class project a film on Typecast Press. Each would do a short piece on us, documentary style.

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!

Saved for Poster-ity

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.

The Sign

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.

Permafrosted

It’s safe to say that, if they X-rayed his lungs today, Shop Boy would receive a sparkling report.

And a dark diagnosis: Freezer Burn.

I mean, the warning signs were there. That odd glistening from certain angles. The telltale gleaming smears on the dinner napkin. Shiny dandruff. Disco-ball reflections off the fingertips.

Shop Boy: “How long do I have?”

Dr. Mashburn: “Ninety-one.”

Shop Boy: “Days? Just three months!?!?”

Dr. Mashburn: “No, 91 more cards. And you’ve got about three hours.”

Shop Boy “NOOOO-ooooooooo!”

True story: Shop Boy’s always kidded Mary about her love of handmade paper. I didn’t get it, and sometimes still don’t, to be honest. The edges were all rough and ragged. The thickness was all messed up and irregular. And it was expensive as heck. One Christmas when we were dating (yes, her obsession goes back that far, way before letterpress took over our lives), Shop Boy went to the drug store, bought a ream of garishly colored construction paper, crumpled it a bit and tore it into rough, kinda-square chunks.

“To Mary: Since I know you love wrecked paper.”

Oh, we laughed about it back then. But at 3 a.m. on a Thursday night/Friday morning, it was all Shop Boy could do to keep from crying.

See, the thing about handmade paper and letterpress printing is that inconsistent thickness of sheets of paper means the impression is all messed up, some sheets printing beautifully, some barely touching the form enough to pick up ink. The best you can do is segregate like thicknesses into separate piles and change packing depth as you go to match. Annoying? Oh, you betcha. Add sprinkles, which of course Mary had, and … oh, man.

The job was a card for wedding guests letting them know that a donation to a charity had been made in their honor in celebration of the bride and groom’s big day. Nice gesture. The design included a side-by-side silhouette of the happy couple, with it and the words of the invitation to be printed in gold ink on, yes, Freezer Burn, a white, sparkly, handmade paper from Porridge in Nebraska.

Mary loves her some Porridge Papers. We’ve done magical cards for a fantastically, um, creative friend on orange paper with orange sprinkles — Shop Boy forgets what that paper shade was called. (Mary informs me over my shoulder that it was called Fuzzy Navel. Awesome!) We did a baby announcement on a bluish paper that Porridge had added a scent to, so that when recipients opened the announcement of the little darling’s arrival … they smelled a hint of baby powder. Cool, no?

“What’s with Baltimore and all this sparkle paper?” Christopher James, the proprietor of Porridge Papers, was asking Mary, having received several similar orders recently from her.

You have to remember, Baltimore is the city whose favorite nutty mayor decided that an answer to the recycling problem was to take all the glass bottles piling up, crush them, add them to road-paving materials and … glasphalt. A number of the city’s streets shine like diamonds when your headlights hit them. Swear. That’s just how we roll. Besides, when clients get a look at some of the funky stuff we’ve printed on sparkle paper, sometimes nothing else will do.

Now, what can Shop Boy say about gold ink? It’s an odd deal. First off, that’s actual gold leaf in there. Meaning it’s a bit pricey. Second, on certain papers it prints more brown than golden. Baby announcements that smell like baby powder? OK. Baby announcements that look like baby poo? Not so much.

Gold ink is also picky about how you apply it. Spread it on the ink wheel of a C&P, get it to the right density for the run and you’re off. Awesome. But say, for the sake of argument, that sprinkles get shaken loose from the paper your printing with each and every impression, creating golden blemishes wherever they land, sometimes sticking to the plate and messing up five cards before you even notice. Then you take a speck of gold from the ink plate and dab it into the crummy-looking crevices. Two very different shades of gold. That’s OK. It’ll dry back and blend in. Same ink, right?

Um, nope.

Which Shop Boy really didn’t get through his skull until 3 a.m. rolled around, he proudly picked up the pile of “finished” cards and he noticed that six hours of eye-straining, nerve-testing, absolute focus had produced … garbage. I mean, it was incredibly subtle work, using the steel tip of a long-expired pen to dip into a droplet of the gold ink and then, very carefully, tracing the contour of a nose or a chin on a cameo or adding a splash of color to a spot here and a spot there, and there and there and there and there and there and there and there.

Look at the dried card straight on? Nice. Let it catch the light? The effect? Bird doo on a statue, like from a golden eagle or something:

And the sparkles? In my nose. In my tear ducts. On my scalp. In my teeth. And, yes, in my lungs.

A big pile of wrecked paper. And a job that would have to start again, almost from scratch.

I see spots.

Stage Dive

Shop Boy may have claimed to be many things in this letterpress blog on occasion: chronicler of the absurd, poker of hypocrites (self included), lover of heavy metal as well as syrupy pop music, hater of bugs.

One thing I’ve never tried to pass myself off as … not even once … is a printer. Oh, I may offer a helpful hint now and then to a shop visitor or blog reader by mistake. But Mary’s the brains here. Really. She gives me grief when I call Typecast Press her shop. But honestly, all that we’ve accomplished as a business is her doing. How the printshop looks? OK, some of that’s me. But Mary’s the printer. She does her thing, then Shop Boy cheers … and cleans the presses. And maybe writes, ahem, a word or two about it.

Believe me, that’s how I prefer it.

So imagine my surprise — OK, horror — when Mary handed me her iPhone, displaying the ad for a recent AIGA event.

One of the featured speakers? Guess.

“They’re not making people pay for this, are they?” I asked.

They were. Shop Boy? Already paying as soon as I saw the ad.

Kat Feuerstein of Gilah Press + Design, Mary Mashburn and Shop Boy of Typecast Press and Ray Nichols of Lead Graffiti will share their love and war letterpress stories, tips and tricks and answer all your questions!

Where to hide?

“Mary Mashburn and Shop Boy.”

Ooh. Ever hear the expression “a face for radio,” meaning “too ugly for TV”? Shop Boy’s got a face — and a voice — for blogging.

Mary assured me that this would all turn out fine. That, yes, I am a printer:

Who ran the job on the windmill last weekend?

Shop Boy, but …

Who does so many of the C&P jobs and sets up demonstrations on the clamshell presses for tour groups?

Shop Boy, but …

Who empties the garbage cans, fills the solvent dispensers, changes the water jug, deals with the recycling, unfolds the boxes of envelopes (then re-folds them after they’re printed), digs out the 26″ by 40″ ream of Lettra from the absolute bottom of the stack of enormously heavy boxes then puts it back when Mary decides to use a different paper, rounds the corners on the coasters, wrestles the eyeleter to a draw, picks up lunch, makes the coffee, reminds Mary which way “clockwise” is and sings a few really bad songs really badly?

OK, Shop Boy, but …

I don’t know about the whole “Shop Boy as expert” deal.

So there we were at the Windup Space at the appointed hour, ready to give our talk. The Windup sits on Baltimore’s once-hopping North Avenue, now kind of a gloomy stretch of fried chicken places, cash-checking services, Jo-Willie’s Bank & Trust, sketchy taverns, no-tell motels and the castle/fortress that the Baltimore school system built as a symbol of its great successes with urban students. To be fair, North Avenue also has Joe Squared (awarded the 2010 Shop Boy Gold Seal for pizza) … and the Windup Space. It’s essentially a big old, hollowed-out tavern itself with an extensive show of tattoo-inspired art along one wall, a long bar along the other, a small stage and a bunch of tables. It looked like a fun place to hang out. Beer in bottles or on tap, what looked like an OK liquor assortment and a bathroom that didn’t give Shop Boy the creeps. We’re there!

Mary had prepared a slide show (as had Kat and Ray) to give the audience a feel for our shop and work, helpfully illustrating several panels on the joys and hazards of collecting — and cleaning — printing presses with doodles by Shop Boy, who has never claimed to be an artist.

Shop Boy has never tried to pass himself off as a computer whiz either, by the way. So, as the IT guys threw up their hands when the projection projector wouldn’t project the project that Mary had spent all day on, Shop Boy began pacing even more furiously. No A/V aids meant more talking. Not good.

