Yeah, It's a Video. So what?

I'm only gonna say this once: If you're deep into printing or have nothing else to do but think of how you're gonna resurrect a 1874 Franklin Gordon what needs some love an attention, watch this video.
     And after you watch it, go to Adventures in Letterpress and thank them for putting it up on the page 'cause it's so awesome.
     Yeah, I said "awesome," just like my kid's friend said once or a half thousand times one time we went on vacation together.
     So there.
     Get over it.
 

Homecoming, Part 2

Back 22 February 1983, nearly two months after my father died, I got $500 and a truck and removed a 9x13 Franklin Gordon from John Renner's basement. This was the first press I bought after Dad's death, adding it to the 5x8 Kelsey front-lever press that I'd gotten from the guy who had bought Dad's shop.
     The Gordon came apart in a pile of fairly manageable chunks, all of which went into the truck bed and ended up laid out in the end of the one-car garage of the house we lived in at the time. After everybody had gone home & I was alone with the collection of parts, I began putting the press together in my mind, figuring out which piece would go with which part and in what order. By the next afternoon I had the entire press, with the exception of the bed, completely put together. I did it all myself, back when I was 40 years old and a lot more limber and given to fewer back problems.
     And I have to wonder if the back problems I enjoy now didn't get their first shove down the aging cycle from putting the press together back then, in the first place.
     I used the Gordon non-stop for quite some time afterwards, giving it a break only after I had resurrected the 10x15 C&P NS that I'd hauled out of the weeds behind Bill Thompkins' shop in nearby suburbia.
     That was nearly 25 years ago. At that point in time we had set up to move to the digs we've had for the past 22 years and the Gordon and the C&P made the move with us. One of the people who helped us move the shop then was Tom Ebbert, whom I had known from the AAPA and the QSL card printing business at the Dayton Hamvention. After we got the shop moved, maybe a year or so later, I decided to cut back to just the C&P and thus offered Tom the Gordon. After all, it made sense to me: Tom did all his QSL card printing on a hand-level Kelsey with many of the cards he printed being two or three color runs, one at a time on the Kelsey. I figured that he would be able to print more cards more quickly if he had a floor-model press with a motor & all the accouterments. Save wear-and-tear on his shoulder joints, among other blessings.
     So Tom came over with a truck and we loaded the Gordon and another press that I'd found locally into the truck and off the press went to be used for the past two decades in Tom's printing business. And in the between here and then time, Tom's business moved a couple times and he managed to keep in touch with other letterpress printers who helped him acquire even more and larger presses until he ended up with three C&Ps between 8x10 and 12x18, old series and new series, with motors and belts and all, eventually filling the 400 ft sq barn where he now has his shop.
     And the Gordon was sitting in the corner.
     So today, a month and two days before the 25th anniversary of my having bought the Gordon in the first place, Mikey and I went over to Tom's digs and coaxed the old press into pieces small enough to fit in the bed of Mike's truck. We just finished unloading it and Mike left to drive on home to a well-deserved nap.

I'd take a nap as well, but I'm too psyched about having this old beauty back.

I am of the opinion that Gordon presses of this vintage and design are fairly rare. It helps little that the press was produced pretty much copy-cat by two other 19th Century ironworks or that there are two different versions of the press relative to the way the roller arms were cast. Plain and simple, I don't think many folks can say they own a press that carries a 19th Century version of the manufacturer's trade mark and a sign of its vintage.
     The main roller action and bed draw bar assembly is a single arm mounted on the bull gear which carries the brass plate shown here, designer, manufacturer, date and all. It's almost as charming a piece as the little inking table that hangs off the side of the press, from a time before the invention & development of the ink fountain common to C&P presses of the early 20th Century.

This little press – which is not that little, weight and mechanism considered all together – is now back in my shop. It's not as small or cute as a Pearl but it's a lot more tough and the castings are better than anything I've experienced with Pearls. Straight up, I'm glad the little press is back home again.
     I'm gonna fix it up a nice place to stay, behind a good, solid, well-insulated wall with the same light fixture overhead as it stood under before. Then I'll repair a few pieces in need of machining, maybe get some rubber rollers made and get her a proper treadle, even if I have to get the theatre scene shop folks to make me one out of lumber that ends up looking like cast iron. At which point I can once again claim to having treadled off whatever I send to the bundle or otherwise feel good to have done.
     Again the familiar feel beneath my fingers and toes. It's a homecoming.
 

