The Tagalong Press

There Must Be Something Wrong with Me . . .

2010-03-06T18:02:00.000-08:00

Well, I done finished writing my book. There's an advert for it in the sidebar. You can order it online from the link provided. But I have to tell you two things: First, it's about time travel, mean monkeys, friendly cats, two guys from the future trying to fix things up so the future goes on to be what it is supposed to be. All that. And secondly, if you find anything wrong with it, like misspelled words and bent story lines (which I already know about, being as how it's PostModernist fiction), don't tell me right away. Read it all the way through. Jot notes down in the margins or on the back blank pages or something. Give it some time.
Give me some time.
Then tell me.
See, I went through a ton of frustration on this project. The biggest problem was having to read it again and again, looking for typos and blown up sentences and stuff. It was wearying. And then there were all the little things like the same word used three times in one sentence to say one thing. Yeah, like that. And a huge amount of wasted space on adjectives. All of that stuff I had to find before I could say that it was "sell-worthy."
And then there were the typographic problems. Widows and orphans and hyphenated words at the bottom of one page and the rest of the word at the top of the next. The usual stuff most people don't notice or if they do, they just figure it's the work of a rank amateur and let it go at that before giving up.
I didn't want to come off looking like I didn't know how to paginate, see?
I'd get all finished finding what I thought needed fixed and then I'd fix it and upload the changes to the site. Then I'd order another proof.
Before that proof even got halfway out the shop where they print 'em, I'd find stuff that I'd missed which had gone on in the upload that I was waiting proof on. So when the proof got there, I knew I had to fix all the stuff in the proof that I'd found before receiving the proof. And then there were the things I found from that proof which, upon being fixed and again uploaded, led to more errors.
I think I went through four proofs getting to where it is today.
And just today I found a mistake on the back cover, a small typographical one, a matter of an apostrophe, that I will have to fix when I find all the rest of the stuff that I didn't find this time or that time or any time before.
Yeah.
It was a pile of more frustration going through all that than it was just writing the damn thing. And even there I had help, as noted in the previous posting. At various points in this long dance around frustration, I often thought that, if I hadn't put this much effort into it already, I'd just give up. Seriously.
So there I was -- and here I am today -- trying to not make something for the public offering that looked like my amateurish hand set penny dreadfuls, even if the penny dreadfuls that I've printed for the Amalgamated Printers' Association are pretty much the source of what's in this book.
But at least it's done.
You can buy a copy if you want. I'm sure by the time it's been around for a while -- presuming I get more than one reader total -- that I'll have found time to go over it again and find even more stuff to fix than most readers will take the time for.
And therein lies the problem: I have finished this one. There are two years of penny dreadfuls already printed for the APA membership, two of which are stories of their own, stories which have proven to be source material for another book, just as the earliest two penny dreadfuls were the source for this book.
Yeah.
I'm already working on another one. There must be something wrong with me.

Patience & Goudy Californian

2010-02-04T07:43:00.001-08:00

Back when I was a wee lad, my father took a couple pictures of me with his printing stuff. I’ve got what I can only guess are third or forth generation copies of these pictures. They’re framed and hand on the ratty walls of my garage clutter print shop.
Either ’cause I wasn't paying attention or maybe because I was, after Dad died, I ended up bit by the printing bug. I admit easily that I let myself be bit. His death took a huge pile out of me. Having the printery in my house or garage was a way by which I kept Dad alive and present in my paws on a regular basis. And even all these 25-odd years later, I still feel that way about the shop.
It's my animita to my father, a man whom I called Sarge more often in the last decades of his life than I called Dad.
And I admit straight up that the printery is also my own egoboo, a place where I can show off what I think of my untested and pretty much unnecessary talent.
I get to write stuff, most of it ad lib & “in the stick” (and back when I had the Intertype caster, I even wrote stuff out beforehand to set & then print). So there’s that.
I also get to play with type and color and paper, hedging myself against the possibility that I might have somehow gained enough insight into graphic design to make what I do end up printing at least pleasing to the eye.
And then I have to add that my attempt at getting an advanced degree in English comp so that I could teach added to this printery thing. After all: I was the son of a journalist & writer, of a school teacher who set me & my sister up to read before I got to kindergarten.

At which point the old man gets a CreateSpace account, which is where all this type and press and writing gets ugly.

First off, let me place no blame on CreateSpace. My experience with them, at this point, has been easy and quick. I had no problems with file upload or getting proofs or any of that stuff.
What I got back from them in the order of proof was excellent. If the eventually approved for sale book – about which I will squeak later – is anything like the proofs, I will be able to say that my book looks like a book that I’d be proud to have said came from my garage only better.
So what’s the case here?
Well, it’s like everything I ever told any student who suffered from my goofy pseudo-intellectualism and drawn out metaphors has come back to haunt me. All that. Like a long sentence at the beginning. Or a long one in the middle. Who cares?
I have learned by paying for my proofs that there is never a time when any work is finished, at least if you’re like me. Scatterbrained. Short-term-memory depraved. Loony. All that.

And impatient.

The book of which I squawk came to me as an afternoon on the can meditation about a long-time story that’s been floating in and out of my head for the past sixty years at least. It’s got time travel, aliens, genetic engineering, mind control, a blessed savior, godlessness and jihad all rolled up in a Burroughs-esque story line that jumps time tracks and reality with impunity.
And that’s William S. Burroughs, Jr Burroughs-esque, by the way.
Ain’t no Martian Chronicles here, yo.
As for the writing I spent a couple couple months on it at least. Started back somewhere in the end of last summer, cruising through tons of disk space in the process, and accumulating various versions of the same bits that eventually got tossed or used.
Truthfully, it was the craziest thing I have ever done, other ’n having childrens.
In the end I had a couple hundred pages of drool and slobber in words that I then turned into a book document, which subsequently got converted to a PDF and it was uphill from there.
I say that ’cause I have a horrible fault that leads me in circles of despair. It’s a simple lack of patience.
See, once you think you’ve written the next supernovel or whatever, you have to do something that I’ve told people for years: At the end of the book or paper or whatever, go back over the sunnabitch like you’ve never seen it before. Treat it as a cold turd on your porch. Give it the big time hairy eyeball over and over again. Don’t let it out of your sight.
Read it aloud if necessary.
But for Frank’s sakes, read the goddamn thing!
And then . . . Read it again!
Then go back and fix all the stuff you thought didn’t work, all the stuff you found with the hairy eyeball and all that. Fix that stuff and then go back and read it again.
And again.
Why should you do this?
Because every damn letter on the page or on the screen is important. Because every damn letter that’s in the wrong place or is part of a word that is in the wrong place or doesn’t belong there at all, even giving yourself a break of ponderous self-absorbed intellectualism, every one of those letters can make you look like a goddamn fool!
So read it again, fool!

And why am I excoriating you over this reading thing? Because I’m being rhetorical, that’s why!