But Mary doesn’t take “no” from any computer. So while Shop Boy sweated, she elbowed the IT guys aside and set about untangling cords. There was a wrong adapter in the mix or the pixel setting was discombobulated or whatever. (Like I said …) At last, the  guy behind the bar — who it turns out was Windup Space owner Russell de Ocampo — remembered an old Mac laptop he’d had stashed in the back room and, as old Macs will, it fired right up and saved the day. The picture wasn’t great, but our audience would get the idea. And the less they could see of Shop Boy’s doodles, the better. You, readers, are not so lucky:

Anyhow, Mary sailed through her 10-minute presentation, mixing humor with the insight, then Ray and Kat did likewise, and nary a peep out of Shop Boy (even with Kat poking me a couple of times to urge me to speak up) — they were doing so well without me. But then came the Q&A period, and Mary’s hand reaching over with the piece of paper that held the questions we were supposed to answer whether they came from the audience or not. “You do this one, Shop Boy,” she said sternly.

It was a “complete this sentence” kind of question: “You will do well at letterpress printing if you are …”

I choked on the wording until it came out something like: “What kind of person would want to do this?!?!”

Freudian slip? “You will do well at letterpress printing if you are …” CRAZY.

Then something crazy did happen. From somewhere deep within Shop Boy came a soliloquy on the art, the majesty and the magic of letterpress; how it can turn someone who isn’t a printer, isn’t an artist and isn’t a computer tech (duh!) into a creator of a tangible beauty — that blank piece of paper transformed into something lovely.

Sigh. There goes all of Shop Boy’s whining down the tubes.

Nip and Luck

The windmill certainly let’s you know where you stand. Or should stand anyway.

“Oh my god, Mary, what did you do to your finger?” Shop Boy asked after noticing the gnarly bruise, blue and purple stretching about an inch fore and aft of the knuckle of the middle finger on her right hand.

“Um, I screwed up?”

We’ve discussed how Mary loves the Heidelberg, and all its knurled knobs, dials and doohickeys. Apparently it loves her back. Enough to let her off easy.

Just this once.

The way Mary described the incident, it went kinda like this: The paper stack started getting wonky in the “out” rack and she worried the sheets might begin to slip onto the floor and get dirty or, worse, end up in the guts of the machine and have to be fished out. So she made a quick reach in from the right side of the windmill, thinking she had clearance.

She very nearly had a little extra room on her right hand. There are several moving parts on that side of the machine, and her finger got “pinched” between two of them.

Complacency. Lack of focus. Familiarity. Overconfidence.

There’s enough danger in the printshop without adding any of the above.

Mary, it seems to Shop Boy, added all four.

Next time, she might end up with exactly that many fingers.

If she’s lucky. Lesson learned.

Composite Metal

It was 10:30 on a Tuesday night, and all but a few of the Denver bars had closed up shop for the night. (Don’t get Mary started. Let’s just say that she and I often differ on the wonders of Denver … and we’ll leave it at that.) She’d picked up a copy of Westword, the local independent publication that has become a whole lot more slick since Mary and Shop Boy left town, perhaps riding a high brought on by page after page after page of ads for all of the, cough, legitimate medical marijuana dispensaries in the city.

Now, don’t you go calling them “head shops,” you sassy thing. You need a prescription to score your doobies.

Giggling aside, Shop Boy and Mary believe in the legalization of marijuana for a bunch of health reasons. It can help fight nausea in those undergoing chemo. It can help fight pain and, OK, stimulate an appetite in those who’ve been through similar medical hell. Look, if Granny’s hurting and scared, and smoking a joint would help ease her suffering, I’m buying. But it’s still a bit trippy to see ads for delicious-looking pot brownies and chocolates. Swear to god.

Here’s the kicker: Since the state law on medical marijuana passed, the taxes on the stuff have been puffing up local budgets. That will make it a bit tougher to pull the hemp out from under the law. Either way, it’s a fascinating social experiment.

So, in the midst of these pot ads, the straight and the dopey, Mary stumbled across a listing for a book-signing at the legendary Tattered Cover bookstore in Denver.

Mary: “Isn’t this that Megadeth guy?”

Shop Boy: “What, Dave Mustaine? He’s written his autobiography? That should be some story.”

Sex & drugs & drugs & drugs & drugs & drugs & sex & drugs & drugs … and rock & roll.

Shop Boy’s been a huge fan of the rock & roll part of Mustaine & Megadeth for a long time. Mary? Ooh. Shop Boy had this running joke, using words to Mary’s favorite songs and singing them like Mustaine does in “Sweating Bullets.” (Mary’s classic response: “Isn’t he a little old to be talking like the devil?”) Mustaine’s snarling version:

Hello, Me.
Meet the real Me
And my misfit’s way of life
A dark black past is my
Most valued possession
Hindsight is always 20/20
Looking back it’s still a bit fuzzy
Speak of mutually assured destruction
Nice story …
Tell It to Reader’s Digest!

Shop Boy’s:

Billie Jean is
Not my lover
She’s just a girl who
Claims that I am the one …

You get the idea.

Mary: “Too bad you missed him. He was here the 25th. Oh, wait. That’s tomorrow.”

Alas, he was scheduled to sign books at 12:30 p.m. or something (although you could line up at 6:30 a.m. if you wanted). Shop Boy and Mary’s dad, Wayne, would be in our seats at the blessed cathedral known as Coors Field for a baseball game by then. He’d planned the journey months in advance.

Mary: “I’m going to go.”

Well.

Let me tell you, I’ve whined in this space about Mary sending me to makeup stores on my own to stumble blindly (and choke on the fumes) while looking for the Kevin Aucoin mascara or the “porcelain delicate” shade of this foundation or that. Shop Boy clearly had no idea how much she appreciated my sacrifice.

She asked me to tell her again why I like Megadeth so much. Well, it’s speed metal, of course. I mean breakneck speed metal. Yet oddly melodic. Somehow it all sounds like a classical composition, not simply a song. Very tight. And, as you might have guessed, Shop Boy loves to play around with words. Ditto for old Dave here.

Mary wanted to hear a different song by Megadeth to remind her of what it sounded like. Cue the air guitar: Dun-da-da-da-dadada-naa-naaa! Shop Boy let loose on a few bars of “Almost Honest,” a slow song by Megadeth standards, but a big favorite.

I was nearly pure
When I said I loved you
You were semi-sincere
You said, “I’d bleed for you”
We were kinda candid
Now you’ve gone away
We were almost honest … almost

“Oh, I like that one,” Mary chirped.

(Who needs bars when you got this kind of entertainment handy, am I right?)

Thus Mary declared herself primed and ready to meet The Man.

And so she did. Mary and the metalheads.

To hear her tell it, she was unimpressed. At least at first. Shop Boy’s never written a book or been approached for his autograph — yet — so I can’t imagine how difficult a book tour is on a guy. But “Mr. Mustaine” had apparently woken up on the wrong side of the bed this afternoon. When one young chap offered that he’d met the rock star a while back in a show in Small Town X, suggesting that he and the guitarist were now old buddies, Mr. Mustaine snarled, “We do a lot of those events. I don’t remember you.”

Next!

A few moments later, a young mother approached, with toddler in tow, announcing that she planned to raise her child on heavy metal, and indeed rocked the child to sleep accompanied by Megadeth. That really got to the author, who took off his sunglasses — for just a second — to wipe … a tear? “F-ing kids … always get to me,” he said to no one in particular.

Now it was Mary’s turn. She’d bought the book downstairs, where a fastidious librarian type had attached a Post-it note clearly alerting Mr. Mustaine as to whom he was signing for. In this case, he was thrown.

“Who’s Steve?” he snapped.

Not the woman who stood before him, dressed prettily in a skirt and a designer black blouse. She’d removed her little green-patterned sweater so as to better color-coordinate with the jeans and black T-shirt crowd. A bicep tattoo might have helped there.

Uncowed, she told Mr. Mustaine that “Steve” was Shop Boy (a.k.a. her husband), relaying basically what I’d told her about his music and lyrics as he went about the business of applying his John Hancock to the book. Behind his dark glasses she wasn’t sure if he was listening or not. She didn’t much care. “Well, I need to shake your hand,” she said matter-of-factly, “so that I can tell him I shook Dave Mustaine’s hand.” (She said later that she wasn’t going to wash the hand so that I could shake it later and touch the master’s essence or whatever. But then she remembered all the horror stories Shop Boy’s told her about men not washing after using the bathroom, and she quickly headed off to freshen up.)