Under My Tent at the Revival

I can still remember my father being physically moved in reaction to my statement about "pounding the type down." He was showing me how to set type – and this must have been back around 1958 – so I could have a business card like the character Paladin on the TV western Have Gun, Will Travel. We'd already gone through putting the lino cut that I'd made myself into the Kelsey 5x8 and had printed a handful of cards. Now we were setting the type to overprint the text. The card (original from the show seen here; I have no idea what happened to the ones I printed) ended up in two colors with the chess piece in a soft grey and the text over it in black.
     Dad had tried to show me the lay of the case but soon enough gave up when I got completely lost, other than knowing that it went from H to I and straight to K without J, which was at the bottom of the case after Z. With the type set and up on the stone, Dad put the chase over the form and laid in the furniture and the quoins to lock it up. At which point he asked me if I knew what to do next.
     "This is when we pound the type down."
     I remember that he flinched so hard that I thought he'd pinched a finger.
     "No," he said. "You never pound on type. You level it off on the stone with this block. It's called 'planing the form'." At which point he picked up the planning block, put it on top of the form and gently tapped with the end of the quoin key on the top of the block.
     "Never pound on type. And never plane a locked form."
     Coupled with this lesson was the admonition against changing the settings of the impression screws (which on a Kelsey is an exercise in counterintuition) and not putting so much packing on the platen that the type gets drilled into the paper (as suggested being done in this example by the shadows on the paper).
     Instead I was taught that the paper might bear a bit of the impression but that the best printing was done when the paper kissed the type (or the type kissed the paper) with the least amount of pressure on the paper.

Now I know and you know and everyone else who's ever done printing knows that there is no such thing as the perfect kiss, especially in printing and probably not so in human relationships. It's impossible to print on certain papers without a bit of embossing on the paper surface. Soft, thick paper will always feel the bite of the type on it and nothing you can do will make that not happen, unless your goal is to make the type kiss the paper only on the areas of the paper that touch the type.
     Hand-made, deckle edge whatever papers that show no touch of a mechanical process in the finishing of the surface are particularly given to this. You can't print on 'em without going a bit more ardent in the kissing, so to speak.
     So in effect, the example offered above is probably not that big a deal and not something that anyone should worry about. At least and especially if the type or the form or whatever bearing the ink is an engraving of some sort.

And that leads me directly into typography, type and what passes for letterpress today, at least among thems what's got studios instead of print shops.
     See, I was raised with the contention that there was typography such as one could do on letterpress equipment without the use of a camera, plate etching system and plate mounting stuff. Letterpress involved the use of letter type with a press that inked the face of the type and applied its kiss to the paper. That was it: letter & press = letterpress.
     Simple enough.
     But now it seems the letterpress scene (or is that milieu?) has moved beyond type and press to computer-generated text turned into type and made into plates which are subsequently inked and smashed lovingly into expensive paper.
     In other words – and no, I ain't about to quote another Norteña band – handset type and possibly machine set hot metal type is being replaced by computer type turned into printing plates. The hand justification of lines of type, with all of the contentious arguments about when to space in and when to space out, has been replaced by the "whatever?" version of text to type created in a Windows program or via Adobe whatever.
     Whatever.
     Now I ain't sayin' that computer typography sucks.
     There are tons of old type faces such as one finds in a copy of Phillips Old Fashion Type Book that are now being resurrected by such programs as Fontifier at $9 a whack, any of which can then end up computer type & subsequently turned into a plate to be further smashed into paper.

The big question in my mind ends up being whether or not this so-called "revival" of letterpress is indeed a revival when a good portion of what it means to print by the letterpress method has been taken up by computers & plate making. On the one hand I'm glad that someone younger than me is willing to take the time to learn how all this old-fashioned stuff works, to carry the tradition on, so to speak. On the other, I don't feel that just puking plates out of an engraving system when those plates carry, more often than not, computer typography is anything more than a use of an old technology in the worst possible way to give folks the feeling that they're getting something vintage and personal.
     In fact, there's a whole rant about personal and vintage in an essay by Julián Marías called "Unamuno en Forest Lawn" that speaks of this phony mass-produced personalization of life to which Gringos have become accustomed over the past two hundred years and certainly within the trailing edge of the Industrial Revolution.
     Truth up, it's a bit difficult to get personalized on a planet where there are nearly seven billion humans, a tenth of which number has access to all the good stuff and the other 90% of which living between grinding poverty and nominal trailer trashdom.
     One way letterpress will continue to be useful to somebody and those presses that we've worried about saving will remain, even if painted garish colors and used as a planter in the living room, beyond the reach of the Hindustani scrap yards. Somebody will actually read the books I have recommended or take one of the many classes and workshops available to folks interested in letterpress technique and technology. What I learned from my father will survive in the end. We can hope.
     The other way, even if the presses don't end up as coffee stands or planters, somebody will mangle type and defy the laws of physics, not caring in the least to learn from the past, and what passes for typography will go into the smashed and dent can at the end of the shop and eventually all those cast iron beauties will be mishandled, misused and broken, never more to stand in anyone's shop (or studio) and that will be the end of what was until recently an art and a living.
     If it sounds like I'm bitter about this, well, I am. I find it somewhat ironic that I choose to say these things – to point out the irony and the ineptitude – in a medium so distant & yet so close to the printed text. Printing & the subsequent publication of text bearing ideas continues on the InterWebs just as much as it appears to be ready to continue in print on paper, despite the Sony e-book system. What we put on the screen is still read and still attached to general literacy, but in a way that, to some, defeats the purposes of good typography. Whereas reading from a printed page is cognition about places on the paper where the light does not reflect into the eye, reading off the screen is cognition about the places on the screen where the light does not flicker and shine into the eye. So in this literacy is changed.
     Probably the most annoying thing to me about this so-called revival is the appearance of some to follow no suggestions about how to do things right. The worst example so far is a lockup on flickr.com that shows an intense amount of time spent on one of the most bizarre things I've found yet. Another site & photo that I found online carried in the comments an admonition from one commenter to learn how to do it right. The person who had posted the photo responded with a "I'll do it my way, dammit" statement that only reinforced my sense of despair.
     This leaves me thinking that the revival will be short-lived and the tendency toward youthful ignorance will lead eventually to nothing short of bad printing & the decay of heritage into an eBay version of what's vintage and antique and prime. Type cases will become drawers and folks will "pound the type down" until there's nothing left to print but polymer plates on aluminum blocks cut to the size of the chases that were broken because of lockups like the one referenced above.