Now it took me two proofs to find this basic law of writing dynamics, this kernal point in the universe of trying to write or having finished writing. And the sad fact is, the proof that is just now on its way to me, it’s got errors aglory. Like misspelled words, fer Frank’s sakes. And this is the second proof I’ve ordered, which means that once I get the proof on its way to me, I have to look for all the errors that I know are there ’cause I read the copy I uploaded last time and found ’em. The errors.
So even before the proof gets here, I know that I have corrections to upload and then another proof to peruse. Each of them at about $12 a whack, shipping costs figured in for kicks. And, I am sure that once that proof is proofed and the uploaded revisions are proofed that there will be errors a billion for me to deal with again and again.

Kinda like the old engineer’s design hassle: the engineer sets to designing a circuit, which he does successfully. But each time he gets back to the board, he thinks of an improvement or a change could make to produce a more economical product, which keeps getting held up for sale ’cause the engineer is full of new design ideas every morning before he brushes his teeth.
Which drives the marketing guys nuts ’cause they need to sell a product that has been in design forever.
Which costs the company money.
So eventually the marketing guys walk into the engineer’s office and tell him they’re taking over the project so they can market it. If the engineer is gonna design a better version of whateve mouse trap is driving marketing nuts, they suggest the engineer do that design as an advanced, upgraded or whatever product.
Just give us what you have now, monkey, and we’ll sell it!

Thus I am at this point: If I leave the proof on its way to me as the copy going up for sale, the worst case scenario is folks will read the story and wonder why I couldn’t spell embarrassed right. Or I had things like “that what happens in Dallas stays in Kansas,” when “that which . . .” is the correct form.
At least prescriptively.
’Cause I could easy up say that “that what happens is that what happens and that’s just the way I talk, see?”
Which, out of meanness and lack of any more patience, I might just do.

All this means, of course, that my attempt at breaking through the popcorn ceiling of self-published print-on-demand fame will probably suffer for a while from the circuit being sold with the improved (as in: correctly spelled &c) model will come out a little while later.
Thus, in the mean time, I would like to suggest that you get yer paws on my novel, Rising from Karuk, which will soon be available for sale from my CreateSpace eStore or from Amazon.com eventually.
After all, I have to make up for the money and time I’ve put into making a space novel about a guy’s afraid of turtles and loves cats. Even if the typography is gorgeous and the cover is beautiful in its simplicity.

Once Again with the Rollers

2009-12-15T05:53:00.000-08:00

I'm fixin' up an order for new rollers from Ramco Roller Products and trying to get things worked out so I can retire in February with enough type and equipment in good repair to spend the next however many heartbeats with stuff I like to do for fun and occasionally for a couple bucks.
The "couple bucks" part is annoying in the main but I can – and certainly will when the income drops on my behalf – be interested in having a little extra cash coming in after all these years of wastrel spending. I mean, you can't have three cast iron beaters, hundreds of pounds of new and ancient type, all the wood and metal confabula of a printery and not have spent huge piles of cash on what comes down to frivolity.
But I do need the rollers.
The 6x9 C&P Pilot has a set of compo rollers that must be over 20 years old, being as how I got the press and the rollers back when we were housed in the ranch-style in the middle of a plat of houses. I got the press from the late Jack & Henry Schwartz of Dayton, Ohio pretty much for cheap and out the door 'cause I brought Jack & Henry a couple purchasers of equipment they had laying around for the pigeons to roost in.
It's a grand old little side lever, for those unschooled in the mysteries. I like the way it prints and I like the fact that, at one time in my younger moments, I was actually able to pick it up and move it from one table to the other.
So I'm getting set to get that press new rollers.
Which is another suggestion that, if you are into letterpress and you need rollers, to contact Adrian & Jayne at Ramco Roller Products. They do excellent work and at reasonable cost. They're nice folks as well, honest and fair and quick to respond to email requests for prices. And they have a website (refed above, twice). A pdf of their present pricing schema is available here.
Now all of this is unimportant if you're not into printing things or if you don't care what I am doing with what I got. But there is a backstory to this.
See, according to different counts I am either 70-odd calendar days or 50-some workdays short of retirement. Which means in whatever time you chose, I will need new business cards. I'll have to take my job story off the card and put my life story on the card. At which point there's the process of getting the Pilot running again with the pitted, warped and woggly rollers it presently has so as to print the black of a handful of cards. Which worked out pretty well, considering the condition of the rollers. To which end I was able to print cards carrying in a line above my name, the magic words:

Linguist, Writer & Cat-Lady, Retired

And now? Well, that's why I need the rollers. The old pitted ones were just fine for black ink on 8 pt Globe Gothic Condensed. They won't be so good for the gold in 18 pt Cheltenham Inline.
Thus the need for the rollers. And money well-spent it will be, way I figure, all these short days from retirement.

Pictures & Penny Dreadfuls

2008-10-20T08:42:00.000-07:00

The elder young'n came by a couple weeks back to give Cid her birthday present – a nice Nikon digital camera with the usual accouterments – and used his own new camera to take a picture of me out in the print shop.
Last weekend he stopped by on the way to Grandma's birthday dinner at a local franchise eatery & showed me a picture that he had plonked on his flickr.com account. Nice picture of the old guy. (There are actually three pictures, one of me grinning insanely and a more staid shot, shown here edited to lighten it up some, and another of me going through the type cases.)
I was struck, upon going to the site & looking for his other stuff, that he had taken his grandfather's name as the account name.

You spend your life thinking that someone's gonna remember you. You watch other folks like yourself come to knowledge and then die off, forgotten. Some who came before and some who are of your time, they show up as records in books mostly but for the most part their names are long forgotten by the time the grandkids die off.
Upon the death of my father, I took a certain attitude toward making sure the old guy was remembered at least a bit for what he'd done on this earth. I remembered and wrote about his drinking. I remembered his harsh, military-style discipline, how he was insanely obsessed with the driveway being shoveled off spotlessly, down to the tarmac with even the frozen tracks of the first pass out of the driveway removed. Measuring the length of the grass in the yard and showing me where I'd missed this or that pass in what was really a pretty ratty grass back yard.
I remembered his sitting on the front porch with me in Indianapolis, looking at the clear evening sky and the full moon that illuminated the earth to cast moon shadows against the steps and front door. I remember saying that I wondered what the first man might have said upon seeing the moon for the first time. And I remembered his response.
"What did you think the first time you saw the moon?"
A man of bizarre perspectives, my father.
Just like my sons.
At which point it makes perfect sense that my father's name should be remembered by my son upon setting up a flickr.com account.
Keeping the name and the old man alive, just like the shot he posted of me in the shop, looking half erudite and half civil, a weaker moment.

At the same time I have to wonder how it was that my most recent offering to the Amalgamated Printers' Association might not have made the recent bundle, names and misspellings and bad register and all considered.
Maybe it was too risqué? Maybe it was too violent?
Why it no show up, yo?

See, the purpose of literature, the purpose of text on paper, is the preservation of ideas, no matter how bizarre. The balance is in discerning that the instruction manual for a piece of ancient shipboard radio gear, despite its age, is as relevant as the last page of a John Rechy novel or an essay by William Burroughs on the control of various levels of the soul in Egyptian mythology.
So what was in the piece that didn't get bundled?
Well, let's see . . .
"The hole in the front of his head where the bullet went in was about the size of a pencil." An admitted direct squirrel of a perfectly good William Burroughs line?
Something about a wop in the rock letting out water that had been blessed by the last chink . . . a turn of words that I just played with 'cause they was there, thems?
The slipping back and forth between an omniscient narrator and a first person narrator whose sexuality was never quite decided?
Or maybe it was the fact that someone gets shot over and over across two pages as part of a loop in time into which the antagonist and antihero have been dragged by cosmic forces as yet unexplained.
Or was it the description of the antagonist as a "bleached turd," among other nasty names & appellatives?
Who knows?
I don't.