“Hey,” he called to her. She stopped and turned. “Those are good words, man. I appreciate it.”

Apparently …

Makeup counter, here I come.

Defying Description

Typecast Press, chasing off potential customers since …

Well, last weekend.

The weather was perfect as Shop Boy arrived at the studio from an errand. Mary had been inside all week scrambling to finish a couple of wedding invites and also dodging the heat, so I figured she could use a micro break on the loading dock. Somehow I talked her into it.

As we stood in the sunshine and cool breeze — in August! in Baltimore! — an unfamiliar pickup truck turned into the lot and drove behind the building. When this happens after normal workday hours or on the weekend, it usually means one of two things: hooker hook-up or illegal dumping. It’s kind of secluded back there, and there’s a dumpster for building tenants — a magnet for trash haulers looking to make their load someone else’s problem. Either way, it kind of makes Mary angry.

“Will you remember the license plate number when they come out?” she asked me.

Sure.

True story: We were visiting Mary’s mom and dad in Colorado Springs a few years back when there was a knock on the door. Wayne was out running errands, Mary was in the shower, and Mama was doing laundry, so I answered it. On the stoop was a bleeding young man who said he’d just crashed his car and wondered if he could use the phone to call his mother. What can you say?

I called Mama in and she set about nursing the wounds on his face and arms, telling me to get the young man something cold to drink — southern hospitality and all that. The young man called his mom and we figured we’d wait a few minutes with the kid, send him on his way and that was that. Good deed done.

In the meantime, Mary had dressed and come downstairs, acting all weird and stuff about the presence of a bandaged stranger in the living room. Gosh, she’s so suspicious. To be honest, in looking back at it now, he was perhaps pacing a bit, maybe sneaking looks out between the living room blinds, which might have been odd. But his brother came soon enough, dispatched by his mom when she couldn’t get away from work. And, all right, maybe, in retrospect, it was kind of funky that his brother would ask him angrily, “What have you gotten yourself into now?” and he would answer, “Let’s just get out of here.”

And that probably would have been the end of it, had Wayne Mashburn not arrived at that very moment and smelled something very fishy about the whole deal. Our quick explanation had him darting out the door to see where the brother’s car went. Oddly enough, it was still just up the street. And when Wayne saw our young accident victim duck down in the seat as a police car passed … well, Shop Boy won’t tell you what he said. But he wasn’t impressed. He noted the brother’s license plate number as it left the scene and flagged down the cop car.

Well, golly. You’d have thought Shop Boy and Mama were the criminals the way they grilled us back in the house. The cop was almost as bad.

It turned out that the kid was a fairly well-known burglar who had made the mistake of breaking into a nearby home with a dog that immediately attacked him, leaving no escape but straight through a locked glass patio door. (The kid didn’t lie … that’s a car wreck, am I right?)

“Do you mean to tell me I’ve been hopping fences and running down alleys the past half-hour looking for this guy and you’re feeding him lemonade and cookies?!?!“

Yes, Shop Boy found that a bit of a rude way of putting it, too. But the officer was sweating and breathing hard, and he’d sprained his ankle or torn his hamstring or something, so I just chalked it up to a bad mood when he became even meaner about my lack of recollection of what the young perp was wearing.

The topper was when he asked Shop Boy, for the police report, what I do for a living.

“Journalist!” he half spit. “Some journalist …”

I quickly demanded a lawyer. That was all this copper was getting out of Shop Boy.

He did manage to get a full description of the dude from Mary, and Wayne of course had the license plate for the “wheel man.” So the kid was behind bars before long. And a few weeks after the fact, Mama got a commendation from the police chief for her crime-fighting efforts, giving us all a good laugh. (Shop Boy got squat, and I’m still a little sore about that, to be honest.)

Anyhow, so rather than count on my memory to save the license plate number on this weekend’s illegal dumper/hooker hook-upper, I ran to get my phone with the camera. Mary was super suspicious, so I hurried. Really, I was gone all of 20 seconds.

And just like that, a gentleman with long, grayish hair who’d explained through his rolled-down truck window that he’d read about Typecast Press, might have even mentioned this blog, had worked in letterpress shops all over Baltimore and thought he’d come say hello …

High-tailed it out of the parking lot as though Mary’d begun unloading a shotgun at him from the loading dock. Shop Boy showed up just as he was hitting the accelerator.

He hadn’t given his name, which I guess is where the New Yorker in Mary kicked in. Still, the remorse hit immediately. “Oh, my god. That was so mean,” she said. In her suspicion, she hadn’t really bothered to listen to the guy’s explanation. All she saw was someone who shouldn’t be there. And she felt horrible, running through in her mind who it might have been. Perhaps the man who’d e-mailed her from time to time asking her to read his life story of a Baltimore printer. What was his name?

“This is why I always ask people to make appointments,” she said. “How was I supposed to know if he was legit? Put that in your blog: Please make an appointment. God, I’m so mean.”

(Sir, if you are reading this, give us a call. She doesn’t bite that often. Really.)

I rummaged my memory banks, too. And I was sure that he was the guy who’d stopped by once before while we were cleaning galley trays on the loading dock, covered with grime and sweat and not really prepared to “talk shop” with unannounced visitors. But Shop Boy did chat with him just a few minutes and told him he could read more about us at the website before saying I had to get back to cleaning.

“I think it’s the same guy, Mary. Looked just like him to me.”

“Shop Boy, that other man was African-American, with close-cropped hair.”

Oh … um … uh …

And she laughed.

And laughed.

And patted Shop Boy on his silly old head.

Well, la-dee-dah. Just give her a commendation or something.

Workin’ on the Railroad

When we look back some day at this whole letterpress thing, I think Mary and Shop Boy may very well remember the kindness and generosity of strangers most of all. Then there are the quirky, completely weird and totally amazing things we’ve stumbled upon in somebody’s basement as we’ve barged in at the worst possible time for a looksee at some heavy stuff they’re at long last ready to part with.

Sometimes it’s a sad duty. For us as well as them. The final remains of Pop’s old business stacked clumsily in the back of Shop Boy’s pickup truck. Or maybe you’re dealing with Pop himself, watching his life’s work, most of it too heavy to lift himself anymore, carted off by some guy — and a girl!

Other times … well, check this out:

Welcome to Jimmyville.

First, let Shop Boy apologize for the photography. The new iPhone’s camera is still a bit too smart for me. Anyway, this is one view of the layout of the astonishing trainscape of the latest printer whose house we invaded. It captures a Baltimore of the 1950s, all Natty Boh and Bromo Seltzer and Baltimore Colts. The detail is stunning, down to the stuff the vice squad of those times might have wanted to speak with Jim Ullrich about. Jim has got a naughty, naughty sense of humor. And endless patience, a handy defense mechanism when Curious Mary arrives on the scene. As does wife Doris, a collector of all things carousel, from paintings to actual merry-go-round horses to the ornate facing of an old amusement park ride. It’s funny how husbands and wives tend to collect very different things. It’s like Mary and Shop Boy. She collects presses. Shop Boy collects lost hours of sleep. Works out great. In Jim and Doris’s  case, she and her horses rule the upstairs; he and his trains have the run of the basement of their astonishingly tidy home.

We’d come after breakfast to look at some wood type, a lead cutter or two and whatever else was on hand letterpress-wise. Jim needed the space in his workshop to spread out a set of model fire engines he’s wiring to flash their emergency lights on cue and to cook up whatever other optical tricks pop into his mind.

You kinda had to be there to understand how cool the cemetery effect is — dancing ghouls, ghastly fog, the while nine yards (or is that six feet? hmm), but I promised more pictures for this blog and, by gum, pictures you’re gonna get.

Dude’s only been at this a a couple of years, doing most of the work on cold winter nights, and if Mary and Shop Boy would just agree to take the letterpress stuff off his hands, who knows how lavish it could become? Have I mentioned the amusement park section? With the dodge ‘em cars, haunted house and spinning octopus ride?

Yeah, it’s incredibly cool.

