For Those About the Rocks

So you thought Shop Boy was done, didn’t you. Done blogging. Done plying a craft for which he feels uniquely unqualified. (Letterpress or writing? That’s your call.) Done hanging out and breaking his back in crazy old Baltimore printing buildings to save fractured bits of history from being lost forever. Me too. Well I’m here to tell you:

Dang it, here we go again.

That right there, in case you can’t tell from the sign on it, is the old A. Hoen & Co. Lithographers building in East Baltimore, about two long blocks from where Shop Boy daylights as an employee of Johns Hopkins University. And it’s where Mary has got herself a gig assembling an exhibit showcasing the building’s significance to Baltimore, Johns Hopkins and the world.

There are the fragile glass negatives that Mary helped to sort, stack, archive and entomb behind a plywood wall for safekeeping. There’s all the paper: the liquor bottle, medicine jar and cigar box labels; the famous old and, I don’t want to say creepy (but yes they are), medical illustrations; maps and what-have-you. And there are the printing stones.

Now Shop Boy will not pretend to know one bit about the process of lithography. It seems like some kind of black magic. Cyan, magenta and yellow magic too. As far as all that goes, I am a blank stone. (People have tried.) What we can share in this space is an appreciation for how heavy those stinking sorcerer’s stones are. This Shop Boy has once again learned from experience … and wandering too close while Mary is on one of her crusades.

Not saying this crusading is all bad — and this is a very worthy project, to be sure — just that the little red spinning arrow somehow always ends up pointing at Shop Boy. And if he’s gonna spend three solid days stacking, measuring, sorting and re-stacking unimaginably stout stones, Shop Boy might as well complain about it here, where it’s free.

That one’s a little feller, something like 12 inches square or close to it. Mary’s not sure yet just what those two dudes in the etching are up to. Probably pitching tobacco based on … oh heck, a pure hunch on my part. (We joked that maybe that unidentified black thing in his hand might be a flip phone. Dinosaurs!) Maybe 25-30 pounds (at 9 a.m., that is; at 6:15 p.m. it’s more like 50). And here’s where Shop Boy must contractually reiterate that the historical bits Mary’s working with are undeniably cool. But always comes the conundrum.

Yes, friends. We essentially would spend those three knee-buckling, mask-wearing, work glove-destroying, dusty days building a T-rex skeleton from a bone fragment. That, too, is an undeniably cool and worthy pursuit, but holy moly. These fossils of printing’s past were quite literally unearthed during a construction dig during the building’s rehab. Apparently, most were from a second Hoen plant in Richmond, VA. When that one closed down, they hauled the stones to Baltimore and unceremoniously dumped them into the ground as filler. So now’s the point where Shop Boy must bring up an odd truth about craftspeople and artists that many of you are already very likely aware/guilty: They do not see the instruments of their genius as worth keeping. “That old thing?”

Think Globe Poster.

Shop Boy ruminates on this a lot: See, all rooting interests aside, much of the work that Mary is doing in designing and printing for Typecast Press is really quite cool. I’m genuinely impressed. Heck, some of Shop Boy’s posters are at least fun if sometimes in iffy taste. And so we unceremoniously dump any leftovers into a “samples” drawer in a desk or a flat file or stuff them in some box. Yeah, we’ve tried at various times to build an archive system. But who has time? “Those old things? Forget it. We have a deadline tomorrow.” If there for some reason happens to be interest in Typecast’s work after we’re long gone, well, you’re gonna have to dig, folks. Good luck with that. (And “thank you” in advance, Shop Boy II.)

Anyhow, time in the ground did not suit these stones. Time back above ground has also been challenging — the perils of a construction site and all that. We were hoping for the Holy Grail, one stone that could carry the exhibit and make the fascinating bits and pieces fit together seamlessly to tell the story of Hoen.

I think Mary’s figured out how to do that anyway. (She’s like that.) It’s all very distracting from her work at Typecast, of course, but this is who she is.

And in any event, Shop Boy’s had his hero moment, the stones — such as they are (many amazing if a bit wrecked) — are catalogued and safe(r). And I get to mostly sit back, recover and wait for the grand opening. Fingers crossed. Somebody hide the spinner.

Tags: archive, Baltimore, Cross Street, history, Hoen Lithography, Johns Hopkins, Mary Mashburn, printing