All I know is that my son took a photo of me and put it on the web under an account name that is my father's name and the very things that my father did in his printery – the writing of interesting things with the words being used and shifted about in an interesting way – is pretty much what I do today.
Thus is my father remembered.
Thus as we are today.
And if it turns out that the mailer thought my submitted penny dreadful was inappropriate for the bundle, I guess I'll have to get 'em all back, all 170-odd copies. Then it'll be my privilege to send 'em out individually to whoever wants 'em. One at a time. Just like the way things used to be back when penny dreadfuls were so common and so dreadful, just like in my father's day.

Restoration Almost Complete, Part II

2008-04-28T06:50:00.000-07:00

I mentioned earlier about the treadle I'd gotten for the 9x13 George P. Gordon press that I've been resurrecting to use. Well, one of the reasons that the treadle was kicking my butt involved two motions & the frictional constant. The range of motion problem begins with having adapted a treadle meant for a C&P to use on a related but not necessarily similar machine. The treadle was hosed up to the Gordon by the backmost piece of hardware on the frame of the press. Worked fine, 'cept for one thing.
The hinge point on the Gordon is about an inch in diameter. The face of the clamp that holds the treadle on the press is machined for a piece of metal about a quarter inch larger. Thus there was side-to-side play and a wobble to the movement of the treadle under foot.
This bothered me because, most importantly, I didn't want to wear down the post with the treadle's movement. And I realized that the side & end play of the treadle was part of my troubles, in that keeping a foot on a treadle that's flopping around is not too much different from trying to catch a bullet in the dark with a pair of pliers.
The remedy for both situations was simple: a bearing surface to reduce friction, with the bearing material itself set to fit the diameter of the hinge point and to reduce the friction & wear on the steel-to-iron surface of the treadle's hinge point. I did this by simply buying scintillated bronze bearings of the appropriate inside diameter and putting them at the bearing face. I had to cut the bearings in half – which weren't no biggy – and wrap them around the shaft while putting the hinge sections back together.
But, oh, what a difference that made.
First, the flopping about ended. The treadle had only one component of movement, which component was the point of the whole thing from the beginning: up and down movement under the empowering foot.
And the friction was reduced, thus giving a smoother and easier feel under foot to the leg involved in the pumping.
It was special.
I was happy.
And I could now concentrate on the other two matters that concerned me from the beginning of this project: the roller arm spring bearing faces and the play in the platen lifter upon the press opening after the impression.

The roller arm springs are large. The a stubbed up against a rectangular piece of metal that bears against the sides of the roller arm through which the roller arm shaft & hook glide. One side appears to be excessively warn, in that in the movement up to, across and back down from the ink disk, the spring & shaft slips inside the arm such that there is an audible click when the rollers come off the ink disk and back onto the roller bearers on the bed.
Such things bother me.
First the wear cannot be doing any good to the space through which the spring and shaft move. Secondly it's another shift inside the mechanism that must certainly change the way that part of the mechanism works.
And I don't like the click.
So I now have to make or have made a copy of the rectangular piece so that it slides inside track but doesn't flop around in it. And that's the easiest one.

One of the improvements that Chandler & Price threw into their assuming of the original Gordon press patents was to strengthen the raceway of the platen rocker mechanism inside the so-called "bull gear." That's the large gear on the right side of the press (facing the ink disk or bed). The mod that C&P made is shown on page five of their brochure for their presses, showing
This is, of course, part of the advance of technology to which the Gordon factory of the 1870s did not have access. Thus the raceway of the gear wheel of the George P. Gordon "New Series" presses is a simple machined groove. At the point where C&P put the hardened steel insert, there is only cast metal & and a machined raceway.
The absence of this extra metal means that there is wear in the raceway of the Gordon over time. And this is the condition of this press.
The remedy for this problem is not simple.
I can either have someone weld in reinforcements on the outside of the raceway or, in addition to the reinforcement, add a track of modern steel. If I add the track, I must manually assure beforehand that the cam raceway remains the same spacing, which is a lot of touch-and-go, file-and-test operation.
But it's gotta be done.
At some point, if I don't work this out, the raceway will fail and the movement of the press – under the momentum of the flywheel – will rip through the outside of the raceway in the gear and destroy that part of the press, a part which is singularly important in its doing the job it does.

I can run the press without any of these fixes, but I'd rather not. The continued use of the worn roller spring shaft end isn't a biggy. The press might run another fifty or hundred years, properly lubed and carefully tended, without having the piece fixed.
The gear cam raceway is a bit more bothersome to me. There's only about half and inch at the most in metal between running and destruction. The present raceway shows signs of wear that lead me to believe that, if not already imminent, the failure of that raceway is in the long run very possible.
If I want to keep the press going, especially after all the work and money that I've put into it, I will have to take care of the last problem at the very least. And in as much as I can't get the cam gear off the shaft without some superhuman effort, the fix for that one is going to be a long, drawn-out, cumbersome and expensive process.
Gotta be done, though.

Double-Time It, Soldier!

2008-04-17T05:48:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I get the George P. Gordon 9x13 up and running, new rollers and a treadle and lock some type up in the chase & turn to with the treadlin' and the printin'. Worked out pretty well, all thought up and everything. And I discovered in the process that I'd been dead wrong all this time about the rotational direction of the flywheel.
I'd thought that the flywheel turned toward the printer from the top when, in fact, it turns the same direction as the flywheel on the C&P: toward the back of the press from the top. I figured this out because the way the press opened after impression was just a little too abrupt. It was so abrupt that the press would actually thump and the platen would seem to fly back with considerable force.
When I looked at the cam race for the lever that lifts the platen from open to closed, I realized that it had a very quick action going forward, that is, toward impression when the flywheel rotated toward the rear. Running the flywheel backwards put that abrupt lift into an abrupt opening, which I don't think it was ever intended to be. That and the fact that it is the same cam raceway, as contours go, as the C&P convinced me that I'd been runnin' the press backwards all along.
But there were other issues more pressing, at least to me.
First off, I was standing there thinking that, when I had the Pearl, it seemed such a delight to run, so easy to peddle up and down, a breeze. It just seemed that I was burning a lot of energy getting the Gordon running. It was also getting me winded.
I printed a stack of 50 sheets and took a break to put 'em on the drying shelf and then went back to the press, starting up and running another 50. By that time I'd decided to shift from my left to my right leg to treadle and even halfway through that second stack of 50 sheets my right leg was wearing out.
I finished that stack of 50, put them on the drying shelf and got a drink of water. Then I went back to the press and did the next 50 with my left leg and the last 50 with my left starting and my right finishing the stack.
After I put the last stack on the rack I looked at the press and thought there had to be a better way. That or I was obviously a lot older now than I was when I had the Pearl in the shop and even older from when I had the Gordon hooked up to a 2x4 treadle, some 20-odd years further back in time.
I was further reminded of this age factor – and by the possibility that I was out of shape worse than I thought – when I ran the press a few ten or so impressions to clean it up. That being done – and I might add that it's nice to be able to lean over and clean a press from the front instead of from the sides – I took another break, had another drink of water, cleaned up some of the shop area and considered again what it was taking me to print 200 copies.
A little math later the next day got me the answer: To print 200 copies of anything was taking a little over half a mile.