So the upshot is that we didn’t get around to even talking letterpress for the better part of two hours. But when we did? Sheesh. A multigraph machine! (Below — precursor to the mimeograph machine that cranked out duplicates of handouts at your junior high school. If you’re under 35, you’ve never seen either.) With lots of type. Much heavier than it looks, by the way. A cabinet for metal furniture. Brass and wood trays. A long rack of cool old cuts. And those brass solvent cans — if you’re ever looking for a birthday present for Mary, there you go. Jim had two brass solvent cans and one brass oil can. Mary asked if we could just go ahead and take the whole collection. What could Shop Boy say?

I could have said, “Are you crazy?” But I didn’t. It was a great haul. And I think Jim was pleased to send it off with us. Below is one of the cuts, catalogued and printed by intern Allison.

See, it might be tough for these veteran printer types to understand what the heck we want with their old stuff. But they’re always glad we came. First, we give them a good price. Always. Second, who doesn’t want the chance to talk about the amazing heyday of letterpress? Finally, they’re happy, as we will be surely some day, to watch neat old stuff that has sat idle for far too long go to a good, working home.

Sure beats collecting dust.

Have You Seen Me?

OK, so I’m blocked.

See, Shop Boy once was a newspaper headline writer of some renown (Mary liked them, anyway) but used to worry that the well would run dry. That I’d lose my touch some day and never write another worthwhile headline again.

I worry just as much about this blog. Will it start to bore people? Has it already gone there? Or will it, gulp, just stop altogether, the well run dry? No more words. Shop Boy is sure that you also quake at the thought.

A New York Times headline the other day on the spread of dengue fever — yikes — in Key West led me to reflect on this:

Dengue Fever?
What About It,
Key West Says

I turned to Mary at the breakfast table and said cockily, “Hey, that’s my headline.” Meaning that’s the headline I would have written for the story. I mean, had I worked for the New York Times. It’s probably for the best. Very un-Times. Shop Boy did work at Newsday, where one day’s assignment was to sum up a second failure by JFK Jr. on his bar exam: “Belly-Up on the Bar Jr.” Ooh. We watched on the news that night as Gabe Pressman of Channel 4 in New York City railed in an editorial at whatever anonymous jerk had written that headline.

And that wasn’t even one of my good ones (though it was one of the least good-natured).

Anyway, the dengue fever headline reminded me of one I wrote as a young man just to make my Middletown (N.Y.) Times Herald-Record supervisor laugh. (OK, she was cute. Sue me.) See, there was this dude who won the lottery. Two million bucks. Well, by the time taxes and everything were taken out … he went into a screaming tirade.

$2M Lotto
Winner:
Can You
Spare It?

She laughed. Hard. But local newspaper decorum demanded that I go back to the drawing board. Still, Shop Boy slowly began to bring the editors around to “my way” of headline writing.

A Flash in the Can

This was for a TH-R story about guys who (swear to god) put runners on the bottom of outhouses each year and push-race them across a frozen upstate New York lake — with a “driver” seated inside the thing.

8 Billion Times, No
S&L tycoon calls tax deal thrifty, not shifty

This was for a Newsday story about a guy who bilked $8 billion from his savings and loan (or thrift) and testified in court that he’d simply made a wise financial decision on his taxes that paid off handsomely. Asked over and over  and over again in court if he knew he was being a crook, he answered again and again and again, simply, “No. No. No. No. No. No…”

Quantum Physiques

This was atop a Baltimore Sun story about a beefcake calendar of handsome scientists. The headline was stolen the next day by the Washington Post for a movie review of Fair Game, a film starring Cindy Crawford, a tank top and … some dude. Point taken, but sheesh. Now, everybody steals headlines. There’s very little that hasn’t been written before. But the very next day?

Good Intentions Pave the Road From Hell

This one was dead on arrival for a Newsday story about constantly delayed repairs on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. I mean, everybody knew the road was dangerously in need of repairs, and someone was always trying. But jurisdictions, politics, budgets and special interests always got in the way.

It was a play, naturally, on the expression, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” meaning that it’s not enough to have good intentions. Do something good — don’t just intend to do something good — or you go to hell. The boss didn’t get it.

But where was I? Oh, writer’s block. Could have fooled you, eh?

Oh, heck. It’s probably just my brain scrambling as it tries to re-create the work that went down with my old iPhone.

I (don’t deserve but) have gotten my new iPhone, which came with the promise that Shop Boy will blog more often, post regular updates on Twitter, organize and post Typecast Press photos on Flickr, launch and maintain a Friends of Typecast Facebook page and just generally wave the flag of social media for a very worthy organization. Us, naturally.

So perhaps this has just been a bit of stage fright.

We’ll know in a few days, I expect.

WK-RIP in Cincinnati

Whenever a little boy “forgets” to walk the dog, somewhere an iPhone dies.

Somewhere in this case was Shop Boy’s satchel. See, we’d ventured to Cincinnati for the celebration of the marriage of a confirmed bachelor and bachelorette. We had to see it to believe it, you know? And heck, we’d never been to Cincinnati …

So, we’d just stepped into the sun from Murray Brothers Old Time Store with a big bag full of Mary Janes, Smarties and a million other assorted candies hand-plucked from big barrels and displays filling the tidy place. Shop Boy pulled out a few sweets for the walk to nearby Fountain Square and then tucked the brown bag into the satchel, which felt a little too moist against my hip. It was warm. I figured I must have sweated it up, and didn’t think about it again. Later that night at the hotel, Mary would discover the truth. A water bottle’s cheapo lid had come loose. My pricey iPhone drowned. Just like that.

The instructions tell you right out never to get your iPhone wet. It shorts out … you’re done. They also apparently tell you, as Shop Boy learned much later, that you should never then plug a possibly moist iPhone in to charge (you know, just in case it’s not responding simply because it ran out of juice), for this cements things. Zap. Deader than dead. A tombstone, I believe Mary called it.

Here’s where the dog walking comes in. You know how when your kid wants a puppy, he or she will promise that they’ll walk the dog every time it needs to go out, then three weeks later they’re hiding in a tree fort while you are picking up dog poop with a plastic newspaper sleeve? It’s a little like promising yourself, or whoever (gulp) bought you the iPhone, that you’ll treat it with care and always remember to sync it with the main computer at home. It’s a sure bet at first, when the thing is new. Then you start going longer and longer between syncing.

Been a while, eh, Shop Boy?

Yes, yes. And I mean … I use this thing. “Impressions of a Shop Boy” exists largely because I write entries on the commuter train, on the iPhone, whether feverishly jotting down weird ideas for later posts or even writing in complete thoughts and sentences. Then I simply e-mail files to myself and bingo. Here we are.

Well.

Shop Boy had maybe six or seven blog entries nearly completed on the little iPhone notepad thingy. And they’re gone. That’s it. Forever. Time was when a young Shop Boy had a photographic memory … about 15 minutes’ worth of one, anyway. Back at the college newspaper, The Good 5 Cent Cigar, we used TRS-80 computers. Remember those old junkers. Each time you hit a period, the best next move was to hit “save.” Gosh, they were clumsy. “Trash 80s,” they were called. Shop Boy’d get careless every now and again and lose an entire story as I was finishing the last, ahem, brilliant sentence. The shock was so intense, you’d think a college kid would learn from it.

Instead, Shop Boy would swear. Like, lots. Then I’d open a new document file and immediately start typing, and word for word it would begin to come back to me. Every time. Can’t explain it. Nor can I do it anymore. Those brain cells must have gotten, um, wet.

And so now I’m back to begging Mary for a new iPhone. And promising to sync it regularly, and answer whenever she calls — man, can that woman dribble a redial button. I’ll look down and there are 15 missed calls from her, and Shop Boy’s in big trouble. And I promise that I’ll post photos, and I’ll post videos. And I’ll never, never, never let it touch liquids.

(For the record, Mary knows I didn’t do this on purpose just to get the newer model. Clearly, Shop Boy is not that clever. And I even offered to take her iPhone — same as my dead version — and let her get the newest one. So, there …)

Meanwhile, I’ve got only my work-issue BlackBerry, sort of like the TRS-80 of smartphones. (Sorry, Mac snob.)  And I’m writing blog entries on paper that I found high and dry in a secret pocket in the satchel (so that’s where my 2010 health forms went!). You should see the messy, train-jostled handwriting. Can’t decipher a third of what’s on there. Of course, maybe that’s for the best. And maybe the stuff I’d written on my iPhone wasn’t all that great either.