It all comes down to traditions that make sense. Much of what we use in letterpress printing comes from the last days of the store-bought indulgences. That and the sudden availability of the Bible in print led to the upheaval that became the Protestant Reformation & led again subsequently to the Renaissance. This stuff, then, has worked pretty damn well through five hundred years of text printing, from wooden common presses to their cast iron equivalents, through platen presses and cylinder presses, from handset type & stereotype castings through slug-cast type and Monotype composition. Over the course of that time the engineering behind printing improved the quality of presses, type and composition but the basic works of it remained the same.
     All of that time using the same basic processes to set a line, to lock up a form, to register and make ready on the press counts for a pretty decent level of success. I'm not opposed to the fact that hot metal or hand set composition has been replaced by photopolymer plates of computer-set text. I'm not against using letterpress to emboss into or onto paper any number of designs, even inked. And I'm definitely not opposed to printing books on offset or quality-registration photocopy machines and then binding those pages in a letterpress printed – or letterpress embossed – cover for the consumption of the general or specific readers.
     I'm opposed to simple-minded, self-appointed punk thinking that makes a suggestion to lock a form up right or to set a line or lines of type with some adherence to what makes a text legible. Sloppy work, sure, I've done it too. But to see someone crow about having spent 40 hours setting up and locking up a form that is gonna blow up the minute the press kicks over at even a thousand impression an hour just galls me no end.
     So with all the revival talk in the air, I ain't too sure that it's good a deal. And yet, hope springs eternal, even with skeptics and cynics & crusty old curmudgeons like me. Even. Until such time I hope to be able to do it right on carefully-tended and resurrected presses with real type set by hand as a printer in a shop, no matter how beautiful or artistic I can get . . . or maybe in spite of all that, ironies well-considered & all.
 

Twenty-three Cases & the Counterfeiter

Ok, I confess: I have known a couple counterfeiters. They were ordinary sorts and, to the best of my knowledge, they never gave me reason one to think that they were involved in the shady underbelly of Nigerian banks or similar monetary crimes. One was a guy I knew from work and the other was a guy whom I had known for a couple years. Never suspected a one of 'em.
     The last guy in the series had a Kelley B and a bunch of other letterpress – and offset – in a pretty large rental store front place. When Cindy & I were working on getting a new house he offered to be my mail drop for print shop items that I wanted to add to the set up once we got moved.
     So we moved.
     The morning after we got all of our stuff pulled off trucks and out of vans and into the house, Cindy got up to see what the weather was gonna be. She's never trusted lookin' out the window, so she had the TV on to one of the morning news & wx stations. Just as I was leaving the house we saw and heard that someone in a nearby community had been arrested for counterfeiting.
     "Goodness, I wonder who that is," she said with dismay.
     "Probably Tom," I said with a point-of-fact snippishness.
     "Good grief. Why would you say that?"
     "'Cause he's got seven kids and he's $14k in debt."
     And with that I left for work.
     Now I had no real reason to think that Tom was the arrested party. It was just that he was the only printer I knew in that end of town who would have had the equipment and, more importantly, the reason to get involved in counterfeiting.
     So when I got to work, Cindy called to tell me that I had been right.
     Upon hanging up I started thinking about it. Tom had a huge paper cutter. The last time I'd been to his digs to use the cutter, he said he had to do it himself. Some sort of government job, high security, all that.
     Fine. Whatever. Here's the paper.
     And the kid count and my knowledge of his debt load made it all make sense.
     What I wasn't ready for was having to call the Secret Service to find out what they had done with anything with my name on it that had been delivered to Tom's shop, pending my picking it up once we'd moved the house & all that.
     The agents were very understanding, although they did want to know if I had any fiduciary relationships to the suspect and all that. I explained the whole deal and they said that I could contact Tom to arrange for my stuff to end up in my possession.
     He had evidently made bail.