Mathematically it makes perfect sense. Mathematically, if you figure that there are five turns of the flywheel to take one impression, it would take five stomps on the treadle to keep the flywheel moving around long enough to make the impression. And counting off on only one foot, it's something like 400 steps to cover a quarter mile.
Two hundred copies takes one thousand stomps, which means that if 400 stomps on one leg is a quarter mile, a thousand stomps is a bit over a half mile. So a press run of 200, including inking up and cleaning off, plus a few throw-aways along the way, comes easily to over a half mile.
Five stomps on the treadle for five rotations of the flywheel for one impression, well, it's easy to see where the getting tired was coming from.
At which point I went in the house & got out the old BB&S catalog that Dad left behind. That and a 1923 ATF catalog too. And inside each of those tomes is a run-down on the various statistics of the C&P and Golding Pearl presses. And I have PDFs of the booklets on them and the Golding presses too.
Turns out a 7x11 Pearl does one impression every three stomps on the treadle.
Three stomps on the Pearl versus five stomps on the Gordon.
It's no wonder the Pearl was a slick press to run.
Hell, I'm working almost twice as much, stomp-wise, on the Gordon as on the Pearl! That's like printing at a leisurely walk with the Pearl and hustling it double-time, soldier, on the Gordon!

Shit! I should never have given away that Pearl! What a moron!

I am left with only a few recourses, other than going all the way across the Mississippi to get a reconditioned Pearl – one what's been cleaned up so it'll look good in a studio. All of the recourses cost money and time and some self-denunciation. All of 'em involve finding a way to squeeze one more press into a space already overcrowded with two large presses & a table-top side-lever press, other equipment, shelves, storage, typecases, tools, bits and a printshop cat. And none of the ways of getting that done – not a single stinkin' one of 'em – will pass muster with Cindy.
My choices?
Put a motor on the Gordon.
Not what I had in mind, seein' as how I spent on the treadle already more 'n I'd spend on a motor by any stretch. Yeah, sure: I could do it. It'd be easy. But it's the principle of the thing, yo. I wanted to treadle a press.
Or get a Pearl, which would involve a lot more than just finding one for which I'd have to pay real money. Somehow moving the Gordon or finding it a home somewheres else. And the carping and weedling I'd hear from Cindy? Don't even think about it.
That's my choices. Them two choices alone all by they's lonesome.
Off stage I can hear my father grumbling. "I hope you jezebels are happy now! I told you this was gonna happen!"

There is only one other way that I can fix this problem – if you want to consider working twice as hard with one press over another I used to have as being a problem – is to take it on the chin, tough it out and settle for the fact that I'm gonna have to work slower or take more frequent breaks. And hope that my ability to run the press, my stamina, if you must, will improve over time with practice.
As if.
See, I have this very visual memory thing going on here: I remember my father sitting in his chair in the living room, cigarette in his hand, that dour look of desperation in old age, begging me to take his print shop, 12x18 C&P, granite stone, cases of old and new type, table-top paper cutter & all. Begging me 'cause he couldn't barely get out of the chair, let alone go down the steps to the basement and into his printery, as he had for decades for one reason or the other. And me saying I couldn't; didn't have room for it; what would I do with it?
That alone is enough to make me take it on the chin. That look of desperation and age from half a decade at least of serious immobilizing inactivity stopping him cold like a broken crutch. Makes a thousand stomps for 200 copies seem pretty easy, even if I eventually do have to revert or resort to the electric motor.

Restoration Almost Complete, Part I

2008-04-12T19:51:00.000-07:00

One of the happy coincidences of my life has been the good fortune to run into folks who have or do stuff that I need, usually pretty close up to when or where I need it. Rehabilitating presses, once a pleasurable experience but now a pretty nasty chore, what with shaking hands and all, well, that's one of those things you gotta know where and who about. My recent recovery of a 1870s-vintage platen press and my adventures with getting it back together & running has been reasonably calming, but there are parts of it I'm still working on.
First big project was rollers. That was solved by my luck of finding out about Ramco Roller Products in San Dimas, CA. Re-rollered the press for less than $200. Damn sight cheaper than the worst-case estimate of almost $600.
Second project, and probably as important as the first, was getting a means of moving the press. Like how it runs moving the press, as opposed to moving the press. I could have gone with a half-dead washing machine motor on the floor behind the press and a V-belt over the flywheel. But I didn't.
I went for the human power system: a treadle.
Now I'd done this before with this beater, clamping a 2x4 under the press to the back rod upon which the bed pivots, and it had worked out pretty well, even with the aluminum connecting strap getting hot and smelling nasty after an hour or so of pumping. So it wasn't like I hadn't been there. It was more like I wanted to put something on the press a little more appropriate than an oily 2x4 & some aluminum strap.
Which brought me to find Hern Iron Works with a web page about their recast of treadles for C&P press and Pearls. And a price list.
After conferring with Joel at Hern Iron Works, I figured out that I needed a #0219 treadle, which would run me about $185, shipping included. That was easy enough, I figured, so I wrote 'em a check and put it in the mail.
A couple weeks later the treadle arrived in a wood box & with a profound "thump" on the front porch. I dragged the box inside and out to the garage. I pry-barred the box open and extracted the cast iron treadle and its connecting hook. I used the hardware provided to lash it to the bar at the rear of the press that holds two sides together, hosed up the hook and gave the flywheel a shove.
Right up front I knew I was in for some work. It was all I could do to keep the press up to a reasonable speed. The reason, of course was pretty obvious.
Like all good things cast of iron, the need for smooth bearing surfaces is critical. But like all good things designed for one use and yet pushed into another, I had to get out the grinder and attempt to smooth the surface on the inside of the hook where it lopped over the crankshaft upon which were mounted the flywheel and the pinion gear. I knew this going in, since someone elsewhere on the InterWebs, whose writing probably clued me in to Hern, had mentioned that the connecting hook was a bit rough.
It was. But it's also a piece of cast iron.
Thus the grinder.
What I ended up doing was using a grinding wheel that my father had bought decades ago to sharpen lawnmower blades. It was exactly the diameter of the area of the crankshaft and thus perfect for smoothing out the rough edges of the bearing face. Took me about an hour to get things more or less right.
If I'd had a drill press and some clamps, I could have made the surface plain and smooth both. As it was, I knew that my "polishing job" was going to result in a bearing face that was less than even across it's width. But it was close enough.
And the press was a lot easier to pump too.
So score one: Hern Iron Works had helped me restore the Gordon to a more appropriate motive source. And yes, that's a plug.

