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.

And this thingy is called … the whatchamacallit

Show-and-tell was going poorly.

Oh, not for Mary. She had a tour group of 16 students from a summer letterpress course at the Maryland Institute College of Art eating out of her hand. Kid’s got the gift of gab.

Shop Boy? He spent most of the visit hiding out in the secondary studio, organizing flat file drawers or something — anything rather than face a crowd of bright young artist types. Then came the knock at the door.

See, Typecast Press is actually two large studio spaces down the hall from one another in the Fox Industries Building — known to locals of a certain vintage as “the Noxema Building,” as it was the birthplace of the stuff. One of our spaces was the office of the president of Noxema. Chris Hartlove’s half of the studio was the secretary’s office. Our side houses the Vandercooks, a Chandler & Price 8×12, an imposing stone, tray cases, the platemaker and the computer. It’s the nerve center of our little slice of what buddy Bruce Baggan of North American Millwright likes to call the “Wacky Subculture of Letterpress.”

The secondary space is a big lug of a room that houses, you guessed it, the big lugs of our press corps — the Miehle Vertical, the Heidelberg windmill, the hydraulic paper cutter, an antique, hand-cranked guillotine (ooof!) and the old C&P 12×18. By the way, not only were we lucky to know Chris Hartlove and painter/illustrator Andy Snair (previous tenant of the Lug Room), but we were very lucky to have landed on the side of the factory built atop concrete. Otherwise, with all this tonnage, we’d be in the basement by now.

OK. So when Kyle Van Horn of MICA and his 16 students arrived at the secondary space, there was no place for Shop Boy to hide. Oh, I’m getting better at the public speaking thing, but let’s just say there’s room to grow. Not in the crowded secondary space, unfortunately, which left Mary on one side of the student group and Shop Boy on the other. Mary thought it’d be fun to let the visitors hear the difference between the C&P 8×12 in the other room — a creampuff, let me tell you — and its lumbering big brother on this side of the hall. Shop Boy turned “Big Boy” on and the old 12×18 graciously did its thing, geezing and wheezing, clanking and clattering through its paces. No music list today, but to quote Bruce Springsteen: “You ain’t a beauty but, hey, you’re all right.”

Now for some real noise, Shop Boy decided to fire up the cutter, a Chandler & Price dynamo that has sliced a ton of time off Typecast Press’ paper-chopping duties. But not only does running it require the high-pitched whine and hum of a three-phase electricity converter, but the cutter’s no shy flower itself. Shop Boy popped the switch and decided to give an impromptu demonstration.

The cutter decided not to.

Like a stubborn mule, it stood there while Shop Boy sweated and stammered. By the time I’d coaxed a full cut out of the stinker, most of the crowd had moved on, better entertained by Mary’s stories of great and/or crazy old-time printers.

In Shop Boy’s defense, the cutter really is Mary’s baby. But you’d think I’d have picked up something by osmosis as I held the ends of all those big paper sheets. Clutch right, lever down. Like that’s so hard?

Shop Boy was still muttering as the class filed out. I waved glumly and wished them luck.

Afterward, Mary said that the tour had gone well, that the students seemed to have gotten something out of it, which you hope and pray for, after all. She agreed that maybe the cutter thing hadn’t been seamless and offered that maybe it and I should spend a little more quality time together. Hmmph.

Then she said that Shop Boy should take a greater role in these tours. (We’ve done several — there are lots of art and printmaking students in Baltimore. And who doesn’t love letterpress?!?!) It should be clear by now that we consider having a fun space to work and hang out a pretty key part of the Typecast Press experience. Anyway, Mary’s decided that future tours will include Shop Boy taking the lead in the Lug Room.

The lines are forming right now, eh?

Oh, I know the stuff: The ages — and weights … ugh! — of the presses, how they work, what they were mainly used for and how we came to own them. So do you if you, ahem, follow this blog. It’s just that, sometimes under pressure, the knowledge won’t drop from Shop Boy’s brain to his mouth. Like the cutter’s blade, you know?

Anyway, tour groups are nothing: Mary’s also talking about Shop Boy as a letterpress INSTRUCTOR.

Hey!

Wait!

Come back …