Now the first guy I'd known to be a counterfeiter got arrested the very afternoon after I'd had a conversation with him in the morning about the university's printing plant. We were talking about the two color offset press, the very nice camera & developing & plate making facility and how neat it was to have quality gear to play with.
     "A good man with an eye for detail could get himself involved real quick in some serious counterfeiting," I said facetiously.
     The friendly smile disappeared from his face and he told me he had to get to work.
     The federales picked him up that afternoon. I heard about it from the shop foreman. He informed me that it would probably be best if I stayed out of the print shop for a while, owing to the investigation.
     "Don't get yourself involved," he said. "They've given me a pretty good grilling myself."
     I stayed away.

Now I had to go over to Tom's digs and retrieve the three packages of printing stuff that I'd ordered. Couple fonts of type and some other metal from Quaker City Type and a couple packages from M&H and Barco Type. The usual run of the mill stuff that would be of no interest to the Secret Service agents, except that it had been sitting on Tom's kitchen table when they broke in at 4 a.m. to pick him up.
     And had it not been for the fact that I'd bought a type case stand and some other high profile printshop items from Tom, my name would have meant pretty much nothing.
     Except for the stuff I'd bought.
     'Cause if I'd bought what Tom might have acquired in some shady deals would make me the recipient of shady goods, which would play into the investigation, which would make me raw meat. And this after I'd already been hanging around the university's print shop, from whence was arrested a previously suspected counterfeiter.

"Your number showed up on too many pages, Bub. Wanna explain that?"

What I'd gotten from Tom was basically a type case stand, one of those nice solid oak paneled ones in the back pages of the 1923 BB&S foundry's catalog. Holds 23 California cases; metal runners; solid cabinet just the right height for putting stuff on & easy enough to pull cases in and out. Beautiful, cathedral style woodworking. Looks like it belongs in a church.
     One of those.
     If the federales decided that the cabinet were part of some criminal investigation, I would be out the forty-odd bucks that I'd given Tom for it and I'd probably be out the cases in it too.
     When I called the SS and talked to the agents, they pretty much cut me loose, other'n being one of the people on the sidelines who had been lit up by the lights looking for Tom & his handlers. Which was another story. And I still have the case cabinet. You can see it on the right.
 

The Shop Photos

Was a time when the only way I could get a view of somebody else's shop was to get in the car, drive over to wherever it was and stand around in the middle of things. That or get some pictures taken, which pictures I would summarily lose 'cause that's the way I am.
     Such is the case no more. Now we have the InterWeb and PhotoBucket and Flickr and Picasa. Now you or me or the next moron can put all the family photos, boring or interesting or provocative, on the InterWeb and share the horrified stares of disbelief.
     To that end I uploaded a pile of pictures to the APA yahoo.com server so folks could see that, in addition to carping about stuff and being less than assiduous in my own way on other fronts, my printery bears no resemblance whatsoever to the pristine, organized, thoughtful & ergonomic set up that my father had in his days of peace and tranquility. No, my shop looks like the butt-end of a garage what ain't seen a broom in a while and was only lightly dusted-down a couple hours ago before I took the pictures.
     See, that's the deal about visiting: you gotta be ready for it.
     Somebody calls you up and says "Hey, yo, I'm coming over to see your stuff" and the next however many minutes you've got is spent in cleaning up. Like emptying trash cans been full for weeks (or in my case, months) and picking up all the slips of paper and whatever else fell between platen and bed the last press run.
     And maybe even distributing that nearly-pied couple galleys of 8 pt Kennerley you smashed up real good 'cause you didn't check where the gauge pins were when you pulled that proof last year before Christmas.

Ain't that way with photos, is it? I mean, you've got PhotoShop to dust out all the rusty corners and spice up the contrast so the butt-end of the garage doesn't look like the dimly-lit butt-end of the garage that it really is.