The next big deal was getting the gripper bar mechanism to play so the grippers wouldn't get entangled behind the rollers as the press opens. This is what damaged the still-unrepaired lower most right hand roller hook, which led to the damaging of one roller stock, which required me hacking one together out of 7/16 steel bar stock.
On your common C&P, the grippers don't open until the lowest roller has cleared the top of the chase. That way they're not in the way to catch anything coming at 'em from wherever. On the Gordon such a feature would be nice, except that the platen is not rocking toward or away from the plate on closing or opening. The platen on the Gordon is hinged at the bottom, much like Pearl or Pilot, which means that the gripper pivot point is not moving below the midline of the chase when the press closes or opens. In fact, the pivot point for the grippers is below the pivot of the platen, which makes the mechanics of closing & opening the grippers a bit more complex.
In the long-back, when the Gordon was in my shop first, I remember once having to stop the press rather quickly because the grippers did indeed get stuck behind the rollers.
I determined that a piece of metal bolted to a brass arm, which was supposed to form a cam race for the gripper bar pivot, had broken. I fixed that by adding more metal & screwing things back together. I got things more or less working and went on with printing. A while after I gave the press to Tom Ebbert, he told me that the gripper bar spring had broken and that the grippers had caught the lowest roller & bent the hook on the right arm. Must have been a helluva force. I still haven't straightened out the hook. In fact, I may have to get one made.
Either way, between my experience and Tom's, I wanted the grippers to behave a bit more like those on a C&P, in as much as I was going to have to repair so much stuff. Thus I worked out a mental image of what the gripper bar cam should do as the press cycled. And it wasn't just a simple pulling of the grippers against the platen. It was a bit more complicated than that.
See, with the pivot of the platen at the bottom of the platen but with the gripper bar pivot below that, if I set a straight line race for the cam to follow, the grippers would be smashed against the platen such that they would get bent away from the platen and would then be smashed toward the chase & bed. This would put them directly in the path of the downward motion of the rollers. I had to make the cam race bent and curved so as to allow the grippers to remain flat against the platen and only in line with the platen surface during impression.
In other words, the gripper cam had to follow a curved line that went back and behind where it had been as the platen closed.
After hours of fiddling with aluminum stock and brass stock, I got close enough to where I thought I knew what I was doing.
I dragged out a chunk of steel stock, bent it around to nearly match the brass piece that I'd ended up with, and then drilled some holes in it for mounting. That accomplished, I tried it out. It worked perfectly the first time. Not that it was perfect.
I still need to put a small lift in the horizontal plane of the race so it closes the grippers against the platen even earlier than it does now. That will get the grippers out of the way of the rollers for a longer time. But I can't make them close too quickly or they'll be closed before the stock is completely fed – or closed too long after the press opens to safely extract the printed piece.
Maybe I'll just leave it as it is and be happy.

So now it's time to get out the works and fire this beast up good. I've got a 200 copy run, two sides, for a page for the 2008 edition of Treasure Gems. This being the 50th anniversary of the Amalgamated Printers' Association, I figure I ought to put something in from this shop too. Even if it is about the saxophone collection.

Good Source for Good Rollers

2008-04-08T07:43:00.000-07:00

One of the most costly parts of having letterpress equipment is the need for a good set of rollers for the press. You can have all the fancy-pants ink & paper that you want but if you're running busted up rollers, no make-ready in the world is going to save your work from lookin' cheap. You gotta have good rollers, well adjusted & not overly down on the type, to print solid colors. And if you're into text in large chunks, a pitted set of old rollers, hard and nasty lookin', will show up as fades and over-inking.
Getting good rollers without going broke is hard task. For a 10x15 C&P, a set of three rollers runs between $220 and $500 in old-school composition and between $340 and $700 in appropriate duro rubber. Vinyl is only slightly cheaper but not always.
There are probably many small, local shops that might be able to fix up rollers for printers, but it's not like they advertise a lot. And among printers the word of such places gets passed around slowly.

So one day I'm cruisin' the web looking at websites & blog pages of other letterpress shops (and studios). One of 'em, Joie Studio, had a blog, wherein the proprietess, Tina, wrote about her setting up her printshop – er, studio. One entry was about her having found a source of roller rehabilitation in her own neighborhood, a place called Ramco Roller Products. Out in San Dimas, California. Run by a fellow Tina identified as Adrian.
I went through the usual search on the InterWebs for the place recommended and, upon finding an email address, I sent off a query to Adrian on getting rollers for the Gordon done up.
Now prior to this I'd done business on three occasions that I remember with Brown Regrinding. I'd gotten new rubber rollers for the 10x15 for about $200. A set of brand new rollers for a rehabilitated 7x11 Pearl Improved cost me about $180. I was impressed with the rollers I got back for the two presses. I still have the 10x15 running and I've had absolutely no problems with those rollers for over eight years now.
Then Brown Regrinding went out of business.
A bunch of folks in the letterpress game noticed the closing and many bemoaned the end of access to a reliable, quality source for economical rubber roller services. Of course the word of this closing got around eventually to those needing or wanting the kind of service that Brown Regrinding had provided. If the company had been "on the web" the news of the closing might have gotten around quicker.
It works like that any more: you gotta have a web presence.

A day after I'd sent off my query I got an email back from Adrian Ramos, who runs the shop. Adrian gave a bit of background on his company, mentioning that the company had been making rollers for printers for 25 years. He said that the rollers for the Gordon, based on the meager information I'd given him, would cost $55 each.
I put the rollers – two with compo on 'em and one a home-brew stock made of 7/16 steel bar stock – in a box and sent 'em off to Adrian.
A couple days later, I got an email from Adrian saying that he'd received the stocks and that they'd been finished very quickly. He also mentioned that I'd estimated the cost of shipping a bit too high and that he'd be sending me a check for the overage.
A couple days later a check arrived; within the week the rollers were on my front porch, delivered by one of two friendly & often-seen UPS delivery guys.

I am known as a pretty cynical, mean old curmudgeonly gringo. I agree most of the time with that assessment. But there's something about even-handed, fair & honest workmanship that I find impossible to dismiss. When I see timely and careful attention to quality or excellence, I am very deeply impressed.
The rollers I got back from Ramco Roller Products are every bit the quality of what printers used to see from Brown Regrinding.
I'm amazed that the folks I know in letterpress printing don't know about Ramco. You'd think, what with the so-called letterpress revival & and the space it's taken up on the InterWebs, that Ramco Rollers would be known across the letterpress and printing spectrum, even without a web presence. Which is why I'm bringing this to whoever it is reads my blather.

So here's the deal: Ramco Roller Products does roller rehab for letterpress printers. They have a quick turn-around, even for small fish like myself, and the work is excellent. The rollers that I have on the Gordon carry ink nicely & evenly. They're just the right elasticity or durometer or whatever to use in letterpress and, with Morgan Expansion trucks on the press, it's easy to set the rollers for type-high and go on with a job.
I'm making a flat out recommendation: If you need rollers for your press, send Adrian an email [adrianramco[at]yahoo.com] and get his price list. Or call him up (909.592.1002). You'll find an economical source for quality rollers for you press. Even that one you have that you made roller cores out of steel bar stock.