Guess we’ll never know.

The Compound

They say if you remember the commercial but not the product it pitches, that is not a successful commercial. Shop Boy will buy that, I guess.

See, my brain remembers only one tiny bit of a TV ad from a while back that features a young father with a tot — he’s trying to get the little one to eat something. Well, the kid decides to share, popping one of the … whatevers into the mouth of Dad, who offers a gentle “Thank you.” Shown such heartfelt appreciation, the kid begins madly stuffing Dad’s mouth.

“THANK YOU!” the father laughs, gently fending off the deluge.

A sweet moment. What the heck were they selling? No clue. But Shop Boy mimics the father’s pseudo exasperation each time Mary, say, piles one extra box atop an already unwieldy or ridiculously heavy armful or decides to “help” me by restocking the pile of paper that I’m rapidly feeding into the C&P by slipping a new batch of paper from behind me via the air space under my armpit or, yes, feeding me a bagel when we’re driving without maintaining a safe chewing distance between bites.

So, a while back, Shop Boy whined in this space about Typecast Press, an outfit that creates stationery goods for a living, never having a stinking piece of paper that I could write a phone number or paper-cutting dimension or simple reminder on. Imagine my shock and delight, then, the day Shop Boy arrived at the studio to find the leftovers of a recent paper-cutting job — scraps that were, like, 2 inches by 6.5 inches — turned into a little stack of notepads, with cardboard backing.

It turns out Mary’s interns Ellen and Allison, students from the Maryland Institute College of Art, had heard tell of Shop Boy’s plight and, finding themselves between assignments from Mary, gathered up the scraps, cut correspondingly sized cardboard, clamped the piles down in the book press, applied “padding compound” and … zing went the strings of Shop Boy’s heart.

Mary: “They did that for you, you know.”

Me: “Oh my gosh. That was so nice.”

Mary (sarcastically): “Shop Boy, Shop Boy … It’s all about Shop Boy!”

Envy is such an ugly thing. ;-)

Anyway, I thanked Ellen and Allison profusely the next time I saw them, letting them know that I’d put at least one of the pads in every single location of the shop where previously I’d pitched a little fit about not having paper handy. And how I’d grabbed a few pads for my desk at work in D.C. and how I kept one in my travel satchel — OK, man purse … nyah, nyah, nyah! — for making notes and doodling on the train and how awesomely helpful the pads had already been.

Well. A couple of nights later I arrived at the shop to meet Allison, Ellen and the newest intern, Michelle (also from MICA), who had been immediately indoctrinated into the Way of the Padding Compound. Square pads! Horizontal pads! A deluge of pads!

Once the interns had gone, Shop Boy surveyed the haul, patting the piles gleefully.

Mary: “Did you see what else they left you?’

Me: “What? Something for me?”

Mary: “If someone was going to leave you something, where’s the first place you’d look for it?”

Me (looking around quizically): “Where?”

Mary: “Oh, come on. Over here.”

There on the shelf next to the big C&P, where I keep a pad to note starting points on a run (resetting the press’ counter gets your hands oily), was a square pad with an eyeletted cover sheet, a blue-green ribbon strung between the eyelets and tied in a bow and a note in the most lovely handwriting:

Dear Shop Boy,

Please enjoy this precious notepad. Eyeletted with care.

Most Sincerely,

The Typecast Fairies

I mean, what does one even say to that?

Mary (rolling her eyes): “It’s all about Shop Boy.”

Frankly, I don’t see a problem with that. Or with notepads stacked to the ceiling.

THANK YOU!

Three Times the Charm

You could almost see the gears spinning in the little fellow’s head.

It was birthday No. 3 for Evan, the adorable-beyond-mortal-words son of friends Curt and Amanda Iseli, and he was taking it all very seriously. He called Shop Boy over and, as he perched on his pint-sized chair, feet on the seat, bottom on the arm, looked me square in the eye.

He wanted to know what Shop Boy thought about cake. Not the band. Everyone knows my weakness there too well. Evan had reached some existential passage in his young life and was apparently seeking a spiritual guide to get him through the portal to a deeper understanding of the chocolaty deliciousness.

And then he tipped over.

That quickly, a lesson in gravity superseded the quest for baked-goods enlightenment as Curt picked Evan up and dusted him off — no tears, the little dude playing it off like a 10-year-old or something, a swig of lemonade taking his mind off the whole incident. Meanwhile,  Shop Boy used the opportunity to grab a honking turkey burger from Curt’s grill. Thank goodness for vegetarians with absolutely no clue about meat portions. Yum.

Typecast had done the invite for the party for the third year in a row, with Amanda Iseli doing the extravagant design. She does great work for Baltimore magazine, but saves a little of the good stuff for Evan’s birthday parties. Boxes, seed packets, goodie bags, cards inside of cards. Wow. All we then have to do is figure out how to apply ink to all these weird things.

For No. 3, the main invite is cut from this crazy, thick cardboard stuff Mary bought in bulk — you think the turkey burgers were bigger than absolutely necessary? — the gargantuan, heavy pile of which we’ve been whittling away at. Anyway, a little blue ink on there with the right design and … it looks just like the printing on an egg carton. Fun!

Well, this year, Evan is apparently old enough that he got a vote on the card design. So the Iselis stopped by the Typecast Press studios, where, as Shop Boy fed menus to the big C&P, Evan became fixated on the machine’s old gears. And somehow, as the guy who made all those gears move at once, Shop Boy suddenly acquired rock star status. (It’s fleeting. They all grow up.)

I suppose it’d have been more stunning had the little boy not been mesmerized by the machine, as he’s third-generation gearhead. Hot rods, that is.

Mary: “What are those three big rusty motor things in the garage?”

Curt: “Oh! Those are [gearhead-speak] flathead motors that I picked up from a guy. I bought one, and ended up hauling all three back here. I hope to trade them for [gearhead-speak] and [gearhead-speak] with [gearhead-speak].”

Um-hmm.

Evan’s not quite there yet. His pick for the coolest car in the Typecast Press parking lot? Mary’s crummy, old, dented Volvo.

Shop Boy about fell over backwards.

Presidential Zeal

Mary has worked with “names” before. In fact, as part of her career as a graphic designer, she built a niche doing clever, off-beat or even wacky invites for congressional political fundraisers. The idea was that these invitations would not be lost in the pile of formal or prissy requests that came through a potential donor’s mail slot. They were fun to do — from a gaudy coffee mug and invite for John Glenn’s presidential debt retirement party to an awesome keyboard poster (still one of Shop Boy’s favorites) and invite for Al Gore’s event with musician Herbie Hancock. Heck, President Clinton once gave a big speech in front of a gargantuan logo that Mary designed.

But, please … this is Michelle Obama we’re talking about. The Big
Time.

Put the first lady’s name on anything Typecast Press is printing and Mary’s going to freak out.

It goes deeper than politics. Is Mary excited that the Obamas are in the White House? Yes, of course. I mean, it’s undeniably cool that today in these United States, we all can officially believe that any son or daughter of America can be anything he or she pleases.

Even a letterpress printer.

So, a potential client calls Mary, saying she has designed an invitation for an arts event at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., that the Obamas are hosting. Would Mary care to bid on the project?

Are you kidding?

Foldover card with a mod, interwoven pattern — red, pink, white — full program in three colors on the inside. Really cool, but brutal registration. Red envelopes with a detail of the interwoven pattern across the bottom and a Kennedy Center address line on the flap, both to be printed in one pass with intense black ink.

My part of these more complex projects is always easy, comparatively. All Shop Boy has to do is perfect the hand-feed on a thousand or so black-on-red envelopes for the event, then make sure all of our regular — but no less important, mind you — printing assignments are finished and packaged so Mary can focus on really nailing the guts of the job. It’s what I do. Shop Boy’s the donkey; Mary’s the thoroughbred. And I am not ashamed of this in the least. The  donkey is always funnier (and can sing 100 times better, by  the way)  than the thoroughbred. Did I mention “less high-strung”?

I could, but I won’t.

Because then Mary would just bring up the “more stubborn” thing.

Hmmph.

Anyway, this is how Mary spent the days — and nights — of her birthday week. We both sacrificed our birthdays to the gods of letterpress this year. We’ll celebrate twice next time. And I was really excited about the project, which Mary was hustling to deliver on the client’s timetable.