At which point I can get back to reality and show off what's what and make a few comments about it. So I'll start with the press, the C&P 10x15 that's been the workhorse press for the past 20-odd years.
     Found it in a field, I did. Seriously.
     The late Bill Thompkins, former shop foreman at Wright State University's printing plant, suggested one day that I come by and look at a press he had sitting in the field behind his own printing shop in nearby suburbia. He said it had been out there in the weather a while but maybe I could use some of the parts.
     A few days later I went over to see what Bill had.
     He had the basic parts of a 10x15 NS sitting in the weeds for however long he'd had it there – and there was a rusted-to-hell Miehle outside the front door to the shop – with the platen laying face down in the mud and the bed staring at the sky. The flywheel, belt wheel, roller arms and other bits were laying around in the weeds. Other than the platen being pitted and rusted about an eighth inch deep, most of it looked salvageable.
     I left and came back with some young friends and a pickup truck. We stuffed everything bigger than a Nissan back seat into the truck and carried off some of the other stuff in my car. When we got home we unloaded it all into the garage and I started doing the inventory of what was and what weren't.
     What weren't came down to the pinion gear, ink disk, platen cam follower, the pin that holds the roller arm lever on to the frame, a few nuts and bolts and a free working mechanism.
     The large gear with the platen cam race in it was frozen in time, rusted into place.
     And the platen was horribly corroded.
     It didn't look hopeful.
     So I went back to Bill's shop and we found the ink disk, three chases, a few pieces of the throw-off mechanism (but no throw off lever) and a couple roller trucks. All this stuff was inside the building. I guess that Bill had planned on moving it into whatever space he could find – and there weren't much, what with the shop full of two color offset presses and all the fixings. Only problem was, between not getting around to it and getting some of the stuff under a roof, he'd picked pretty much all the small stuff and left the two biggest and most important parts out in the rain for who knows how long.
     Back in the garage I started chasing down parts and found a couple pinion gears in various places on the east coast. I bought one and later bought another.
     I took the parts that were mobile and started brushing them down and getting the rust off. I removed a couple years worth of mud and weeds from between shafts and levers and linkages. I didn't know what I was gonna do with the platen.
     So one day I was at the post office and noticed a truck in the lot with a portable welder in the back. I had noticed that one of the points on the press – where the roller arm lever hooks up – had been cracked and reassembled with cap screws. I thought I might have to get that welded.
     I walked into the post office and asked the one fellow at the counter if he were the owner of the truck. He said he was and I told him about my welding needs. He said he taught at the local vocational school and he'd be glad to come by and look at what I had. When he was finished with his business he got in his truck and followed me back to my digs.
     The cracked parts & cap screws looked fine, he said. If I really thought it was necessary he would set up a time and come over to zap things back together. Then I showed him the platen and mentioned the missing cam follower.
     Those things were easy, he said. He would take the platen to school and give it to one of the students to machine and polish. He took some measurements of the cam raceway and the shaft of the platen rocker. He'd already looked at the roller arm lever point and said he could fix up a pin for that too.
     I handed him a Xerox copy of the C&P press parts list. We shook hands, I thanked him for his time and he drove off with the platen in the back of his truck.
     
The press still wouldn't turn, and not just because I was missing the pinion gear. The large gear itself, rusted into place, was depressing to look at, even after I had scraped and brushed and primed and painted.
     I had previously poured about a quart of oil & WD40 into the lube holes on the main gear shaft. Everything else that needed to move within the frame of the press had loosened up fairly easily. The throw-off linkages worked and the roller arms moved around in their channels. Only the roller arm springs were stuck.
     But for all the oil and kerosene and other lubricants I could get into the oil holes for the main gear shaft, nothing even suggested success. I resorted to brute force.
     I took a large piece of square steel stock and used two vise-grip pliers to put it between one pair of teeth on the gear. The stock extended out from the gear enough so that I could put the drawbar on that side on the eccentric gear pin and push against the bar. I pushed. I tapped. I rocked the drawbar around the pin and pulled and tapped against the square stock on one side and then the other. Slowly the gear began to move. Eventually it moved a quarter turn, then full around. Within a few minutes I had the entire movement of the press – other than the roller springs – free and operational.

A few days later I got a phone call from the fellow at the vocational school. He said he had some stuff to bring over. I said I'd be there. A short time later he pulled up into the driveway.
     We pulled the platen out of the back of his truck. He had covered the surface with a couple sheets of corrugated cardboard. When he took the cardboard off, the surface of the platen shone like a mirror. The students had leveled it to within micrometers of true and run a polisher over it so the surface was smoother than it had ever been, probably since the day it was cast.
     Then he handed me the cam race follower. It fit the rocker shaft and the cam race perfectly.
     And the pin for the roller arm linkage was threaded on one end and it and the cam follower had been heat hardened.
     I asked him what he wanted for all the work.
     Nothing, he said. He thanked me for having given him a project for the students that had something to do with real machine work. I insisted on giving him something for his efforts. He refused. He suggested that I vote for the next school levy.
     Mom as a school teacher.
     I told him that I never voted against a school levy.
     He thanked me. We shook hands and I got out more paint and another brush.