The Tagalong Press Web Site

2008-03-17T11:48:00.000-07:00

When the InterWebs first became available to mere mortals I was only peripherally involved in what's today called "educational technology." Soon enough, however, I learned that it was quite easy to use any number of software programs to build a web page. Of course back then all that really happened was the software's taking your graphical cues from mouse & keyboard settings and turning that into HTML, which was subsequently displayed more or less the way you want it to.
Over the course of time I soon enough learned the basics of HTML code, which allowed me to do things that the original design software either ignored or was outright incapable of fudging into what I wanted. Added to my growing understanding of how easy it was to use somebody else's design code for my own page work, this made it easy for me to dream up work-arounds in other folks' code so mine would look a bit different here or there in the process.
Then I discovered blogging.
Once I had my first blog up and verbose, I began looking at how the blog's basic background worked. Now this was a bit after I'd come to understand – for a little understanding as I might ever know – how consolidated style sheets (CSS) worked. Together with that knowledge and my working out the arcane code structure involved in the blog pages I eventually settled on a background and look that I could mess with and still find graphically inviting to readers.
Soon enough I set up my second blog, which was my first truly disbelief &/or anti-superstitionist writing. When I set that one up I took a different tack in the coding of the page lay out and eventually was able to adapt different versions of it for my third blog, a ham radio foray named after the ham radio gang I hung with back in the early 70s, Late Night Radio.
At about this point I went back over my then-extant web sites and gave them the renewed look of what I was happy with on my blogs. That, of course led me to cut back a lot on the stuff I'd done in web page construction and eventually clean up what was a real hell-hole of butchered code & horrible lay out.

Which brings us to today . . .

One of the many things that I liked about the InterWebs and the abililty for normal bean heads such as myself was the public exposure. And even when "they" said that such exposure only opened a person up to identity theft & all its wonders, I still thought "Nah, not me."
As if.
Simple fact is, and plainly put, having a web presence is like asking for trouble.
It's like living in a hippie house back in the 60s and hanging a big sign in the upstairs window that screams "BUST ME! BUST ME NOW!" at passing police cars.
And having gone through that once in my life, I'm reluctant to even think about having it happen again. Which it did, I might add, at some point in the not too distant past with the sudden appearance of six different people with my exact names on three or four web sites & chat/instant messenger boards.
Even one of my co-workers had a conversation with me while the real me was sitting right there next to my co-worker watching this all go down.
The wimp pussied out when I took the keyboard.
Undaunted by even that, I have kept some web presence for my ego to gloat over. Along the way I managed to clean up my basic pages and even develop a page set for the ham radio hobby side of my being. And, as President Kennedy said ". . . and do these other things."

So here and now, at this very moment unless you read this later, I am finally putting up a web site about my printing hobby. It's full of gratuitously self-promoting bullshit about me, how I came to learn how letterpress printing works and how I have managed to cobble together a collection of abused and ancient pieces of gear in the pursuit of hoarding stuff in my garage.
Little else can explain it.
So there you have it: I have letterpress print shop web site. You can go to it now, if you wish. Just remember, when you do, that I am really not quite done with it.
Before long I'll have even more pictures of stuff nobody wants to know about and even a database that you can download to view of my collection of type by face, font, foundry, case number & approximate estimated date of casting.

Have a nice trip. Mind your ps and qs

Teach? Hell No! I'm Lucky to Have Fingers!

2008-03-04T07:31:00.000-08:00

As you and whoever else is up for reading my stuff every now and then should know, I look for things that are tangential to my interests. Thus I look for letterpress and studio to see how many young whipper-snappers there are out in WebLandia setting up shop to smash type & ruin old equipment. Sometimes I look for C&P Pilot to see how many folks have one, think they need one or otherwise are into having a small, cast iron, side lever platen press in their lives or kitchens. Other times I look for other presses or combinations of press and letter &c just to get some feel for how quick Google will find me.
But today's topic is about a combination of the above three search examples.
Today is about C&P Pilot presses used by young whipper-snappers setting up letterpress studios and who then somehow feeling competent enough to teach the subject. Part of this, I am sure, comes from the desire to show off all the stuff the young whipper-snapper has to the folks who decide that they want to get into what Elbert Hubbard and William Morris – among other arts & crafts folks – got into two centuries back.
Everybody loves show and tell.
If you go to the web and look, you'll see 'em: folks teaching letterpress. Most of 'em are younger 'n my sons or at least not as old as the oldest. Some are old geezers like me who learned about this stuff from someone young enough to be their grandkids. Either way it works out that a lot of silly stuff gets passed on and nobody reads the books.
And yes, there are books about letterpress. Here's one and here's another and here's a third and a fourth.

So let's start with the press. Like the big cast iron thing you smash type with. There are many of 'em out there in WebLandia and many more sitting in basements & other places since grandpa died that are never seldom considered until after the estate auction.
Given that no American company has made any platen presses of a size easy enough to move into your garage or basement since about 1952, many of the presses still extant and not yet in museums or on junk piles have minor problems, rust being the easiest of the lot to see.
A fair number of what's available have minor problems like missing rollers or a broken bracket to hold the feed and delivery boards. Some have been partially disassembled and of those many of the missing parts have already been sent off to India to turn into cheap doorknobs. A handful of the disassembled are laying in weed patches behind some greasy pile of dirt known locally as "the scrap yard." And then there are the ones that have been broken because stupid people with no common sense and absolutely no consideration for the laws of physics regarding leverage and force have tried to either move the presses partially disassembled or have broken pieces here and there in the process of disassembly. And then there are the ones that have been disassembled so another broken press can be repaired with pieces of an otherwise useable press somewhere else.
And if that sounds dour and grim, tough. That's how it works.
This is, however, where the beginners come in.
See, many beginners have no idea what they're getting into. They've seen it on youtube.com or they have a friend who has seen it on youtube or maybe they have a friend who took a course with some local letterpress beginner who has since seen the affair in bits and pieces on youtube.
Most of these folks are as dim as I am. If it weren't for all the safety doodads they'd have stuck their fingers under the running lawnmower just to see if the blade was sharp.
Yeah, those kinds of idiots.
Unbeknownst to most folks, printing is a serious business that takes advantage of some and overcomes many of the laws of physics. In any kind of printing there's the need to make chemical changes happen on paper so the ink stays there and still manages to be crisp and clear. It does this, one way or the other, by applying serious pressure to paper and type (or another transfer medium) so as to start the chemical process on its way.
The amount of pressure is really obscene. In letterpress printing it works out to about 175 lbs per square inch being applied at the face of the type to the paper. On a platen press this pressure is distributed across the cross sectional area of the platen where the transfer takes place. On a cylinder press this pressure is applied briefly along the length of the impression roller across the type.
Either way, given the stress involved, you'd think that presses are pretty damn durable. And they are. They're designed to compress and release that kind of pressure in a constrolled way. But they are not designed to have similar pressures applied to other parts of the press mechanism. Thus, if someone is disassembling a floor-mounted press and is in the process of removing the draw bars from the bed without anyone to hold the bed up, should the bed fall backwards – and believe me, it will – the supports for the bed at the bottom of the press are going to break. They are not part of the compression process. They are hinge points.
And even if someone's standing back there to hold the damn thing up, unless they have a place to rest the bed end of the mechanism before it hits the deck, the same hinge points will break. That's 'cause the mechanism and hinge points were not designed for the stress of a 500 lb chunk of metal pulling the hinges up from where the press usually sits on the deck in operating condition.
Simple physics. Any moron with eyes and sense of how things break could see it up front and country simple.
But beyond that, there's all the bits and pieces of half-disassembled and commonly broken presses that people think they can cobble together, which is why folks will buy a "press" in the condition shown above. And then, when they come up with a broken piece such as shown here, they ask if it's repairable.
No. It ain't repairable.
The point of enquiry is a connecting point between the draw bars that pull the platen to the type. Remember the 175 lbs per square inch thingie?
So short of finding another C&P Pilot (which is what we're looking at here) with all its parts or with just the parts needed to put another one back together in working condition to build a press, the money spent on the broken pieces and the basic guts of the machine may as well have gone down the toilet or into the hands of a InterWeb phishing outfit.
This "press" ain't reparable. You want to fix it?
Find another one that has all its parts.
Simple enough.