Shop Boy’s timetable?

Shop Boy was cleaning ink off the big C&P after running a few hundred Woodberry Kitchen menus and, in a moment of wishful thinking, assumed that the “woosh-woosh-woosh” sound from the Heidelberg Windmill meant that Mary — satisfied that she’d nailed the ink color and plate registration for the next day’s run — was cleaning it, too, so that we could head out.

Au contraire. She was cleaning it, all right. But just so that she could erase an unacceptable shade of pink to make room for a fresh try on the press. She’d need to mix the new color from scratch, as the other pink wasn’t close enough to goose toward the right shade. For  the uninitiated, this meant 90 more minutes at the shop, minimum. It was already very late. My heart sank.

She was on a roll, she said, and wanted to keep going, though whiffing on a color she’d usually nail with ease was, to Shop Boy’s way of thinking, a very bad sign that she, too, needed some sleep.

So I questioned the wisdom of such a decision.

Now, who knows if Barack Obama has ever tried to use the presidential veto with Michelle, but I’m thinking it would work about as well as Shop Boy’s did that night.

Two Double Goose Eggs

Turnstiles at department stores are incredibly stupid and annoying. But they must serve some purpose, right? So each and every time I have to walk through one — they’re becoming more rare, thank heavens — I’ll stop suddenly on the other side and excitedly look toward the ceiling for what will surely be a shower of colorful balloons and confetti as the winner of the “1 Millionth Customer Award.”

The balloons have never come. Just a shower of eye-rolling from Mary.

What, you’ve never done this? How are you supposed to ever become the Millionth Customer without showing that you’re willing to act like a fool if it ever happens. It’s like the lottery. Nothing angers the Lottery Gods more than someone who would act in a reasonably sane manner if they won. It’s like Mary’s mom, also Mary Mashburn, or the “real” Mary Mashburn if you prefer. She buys her tickets semi-regularly for “the big one,” and always talks about how she’d set aside a portion of her winnings “for the children,” meaning the needy and worthy kids of Colorado Springs, Colo., and elsewhere. She’d even give us some.

Nope. You lose.

Instead, Mary II suggests, as you purchase your ticket, you should let it be known that, with your winnings, you’d quit your job, buy a Winnebago, drive to Disney World and blow the whole enchilada in seven months of drinking, debauchery, and dumb investments in your quack cousin’s miracle exercise machine.

That’s who wins, right?

Anyway, a couple of things brought this to mind. First, we were asked to bid on a business’ promo card. Really cool-looking thing with, like, 10 or 15 tiny squares to be die cut out of it.

Yup, little square confetti. Absolutely everywhere. Heck, it might even be falling from the printshop’s ceiling for a while afterward. Guess who wins the right to clean up the mess for, like, the millionth time. Shop Boy!

Still, I really hope we get the job.

Second, and of course far, far more importantly, we’ve reached another milestone here in Shop Boy’s navel: Post No. 200. Release the balloons!

Um, hell-oooo!

Hmmph. Shop Boy’s gotta get himself that company Winnebago.

Seriously, I’ve been thinking about this milestone for months. Shop Boy’s kinda proud to have kept up what I hope has been a usually fun if rarely actually useful blog. So it took almost four years, gulp, to get here. Mom would have been appalled at that. See, she was not a voracious reader. She was insane.

And she wanted me to be a writer, figuring she’d raised a kid who should be able to write at least as quickly as she read. Those moms …

True story: Shop Boy once entered a novel-writing contest for a seminar put together by Mary’s mom, who for years was (and ever shall be to many) the face of an awesome Colorado Springs arts endeavor, the Imagination Celebration. The contest deal was to write three chapters, then have sort of an outline for how the story would go from there.

So, townspeople driven zombie, bat-guano mad one morning when the coffeeshop doesn’t open. Owner’s been murdered near the hydroelectric plant. This leads to violence in the streets. What’s wrong with them? Nutty twist; can’t tell you about that. (But a New York Times article six months later kinda backed the science of my loopy supposition. ;-) ) Oh, and there’s a dopey sidekick — surprise! — who ends up stumbling upon the answer. How? Darned if I know. That part’s not written yet.

What did the three judges think? Two liked it (one of them a lot). The third?

“This makes no sense. Who drinks a cappuccino in the morning?”

Um, dude? Go to Starbucks much? But fine, not everybody’s going to be a fan of the linguistic stylings of Shop Boy.

What did Mom think? “But where’s the rest?”

That’s it. Ouch.

This blog is the product of years of writer’s therapy.

Kidding. Still, I always tell Mary, “Please, when you’re bored or whatever with this whole Impressions of a Shop Boy thing, let me know.” Because if she’s bored, the townsfolk of Shop Boy Land are close to taking up torches and pitchforks.

I’d like to think I still might have a surprise or two for you up the sleeve of my black lab coat with the monkey emblem. But who knows?

One of my favorite expressions comes from snarky old TV tongue wagger Keith Olbermann’s SportsCenter years. Forced to read a line reporting that injured player X was listed as “day to day,” K.O. ad-libbed, “We’re all day to day.”

So on we go, eh? It’s funny. In the same four years it’s taken me to get to this point as Shop Boy, Mary’s turned herself into a darned good printer. I hope writing this blog has helped her there somehow, if only to lighten the mood in tough times. If so, I’m doubly proud.

And one day, perhaps I’ll read all 200-whatever posts that end up here myself and think …

“This makes no sense.”

But I hope not.

Crying Over Spilled …

We try. At Typecast Press, Mary and Shop Boy use as responsible and earth-friendly a solvent as we can find to clean the press rollers and the ink plates. If the color is caked on after a long run, we use corn oil to loosen the ink first, then wipe on just a little solvent to finish.

As I mentioned last time, we use paper that’s at least partially recycled when we can. That’s when we don’t use cotton paper, perhaps the least planet-wrecking stuff on the globe. Every so often, we haul the cotton paper scraps over to the Maryland Institute College of Art’s paper makers.

Are we perfect? Heck, no. But we feel like, if everybody does their little part, even picking up one wrapper from the street, say, and dropping it into a trash can, we can keep the world a bit cleaner. They taught little Shop Boy that at Daniel D. Waterman Elementary School. And that offending wrapper? Probably blown out of somebody’s hands, racing away in the wind, no way to catch up to it. Happens to us all.

Oh, to still be young and naive.

Want to know what bugs the bejeepers out of Shop Boy? People in Baltimore who stop on a tree-lined neighborhood street, open a car door, set a McDonald’s bag full of trash down or dump out an ashtray full of cigarette butts, then motor onward. I could scream, “Hey, get back here!” But I don’t.

Mostly, I’m just shocked into silent resignation. And I go pick up the mess. Mary does the same thing, only she then proceeds to spend the next 45 minutes doing a trash sweep of the whole block.

So it’s hard for Shop Boy to put into words how numb and helpless it feels to read about and watch the news on this oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, I’m always intrigued by the possibility for innovation that accompanies such previously unimaginable disasters. Closet science geek. But … dear god.

Many younger Americans have probably never heard of Joseph Hazelwood, the Exxon Valdez or Alaska’s Prince William Sound, still contaminated 20-plus years later from an oil spill much smaller than this one. That one happened in the middle of nowhere. This one is right at the nation’s doorstep. Could it take 30-plus years to clean up? Longer? Can we ever really convince ourselves that more offshore drilling is the answer? That drilling on Arctic wildlife refuges is OK?

No. We are wrecking our planet through our lust for oil.

Look, Shop Boy’s no tree-hugger. (Well, mostly not, anyway.) I drive a small pickup truck with a stick shift, gently enough that it gets about 30 mpg highway/25 mpg city. Mary? Her Volvo, driven — ahem — a bit less gently, is probably 20/18. Just two more American consumers of gasoline. And Shop Boy feels the oil on his hands, along with the blood of all those the dead and dying animals along the Gulf of Mexico.

Like the other day, when I noticed Mary’s tank was on “E” again, and drove over to the gas station nearest the printshop. Among its many flaws, Mary’s jalopy has a deal where, if you fill the tank beyond, say, 12 gallons, the smell of gasoline fills the trunk and begins to seep into the main cabin. Hence, “E” — again. But she loves the stupid car.