I ran the first job on the press around 1985. I figure that, between all the hobby printing I've done and the few commercial jobs that I let myself get finagled into, there have been at least a million impressions on the backyard press since then.
     I had to remove and rebuild the roller arm springs and I had to make a throw-off lever out of a large piece of steel bar stock. I made a set of fingers out of steel strap. I've had the rollers recast three times now, the last from Brown Regrinding Service, which is no longer in business and to me sorely missed.
     The serial number on the press (C65164) dates the press by available records to 1923, when my father would have been 12 years old, and a year after his mother took her life. It probably started out in a school – the original paint is that bizarre soft "institutional green" – and how it ended up in Bill Thompkins' back yard is anybody's guess. But it's sat on the concrete in two garages for 20-odd years now and it's been a true pleasure to run.
     I hope to get many more impressions out of it before it goes into my own estate auction. It's certainly a survivor.

The other press presently in the shop is a C&P Old Style Pilot that I bought from Jack and Henry Schwartz back some twenty-two years ago. It came into the shop around the same time that I succeeded in getting the 10x15 up and running.
     Jack & Henry were two brothers who owned a printing plant on Ludlow Street in downtown Dayton, Ohio. When I was a high school student I would walk past their shop every day after school, headed toward the first bus stop in the line that took me home to a suburb south of Dayton. On many occasions I would walk past and catch a whiff of the smell of ink coming out of the second story where I later learned their presses were located.
     By the time I got to know Jack & Henry, I was halfway to being an orphan. Dad had been dead a couple years and I had found Schwartz Brothers Printing Equipment in the phone book while wondering where I could get some leads and slugs. I called and enquired. The gruff voice on the other end said he could set me up. Just come by and come up to the second floor.
     As I walked up the stairs I could hear a press running. And then there was this loud mechanical crunch and thud. I wondered what madhouse I was entering. As it turned out, I had just heard Jack & Henry's huge old Seybold paper cutter cycle through a lift. It was right by the door to the shop and it looked about as safe as wearing a gasoline suit to a forest fire.
     Over the course of the next couple years I bought bits and pieces of stuff off the Schwartz brothers. Leads, slugs, galleys, a miterer. From time to time I'd put a note or card in the bundles mentioning that Jack & Henry had this or that piece of equipment they were selling or mention that they were a good source of parts like roller cores and the like. Then I found out they had a couple Pilot presses.
     Now I'd never gotten a Pilot 'cause I never seemed to have the money when one became available. I also had more than enough press room, what with the 10x15 up and running and the 9x12 Franklin Gordon (yes, a real Franklin Gordon of 1880s vintage). But I'd always wanted a Pilot, if only 'cause it was in keeping with my philosophy of "save everything" by which I ran at the time.
     So I found two buyers for the Pilots that Jack & Henry had for sale and arranged for the buyers to meet with Jack & Henry to pick up the presses. We went over to the shop in a van and Jack & Henry rolled the presses out of their shop and onto the elevator. On the way down, Jack asked me if it were my doing that had gotten them so much business from hobby printers.
     One of the fellows with us said "Yeah. He has stuff all the time in the bundles about your shop."
     Jack smiled. He leaned closer to me and said in a low voice that he had a Pilot upstairs that needed a lever but was otherwise complete.
     I said I didn't have any money.
     Jack said something very unusual. He said "Pay me later."
     I'd never heard Jack or Henry talk in terms of paying later. And most of the time it was Henry who decided what the price should be. I realized I had just sailed into unchartered waters.
     I asked Jack how much he wanted.
     "Oh, let's say $200. You can pay me later."
     We went back up the elevator to the third floor where pigeons flew in and out of broken windows across an expanse of cast iron antiquities. Jack found the Pilot in question, we wrestled it onto the floor truck and rolled it onto the elevator. The elevator stopped at the second floor. It was Henry. He wanted to know what was up.
     Jack explained that he was selling me the incomplete press. "Two hundred dollars," he said.
     Henry grunted. The elevator doors closed and we descended to the ground floor.
     "Don't talk with Henry about this," Jack said.
     "Mum's the word. And thank you very much for the favor. I'll pay you . . ."
     "Don't mention it. And especially not to Henry."
     Jack & I shook hands. My fellow cast iron addicts loaded the third press into the van and we drove off.
     I visited Jack a couple weeks later and handed him $200 on the sly.
 

I Have a Little Monkey . . .

As I understand the chronology, the Amalgamated Printers' Association began its containment of the mass field within the heavy metal addicts around 1958. Now, using modern math I have been able to deduce that this will be the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the APA. Thus I will expect a flurry of activity as members of the organization take time out from their usual pursuits to print tons of ephemera &c to fill the bundles with signs and symbols of gratitude.
     In other words (an paraphrasing my favorite Norteña band, Grupo Exterminador,) "Somos mas peligrosos que el menta'o chupacabra . . . ¡Ya veo el parillon para celebrar nuestros escales!"
     I, myself, am planning on a series of printed pieces, none of them particularly spectacular – even to my self-absorbed critical faculties – which will make mention in various ways of the grand clamor. I did this act for the 50th anniversary of the American Amateur Press Association back in '86 by summarizing and reprinting in a style set up by my father years earlier a little book of stuff about who and what and when.
     No biggie. Just a couple odd pages of hand-set eight point & some advertising-stylee cutwork. I think I ran it off on the 10x15 but I might have done it on the Pilot or maybe even the Gordon, back when I had a Gordon press. No, a real Gordon press from the Gordon press works. One of thems.