At the same time as all this is going through my head from seeing one photo on the InterWebs, I'm thinking about how I'm moving with restoring a 1874-vintage George Phineas Gordon 9x13 platen press. This is one of those rare presses that, for the most part has all its original parts. The only new stuff on it are the roller trucks, a couple pieces of metal that have gone walk about but which can be replaced or recovered with locally available brass or steel stock. It's got years of oil and probably a couple decades of ink on it here and there. But it cycles cleanly and runs smoothly and, other 'n needing rollers recast or replaced, it's all there and ready to dance.
Back when Mikey & I put the bed back on, I'd by that time already gotten the weight of the bed up off the deck and had reinstalled the roller arms. The roller arms are necessary because the main draw bars connect the bed to an eccentric shaft that works the throw off. (The mechanism is the same on a C&P floor press except that the position of the shaft in the mechanism is reversed.) So I had the bed up on blocks and the hinge pin in and we were all set to lift. Once we got the beast up there, the weight on the hinge pins was the weight of the bed & frame. Once we got the draw bars on and then the one larger draw bar that cycles the roller arms and initiates the closing of the platen to the bed, all we had to do was tighten nuts & bolts.
Now all of this was easy cake to Mikey & me. Mike had been there when Tom & I took the beast apart and he'd seen how the mechanism required the bed standing off the floor until the hinge pin was out.
So here I am with a nearly perfectly working press from the old days. I don't know how many of 'em there are, but I'd guess a bet that there are probably not more than 100 sitting in shops in working order. There are just too many places to mess up the cast iron. I know that 'cause I've seen one side casting of a similar press leaning against a garage wall with the front foot broken off.
And the only thing I can say about that is that the broken piece was leaning on the wall of a garage in a house owned by a printer. I can only guess at how he broke that. Shudder to think that he thought he knew what he was doing.

Hey! Check This Out, Yo!

2008-02-25T09:11:00.000-08:00

Everybody who's ever taken a course or who has read the book knows that one of the first things to do when putting a form in a chase & then putting that on the press involves moving the grippers.
For the uninitiated or those unschooled in the mysteries, the grippers are the two finger thingies on the platen of the press which usually stand off the platen when the press is open. The job of the grippers is simple: hold the paper down as the type pulls away from the printed sheet so the sheet doesn't get picked up off the platen and set to wrapping up on the rollers.
If you leave the grippers inside the frame of the form – as in: you leave the grippers too much toward whatever edge the form is going to take – the grippers will be between the type and the paper when the press closes. Thus the grippers will be where the type is going to hit the paper, but because the grippers are in the way, the type will be pressed against the metal grippers with a force of some 170 ft/lbs per square inch.
That's a nice way of saying that the type is going to get smashed into the grippers.
If the type gets smashed by the grippers, all the letters in the form making contact with the grippers will be ruined.
Type that's smashed into grippers is usually very far from type-high when the press opens. Such type might get inked but it will no longer meet the paper and if it still does, whatever it was supposed to look like will not be what it will look like.

That's a cardinal rule of letterpress: move the damn grippers to the outside of their place on the platen so you can check and set the form prior to printing.

Now there's another minor codicil to this rule, that being the mandatory removal of any extension fingers attached to the grippers under the same provision of not smashing the type.
And you'll notice that I said "removal of any extension fingers," not just moving them one way or the other so the type is out of harm's way.
Failure to remove the extension fingers might work out if the fingers are out of the way, but if you're using the simple spring type fingers that just clip on the grippers there's always the possibility that the finger will get moved or nudged.
Imagine then that you're putting the chase in the press from the belt wheel side and your arm happens to nudge the finger off the gripper so the finger is pointed down across where the form is going to fit.
If such is what happens, you might, in a moment all too easy for a beginner, run the press closed to check the impression against the draw sheet without ever noticing that the finger is going to be dead under the type.
If such is the case, you'll have sheet that looks like the one to the upper right here.
If such is the case, you'll open the press and immediately see that you've ruined a stretch of type going from the middle of the page downward over a good inch or two of the form.
If such is the case you'll swear to yourself and then you'll sit down and look at what you've done and realize that you have only two options:

1. You are going to have to sit down and set every damn one of every damn line that you've ruined . . . or
2. You're going to have to sit down and individually try to reset the last inch or so of every line on that side of the page because of what you did.

And either way, you know from experience that, unless you fix what you've fouled up, the page is going to look like the example to the right, with an open space the exact shape and size of the finger where the type (now ruined) used to be.

And that's the most cardinal rule of all: if you smash the type, it ain't gonna print.

So for me, the answer was to sit down and pick through the form, line by line and letter by letter, replacing every single piece of type on that section of the form. And when all was said and done, I still had to fiddle with the spacing so the form would lock up solidly without too much jimmying around.
And every single piece of type that I pulled from the form to fix my foul-up went straight into the hell box with the other bits and pieces of metal that have either been cut off, cut up or otherwise taken out of service.
Yeah, all that 10 pt Century Schoolbook, most of it ATF casts with some F&S Type Foundry sorts mixed in, all of it went into the hell box.
And the only consolation in that will be that some day the contents of the hell box will end up in the pot of somebody's caster and the tiny bit of foundry metal therein recycled will add to the hardness of whatever is cast from the contents.

Not much of a consolation prize, really.

The worst part of this is that over the next half hour or so after I'd squashed the type I had two more episodes of fighting with the extension finger problem. This was because, as I slipped the chase into the press from the belt wheel side again, I noticed that my left arm came down on the part of space where the extension finger was still none-too-firmly clipped to the gripper.
Twice.
Two more chances to smash type again.
Two more moments when – and before which – it became clear to me that the problem was not so much my leaving the finger on the gripper but more one of my damn arm getting in the way.
So I tried putting the chase in the press from the delivery board end and decided that my slowly aging vertebral parts were not quite up to the task of hoisting that much metal across that much space.
And thus I grabbed the finger and pulled it off the gripper and stuffed it in the drawer under the delivery board where I keep such items as extension fingers, a pencil and a small jar of Badger Balm.
This action, however late it might have been, prompted me than to grab a hank of string off a nearby shelf and use the string – tied between the grippers – to replace the metal of the extension finger.