So, Shop Boy watched intently as the spinning gallon counter neared the magic cutoff, reholstered the pump handle, grabbed my receipt and … saw the logo on the gas pump.

BP. I had never noticed it before. It was just the gas station.

Suddenly it felt as though I might as well have been pouring the gasoline directly onto the ground.

I mean, why do we even try when the richest companies in the world can distance themselves from their catastrophic messes? Why pick up after slobs so callous that they can’t be bothered to simply hold the Dunkin’ Donuts refuse in the car until they come to a trash can?  (What are the public schools teaching these days?) Why go through the annoyance of properly discarding that old microwave oven rather than, say, throwing it over the fence that backs onto the railroad tracks?

Because it’s right. And because if there is a God, He’s gonna want to chat about that Big Gulp you left in the middle of His street.

Just saying.

A Little Off the Top

Paper is difficult to ship. There’s no getting around that. It bruises easy. Get careless and drop a box of, say, 26- by 40-inch paper on its corner and you might ruin four square inches of every stinking sheet in the stack. That’s wasteful, expensive and, most importantly, it really bums Shop Boy out.

And that’s a darn shame.

See, Mary — and most professional printers, I’m guessing — can do the basic geometry with a calculator and a ruler on how to best cut around the damage for the least amount waste. So could Shop Boy, I imagine, if I wanted to.

I do not.

Nope. Shop Boy wants to slide the sheets from the big box onto our trusty little cart, wheel them over to the cutter, set the guide and chop away.

Which is why the new brand of menu paper that we’re using for Woodberry Kitchen has been making me smile. Mary found it online while looking for ways to bring the per-unit cost of the menus way down, for the restaurant and for Typecast Press. And it is cheaper. Bonus points: Better for the environment, as it is 100 percent post-consumer. Double bonus points: It shows up in pristine condition. The name of the paper? Shop Boy’s secret, lest someone grab it all and force us back to the old brand.

Anyway, maybe this stuff is sturdier. Or maybe the manufacturer packs it a little better. Or maybe the new delivery guy — Derrick, Mary informs me dreamily — has simply learned how to better deliver paper than most.

Me? I’m not asking questions.

I’m not doing the math.

I’m cutting.

I’m also jinxing it, of course. Let’s all knock on wood pulp.

Conk on the Head

Now, this had to be the left-hander’s coup de grace. Shop Boy was driving 75 kilometers per hour on the left side of a two-lane road.

Of course, it was a foreign country, and that’s what the locals do, but still. There are anywhere from six to eight rotaries, or roundabouts if you prefer, on the way from the airport in Grand Cayman to the road we needed to find for the East End of the island. Negotiating those bad boys is like driving upside down. So you’ll have to forgive Shop Boy’s inexactness on the number. I lost count in all the screaming.

Sweating it? Oh, you betcha. But I’d been doing that since the morning before. See, we were supposed to be lounging on the beach already but had, ahem, missed the last U.S. Airways flight of the day out of Baltimore that would have reached Charlotte in time for the connecting flight. This being the off-season for Grand Cayman, there are only a couple of flights per day.

You should have seen us on that sad ride home from the airport. It’s the kind of harsh lesson and crushing disappointment that’ll make you straighten up and fly right. No more of this last-second race to the check-in counter for us. The lady who’d scolded us for, like, 15 minutes gave us a final warning:

Our only option was a flight that left at 5:45 a.m. the next day. Airport check-in and security opened at 3:45 a.m. Be waiting at the door.

Don’t have to tell Shop Boy twice. The fear of god — or, more precisely, my sister Margaret — was firmly installed. If I wasn’t waiting at that door at 3:30 a.m., we’d mess up the wedding and create another of those moments that you spend the rest of your life trying to live down. Nope, 3:30 was gonna find me on the airport sidewalk, nose pressed against the window, passport out of its sleeve and driver’s license in my hand, boarding pass ready for inspection, chewing gum for the trip — orange for Mary, peppermint for Shop Boy — packed neatly into the carry-on, laptop out of its case, shoes off and wristwatch stowed away, cellphone in “airport” mode and pants sagging with my belt already rolled up and stuck inside my left shoe.

Mary? She immediately rushed to the alarm clock and set it …

For 3:30 a.m.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

“Oh, relax, Shop Boy,” Mary said. “She was just being an officious jerk. We’ll be there by 4:30 for a 5:45 flight, and we’ll be fine. We’re already packed, right? Trust me. “

I did. Who I didn’t trust was me. We’d absolutely killed ourselves at the printshop to get ahead on things so that we’d be ready and guilt-free for the trip. Mary’d been up really late for several nights in a row and Shop Boy, a notoriously twitchy sleeper, hadn’t done himself any favors the past few weeks either. Look, Shop Boy’s an absolute freak about being early for the morning train to D.C. If I’m half a minute late leaving the house, the panic sets in. Mary can’t even watch anymore. And yet twice in the last couple of weeks I’ve slept through the alarm(s) and had to gallop in my wrinkled shirt and mismatched socks for the train, barely making it aboard. OK, Shop Boy … point taken.

Anyway, Mary gave a little, Shop Boy gave a little, and we got to the airport early enough that Mary could purchase every single magazine with Michelle Obama or Sarah Jessica Parker on the cover. There were about 30.

And six hours later, the pilot announced that we were beginning our descent into Owen Roberts International Airport, a quaint (gulp) little place. But the airplane’s brakes held, and soon Owen Roberts employees were wheeling the stairs — cool! — up to the plane.

Did I say cool? It’s off-season down there for a reason: It’s hot. The tarmac was a blast furnace. Still, as we descended the stairs, our arrival felt a bit … presidential. Our suitcase awaited us. And once the customs agent stamped our passports — cool! — we were dashing off to the car rental place, having gained an hour through some unexplained international time difference. Shop Boy was not asking questions. We still had to drive across the island to the Reef resort for a late-afternoon wedding. My life was on the line, or so it felt.

Mary had explained the whole driving-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-road deal during the flight. I hadn’t thought to ask before then. Not that Shop Boy should have been surprised. She makes me do
everything left-handed in the printshop, because she is a lefty and this right-handed letterpress stuff is so old-fashioned and, dare we say it — yes, she does — discriminatory. So how awesome was this?

We’d reserved a sub-subcompact car (“Chery QQ or equivalent”), but the place gave us a free upgrade to “teensie-weensie.” Which was nice, because in researching the Chinese-made Chery QQ, Mary had seen it described as a knockoff of a Chevrolet model, but with none of those annoying safety features that Americans insist upon. You know, the idea of coming through a fender bender without massive head trauma and all that. Drivers are a dime a billion in China, apparently.

After a bit of confusion over Shop Boy’s credit card — we’d forgotten to activate it, oops — and a few scowls from the vacationers queued up behind us in the heat, we loaded up our little green clown car, pointed in a direction that felt to Mary like east (I don’t even guess anymore) and off we scooted.

First roundabout: Whooooo-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Second roundabout: Look out! … Whew!

“I’m so glad you’re driving,” Mary said as we dodged an impatient islander in the third roundabout.

“I’m so glad you’re navigating,” Shop Boy responded.

And we laughed. Teamwork. This was more like it, shaping up to be just another wacky adventure in the Mary and Shop Boy Show.

This Grand Cayman place is pretty cool. Everywhere is low to the water (hate to be here in a hurricane), it’s about an hour and15 minutes by car — even Chery QQ, I’m guessing — all the way around. All these weird, beautiful plants and odd animals like the wild roosters, the jet-black birds with the sideways tails and the little lizards who rushed up to check us out when we stopped at a public beach. Iguanas, by the way, make for pretty disturbing roadkill. First of all, the two we saw were the size of speed bumps. How could you not see these dinosaur-looking monsters in the road and stop in time? The darn things could total a Chery QQ. And it’s not like they’re dashing out into the road. They are lumbering beasts. Yes, one of them was killed in a roundabout, so maybe it was a “him or me” thing. Still, sad.

We finally reached the Reef at about 3 p.m., were greeted by the incredibly friendly staff, handed a cup of rum punch and sent to our room, which had a balcony overlooking the beach. We quickly surveyed the place, found it clean, slipped into bathing attire, locked up our passports in the room’s safe (a wise choice, we’re told) and went to find Shop Boy’s family. Only a few had made the trip — Dad, sister Rosemary and, of course, Margaret — but since a misunderstanding over our predicament the day before had led to a curt exchange of text messages (my bad), Shop Boy had some groveling to do.