The worst part about my plans – should they all come to fruition (paraphrasing a Muslim-stylee interjection) – will be having to decide how many over I print for the bundle. And if I want to do color cuts on any of the pages, sheets or whatevers. Or whether I really want to go to the effort of reproducing my youngest's "dancing monkey" drawing of some years ago.
     Not a bad monkey, really. And a perfect piece of art to put on the cover of a book of limericks about dancing monkeys, even if the monkey cut itself will be run off in a batch on my wife's photo printer and subsequently pasted on the cover of the intended booklet.
     As long as the innards of the booklet are all letterpress, right?

See, that's where we get to the real problem: rules. And yes, I know: rules that we can live by and all that. But the game of the APA is letterpress, like continuing letterpress, teaching letterpress and preserving letterpress work in general. Bunch of old guys and young kids sittin' around dressin' up for the Civil War re-enactment spectacular out on some park land in Arkansas, set up so the Confederacy wins this time.
     Maybe.
     Like that.
     If I do the monkey book the way I'm thinking, it'll be just fine. I've done such goofy stuff before (don't even ask about Ez-Aha) and, for the most part, it's all been the sort of stuff that archivists and historian types look at and wonder why I spent so much time on it.
     Which gets us back to the question of the challenge of art to psychology, which I've already covered and which I will not divert myself into again.
     In the end everybody has to ask themselves what the hell they're doing that they think it's so important that they have to buy special paper just for something that only 200-odd fellow sufferers are gonna see, let alone appreciate as relevant. That's the nature of hobbies anyway. That's why Mikey got into ham radio and still hasn't gotten on HF. That's why I have 18 radios in one room and seldom do more than turn them on now and then to make sure I still know how to reprogram the memories. Or talk to Gary in Indiana, for that matter.
     As if missing a chance to put a slip of printed paper in a bundle were the capital crime.
     And to many it is. Which is why I have to really work hard to get calmed down when I think that I've taken a big chunk out of my garage real estate so Cid can park her car with the front license plate less than a foot from the flywheel of the 10x15. Now that, that does bother me.
     But not enough to make me not want to do something totally silly for the anniversary bungle and any bungles leading up to it. And if you don't know what a bungle is, go to the APA site and look up the info on the "bundle."

And remember: "Somos mas peligrosos que el menta'o chupacabra . . . ¡Ya veo el parillon para celebrar nuestros escales!"
 

Convenciones de la Tarjeta Propietária

I spent a hour and some last night setting up and printing the revised prop card so it would pass muster with the rules. And yeah, I know I just anthropomorphized the rules but that's about how it works: if a monkey made it, then it's monkey stuff and can be enshrined in monkey flesh. Thus the rules become monkey and the monkey becomes the rules.
     Kinda like Burroughs asking "Is control controlled by its need to control."
     Like that.
     After I'd done about six or twenty of 'em I realized that I had a problem with impression and inking, so I adjusted a couple things and finally got some take on the paper for the ink I was puttin' on the rollers. And since it was only one line of type and the press has three pretty much brand new rubber rollers, I figured that adjusting one roller was enough – when in fact I could have just let that sit – and went from there to impression & makeready.
     So after about 50 or so of the revised & adjusted ink/impression cards I realized that I had a stray font letter in the date.
     At which point I invoked the power of being 62 years old, which works out like "I'm 62 so to hell with it," except with a little stronger invective. Like "I'm 62. Screw it."
     And that, dear friends and readers – all two of ya – is how I came up with this version of the prop card needed to fulfill the destiny of the printer in this new year & all that.

 

Prop Card Proprieties &c

Up front and country simple I dropped out of the hobby printing game 'cause it became a job. It took me nearly three years of printing other people's stuff before I figured that out. In fact, there were probably a half-dozen times during the last few years that I was involved deeply in the so-called "amateur journalism" ("ajay" or "aj") movement when I figured that I would have been better off sitting in the sunlight of the back yard with a cold Negra Modelo in my paws. And it's probably kind of ironic that I would take so long to figure out what my father had figured out before me back in the 70s when, as a newly inducted member of the Amalgamated Printers' Association he wrote:

"If we allow our hobbies to demand certain attainments at specified times we no longer have a hobby – we have started a new business. And the bird who hand pegs these lines . . . is not ready to return to printing as a business. Not at today's market!"

But yes, it did take me a while to get that message, even after I'd set it in 8 pt Century Expanded for a bit I printed for the 50th Anniversary of the American Amateur Press Association, with which organization my father had once been a member.
     So up front and country simple, I dropped out of the hobby printing game 'cause it had become too much of a job. That and I was going through some particularly pernicious persecution from an worthless piece of evil white shit who was at that time my supreme overlord and boss, may he suffer a long and painful death only to discover that there ain't no hell for him to burn in for eternity.
     But I digress.
     My departure from the ranks of hobby printerdom was over ten years ago by my haphazard counting. Over the course of that decade I printed very little else but a book of stuff a friend's sons had written, a book of my own poetry, a book of poetry from the hand of a self-acclaimed poetess, my sons' high school graduation announcements, my eldest's wedding invitation and one or two other things that I can't really remember as having been that big a deal.
     And some stationery and such.
     Ten years or so of not doing much more than opening the door, looking in the shop and closing the door again. It's more like everything was abandoned. And then, well, along came crazy Mikey & his ham radio license and the QSL cards I ended up printing for him, all 1013 of 'em in three colors.

There's something pleasant and surprising about putting together a design – a graphic design or a radio design – that works. There's a pleasure derived from picking through the collection of type and paper – even if it's paper I've used many times before – and watching it all come out right after three press runs. It's a proud thing, that pleasant surprise when all the work is done & the press is cleaned up and the job wrapped up and ready to go off to whatever purpose.
     Going through the three days of printing Mikey's cards I had a long conversation with my father's ghost – no simple feat for an atheist – and in the end I had to admit that I had been hiding from the print shop 'cause I had let it become work and let my work detract me from it. The printshop & all that's in it and all that goes on in it.
     So with due consideration and a bit of Christmas joy I contacted the secretary of the APA via email and enquired about my chances of getting re-admitted to the ward. And, as things usually go, I got my slot back and, having already sent in my cash, I received a few days into the new year all the doodads you or anybody else gets from joining up. Even again, even.

One of the necessities of having joined the APA is the printing and mailing out of the mandatory prop card. Now I don't know when this feature of the membership surfaced but I don't remember Dad printing a prop card or having even talked about printing one. Either way, every time that I've been the first-timer on the prop card printing I have always discovered way after the fact that I had not done the job right.
     Like back when I first joined up, which I figure is something like 20-odd years ago, I sent in my prop card as I had figured the beast was done – based on my cursory view of a couple of 'em what I'd seen elsewhere – only to discover that I had done it wrong.
     Back then it was "last name, first name, APA membership number, press name, info, address & phone number." Which is not what I did, in as much as I put the card together "first name, last name, press name, info, address &c." For this I got a note from the mailer who had taken the time to set the deal to straight by putting my APA number on the card & then including it in the next mailing.
     The next half-dozen times I fiddled with the prop card & posted it to the mailer I followed the lines as I had been corrected to see 'em and that was that, as shown here:

     Then I dropped out, as explained aforehand.
     This time, however, not wanting to be lurching in the proscenium I printed the cards up as I remembered 'em, plus some stuff: "last name, first name, APA number, press name, info, address, email ('cause I don't do phone numbers any more)."
     And then I get the info from the secretary with a sheet of info on the prop card advising me that the format is now different. To wit: "last name, first name, APA number, name of press, info, address, telephone, email, and then month & year of joining the organization, and then month & year the proprietor's card was issued."
     Yeah, now I need to remember when I joined . . . or does it only count for this time that I've reapplied &c? And if it's the first time I joined, what if I'm wrong? I mean: I could be wrong 'cause I have absolutely no idea when I got that last bungle in the mail & none of the stuff I've done previous to this – and I sure ain't about to go plowing through my own archives to find this – and thus may produce yet another faux pas for which I will be summarily chided.

I seem to remember somewhere that Dave Churchman was or still is or had been a member of an organization – and it might have been the APA version running at the time – where there were two rules: there would be no rules but the rule about no rules. And the second rule was that, in any questions about rules, the question should be referenced to the first rule.
     My kind of outfit. And I suspect the perfect outfit for my father's printery, being as how he had many rules that he applied only to himself (and in times of paternal privilege, to his offspring as well), not wanting to worry the world over anything more than the fact that otherwise the world should recognize the primacy of rule number one and get over it.

Thus I have a series of prop cards already printed, none of which says anything about the date I joined the APA and each of which does meet the requirements of a prop card from the first time I joined.
     And since each of these cards is wrong by today's standards, I have now the obvious privilege of going back and overprinting the cards so that the date & time and frequency requirements (which the FCC long ago abolished for the operation of ham radio stations) will be on the damn cards and right by the code of the rulemaking body or bodies. Or body snatchers.
     But until such time, here's what I've got.