Mission accomplished — we all chuckled it off — Mary and Shop Boy set off for the sand and the ocean for a little chilling before the wedding. If you haven’t been, the sand isn’t like the stuff we see in the United States but more like billions of tiny pebbles bashed into grains by the tide against the coral and volcanic rock. We’ve not been to Bermuda, but you can see traces of the pink that its sand is famous for on Grand Cayman’s beaches. Cool.

We finished our rum punches, dipped our toes once last time and went in to dress for the big event. Shop Boy was casual — the wedding’s theme — in khaki pants and a really boss shirt from Acapulco that Mary’s cousin Mollie had given me. It had been a favorite of her husband, so it meant a lot to me to get to wear it. Mary looked really great in a beachy sundress, her windblown hair a shade wilder and even more awesome than usual. (She kids that little girls are always so drawn to her because she reminds them of a tall muppet.) And off we went.

Two rows of chairs were set up on the beach, and the island minister stood beneath a lovely arch, back to the ocean, to do the honors.

Vinny and Natasha were, unsurprisingly, a beautiful bride and groom. And, as the sun began to set, they were suddenly a beautiful wife and husband.

Now, where do they keep the food around this place? While the bridal party took to the dock for photos (Mary and Shop Boy were in the first family shots, then became just a couple of hungry guests), we began grazing. Chicken satay. Beef kebabs. Conch. Just the beginning of a fun and delicious reception pool- and oceanside. Shop Boy and Mary relaxed.

We’d made it, by trusting ourselves and our teamwork to get us there even after the missed-plane fiasco. It’s a bit Two Stooges sometimes. Mary knows Shop Boy’s worst, but doesn’t play to that. I freak out over my own weaknesses, but know that Mary’s strengths play to mine, and mine (mostly) to hers. Weddings of other people tend to shine some sort of light on your own marriage. You forget, if you’re lucky, that wedding-day feeling of “gosh, I hope this works, because it really seems right.”

Shop Boy has.

Here’s hoping Vinny and Natasha have before the honeymoon’s over.

***

By the way, I called the delicious shellfish “conch” and was politely corrected by the local server.

He pronounced it “conk.” They ought to know, I guess. It’d be “cawnch” or something in Baltimore, so there you go.

You learn something new everyday. And by relaxing and having faith no matter what goes wrong, you learn a little about yourself. Some days you learn lots. This was one.

Driving on the wrong side of the road?

Cool!

Hero Complex

Grand Cayman is a little speck below Cuba on the world map. Shop Boy knows nothing about the island, but they tell me it’s paradise.

My nephew Vinny I do know a few things about, which is why we’re headed to the tropical island this weekend. He’s a fine young man who met his bride-to-be Natasha, a fine young woman, at Virginia Military Institute. Say what you will about the practice of war and the existence of military schools, but VMI turned out a couple of good ones here. And Vinny introduced me to the movie Happy Gilmore. You owe somebody like that, am I right?

“Wedding invitations? Our gift to you. Destination wedding, huh? Where, you say? Sounds expensive. Um, OK, we’ll be there.”

And Shop Boy knew right then what would happen next. The time and space continuum becomes  a funnel, grabbing the responsibilities and realities of life, the deadlines and the drama, which begin pouring slowly, inexorably down toward the little circle over the departure date.

Translation: We’re scrambling. Again.

Mary’s got a couple of big, tweaky projects closing this week even as  new ones launch, with bids to be written, paper and ink to order,  interns to organize, postmortem reports on her MICA class to file,  phone calls and e-mails to handle … Oh, and as we were driving to  the Shop the other morning, smoke began billowing from under the hood  of Mary’s car as the air conditioner (we think) burned up. So she’s  got a ton on her mind.

Shop Boy’s mind? One thing (roughly maximum capacity):

Yes, menus. Millions and millions of them. OK, thousands. Just like us to pick the best and most popular restaurant in Baltimore as a client.

More exactly, it’s just like us to get so busy printing menus for the
best and most popular restaurant in Charm City that there’s been no time to learn the machine that could do them for us.

And the busier Woodberry Kitchen gets, the more menus it needs. And with so much flying around behind the scenes there, they sometimes forget to tell us that they’re low on — or out of — menus till they begin prepping for that night’s rush.

Which is kind of, um, all right by me. I mean, what guy wouldn’t want to arrive at Woodberry Kitchen to the cheers of the very lovely managers Lucie and Nancy? “Shop Boy! You saved us!”

Shop Boy (in a superhero voice): “Heh-heh. All in a day’s work. To Infinity and be-OUCH!”

That sound you just heard was the slap of Mary’s open hand on the back of my head. Ahem.

So, anyway, with us leaving the country for a few days, well, let’s just say that once the new paper order arrives, Shop Boy had better find his inner hero, because a mighty, mighty high stack of menus is going to have to be produced to hold the restaurant until we return. I’ll be seeing menus in my dreams.

Then again, there might not be time for sleep.

Spice Girl

The scritch-scratch noise was coming from behind the door to the
storage closet. Shop Boy had just arrived at the studio after a hair
appointment to find Mary not around.

There it was again, louder.

Behind that door were either some serious, box-moving mice — in which case, Shop Boy was gone — or somebody was in there.

“Mary?” I called through the door. “Mary?” No response.

It was early in the semester, and Shop Boy had forgotten that intern season had begun. Then it struck me.

“Hey, Shop Boy,” Mary chirped as she entered at last from the other space. “What’s wrong?”

“Mary, why did you lock the intern in the closet?”

“Oh, she likes it in there.”

True story: Our Baltimore neighborhood has this thing for history. You know, linotype inventor Otto Mergenthaler — gulp — lived around the corner from us. Famed writer F. Scott Fitzgerald — holy-moly — spent a while a few doors down from him.

Well, each rowhouse that has had somebody famous living there at one point or another has this blue metal disc announcing same.

Wonder if they’ll let Typecast Press steal the idea:

“Winter/spring 2010 — Sabrina’s Closet.”

Sabrina, for the record, is a former student in Mary’s class at the Maryland Institute College of Art who apparently fell in love with our printshop during a tour and … wandered too close and was
sucked into the letterpress vortex. Since then, she’s seen very little of the outside world. Willingly. Swear to god.

“Um, do you guys mind if I live here during Spring Break?”

She about did. They’d better check the ventilation system over there at MICA’s Dolphin Press, because something’s wrong with these kids. Or maybe it’s the sinus-rearranging 15 pounds of lavendar and ginger that also call the closet home. Whew!

Seriously, Sabrina is a bright, funny and incredibly talented graphic design major from Cleveland, typically resplendent in huge pink, Spice Girls-playing earphones (why she couldn’t hear me through the door), who has singlehandedly organized Typecast Press’s paper, envelopes, boxes and samples into something Mary and Shop Boy never thought we’d see in our lifetimes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the interns always get the grunt work, but this one’s taken the task by choice.

“Who did that?” Shop Boy asked Mary one day as he spied the barrister bookcases, their random piles of Typecast samples, orphan envelopes, scrap paper and other ephemera replaced by a bunch of those acid-free archival storage boxes, hand-stenciled with the letters of the alphabet.

“I even inventoried them, Shop Boy!” Sabrina beamed, holding up a sheet of paper listing the contents of each lettered box. “I knew you’d notice.”

Shop Boy would be remiss here not to mention that our other current interns, Allison and Nicolette — also from MICA — have likewise been a huge help to Typecast Press, from lining envelopes to cleaning and proofing the crazy pile of old printer’s cuts that we’ve collected to reworking our business card. More on all that later.

Meanwhile, based on sheer number of hours dedicated to the care and feeding of our little printshop, we’re making this “Sabrina Day.”

(She would probably tell you herself that every day should be Sabrina Day.)

Anyway, Sabrina’s internship is up soon as she heads toward her senior year and then on to make a name for herself as an artist and designer in the real world. But we’ll miss her. And she’ll always have a place here at Typecast Press.

And I don’t mean in the closet, arranging stuff.

Well, unless she really wants to.