Some time later, after all was done and the press was cleaned up and the used type returned to a galley for later distribution, it came to me that this was a good object lesson in paying attention. That and it would give me a chance to show off how good I was at messing things up.
It also gave me pause to consider how much money would have gone into what I'd done, were I running the print shop as a business or was otherwise deluded into thinking that I had a studio.
I figure I wasted a couple hours, which would be an easy $30 by today's money and a small hank of type, probably some $50 by today's money. So all-in-all, I'd messed things up good enough that, were this a money-makin' shop – I'd have been cussed at, threatened and maybe, on a bad day, fired for my lack of attention to cardinal rules.

The lesson thus learned is that I am just as fallible as the next non-pope and that, for all my carping about how things are "supposed to be done," I had no grounds for making any more of a case for what was once an art and a profession (as opposed to an art studio thing on the tail-end of a graphic arts degree) than I do for carping about all the people who have printing studios.

Wanna bet I do it again? Within a couple weeks?

Them Good Ol' Days Are Gonna Cost You Now

2008-02-06T08:30:00.000-08:00

Life must have been very interesting in the early 19th Century. That was back when a man could break his back all day long, six or seven days a week, and come home to his wife and family with a dollar in his pocket.
Yeah, a whole dollar in his pocket.
'Course there were things that the dollar could buy and there were things that a dollar all by its lonesome couldn't buy. But that was what a hard-working stiff could expect as pay at the end of the week back around 1820 or so.
And the banks printed their own money, too.
Yep, life must have been very interesting. All that penny candy and all those penny dreadfuls and all that food at a nickel and a dime. Oh what that kind of money could get a hard-working stiff.
Not to mention the increase in earning power after the Civil War and the true kick-ass onset of the industrial revolution. Iron foundries pounding out bits and pieces of this and that, hard metal shipped and machined and finished and polished and painted so it would look pretty in the barn or on the shop floor.

You have to see it that way, the advances in technology.

Back during the Korean War medics and doctors noticed the large number of men with leg wounds also had the worse circulation in those extremities. Arterial deposits & disease, something that had been around diagnosed but seriously not all that urgently treated, suddenly got notice.
It was the beginning of the world's acknowledgement of blood chemistry. And that led to the chemistry of life, the recognition of the structure of DNA, the double helix, the beginnings of research into the genome, which led to a new understanding of what life itself is all about.
All about life is dedicated to one task: the survival of the DNA.
Such a thought, such a recognition of life as a strangely interlaced physics experiment running on molecular engines scares the hell out of people. It means that life itself has no real purpose, no higher purpose, no grander goal.

You have to see it that way: advances in technology.

Such a microscopic view of existence, the world viewed through a electron microscope is the alternate parallel of the beginnings of the industrial revolution and the one dollar-a-week pay envelope. Now we are so sure of what's going on inside that we've begun to see flowers a different way.
Flowers become elements in the chemistry of DNA being moved around and mitigated by chunks of DNA that fly around with chunks of DNA attached to their legs.
Flowers, for all their beauty to the eye of a creature with reflective consciousness – and yeah, I'm talkin' about you and me, pilgrim – are really just replication machines to keep the DNA around.

Weren't always that way, of course. Back when it was a dollar-a-week world, people painted flowers on machines because, if you follow the delusion that life has a higher goal, a more sensitive focus, machines are things of beauty that give a brighter meaning to life.
Machines allow humans to undo a fair amount of drudgery from their lives, even if those who build the machines are pulling their own share of drudgery.
And since machines do that – that giving of a brighter meaning and a meaningful future – they are part of the beautiful interaction of life. Not a beautiful interaction of molecules and atoms and molecular structures like we sense today at the benefit of science and technology, but the sunlight-in-your-eye sense of life as purposeful and meaningful and contributory.
That's why old steam tractors have gold pin-striping on the spokes of their flywheels and why the levers and handles of the steam drive machine shop drill presses were painted red and decked with little splashes of blue and green. That's why old machines sometimes look much more beautiful than any thing you can buy today made out of plastic.

And for those who are into letterpress printing often spend time cleaning up and repainting machines from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries so they look as bright and beautiful as something just offloaded from the rail car down by the telegraph office and the sheriff's office.
You have to see it that way, from a time before technology had miniaturized life and made the commonness of it so absolutely uninspiring . . . at least to those who are inspired more by old delusions of higher power and higher purpose.
All the same, you have to admit that the painted spokes on the flywheel of a 19th Century cast iron press do look pretty when the machine's at rest. You'll also have to admit that a press in that condition, with the spokes pin striped and the flywheel rim painted a bright white and the manufacturer's name on the draw bars outlined in gold is something that looks more like a sculpture than a machine.
Perhaps the closest you can get to that beauty, that finesse and loveliness in today's world is a carefully preserved & sweetly treated Shelby Mustang, say, circa 1958. You might have heard of one but the chances are good – unless you one of those who believes with religious ferocity in Mustangs – that you've never seen one in your life, let alone on the road.

That kind of pretty.

Thus you have the pictures of printing presses placed around this text. The Golding Jobber above is a serious museum-grade piece of sculpture that has obviously been decked out in all the finery that it might have had when it was built, somewhere between 1890 and 1927.
Other similar beasts show up now and then on eBay, a few of which are shown here. Notice the florets and piping, the simple little adornments of what you or I might take as quaint moments in time from a society that we have lost.
While you're admiring the nice lines and the shiny metalwork, pay attention to a simple fact: every one of these presses was produced first by an ironworks, a foundry where the hot, molten steel & iron was poured in to sand molds. Consider what the heat and dust and smell must have been like in those factories.
Charcoal and coal fired furnaces melted the metal and huge amounts of particulate matter was belched into the air by those fires. What didn't get sent up a flue or chimney was inhaled by the workers or the folks who lived nearby.
All that heat and all that metal, molten or not, was worked in a time before health and safety agencies of the federal or state governments even thought to consider the dangers that factory workers faced. The sheer tonnage of equipment and the tonnage of the products of those plants could crush a limb or a finger. Flying metal could blind or lacerate anyone.
The machine tools that ground down bearing surfaces and finished & leveled the material didn't have safety guards and the drive systems themselves were exposed belts and pulleys. There was no room for error.
And then someone had to paint those flywheels and stand castings. Someone had to finish by hand various parts and bits that were also eventually painted, often with lead-based paints that ran like water into buckets and drums.
All the pretty colors of the rainbow, poisonous.
All the mass of the machinery, deadly.
And a finished product that cost quite a bit more, unit by unit, than the dollar a week that the workers got – and these would only be the high-end workers who finished and polished and assembled the presses. More often than not it was children or women doing the finish work. And children are not that big a deal. You can pay 'em pennies and they'll do the job. If they don't or won't, well, fire 'em and get another. Just like the kids who treadled these presses day after day & got paid by the piece.

Yeah, It's a Video. So what?

2008-01-26T17:28:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-20T13:30:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-17T11:35:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-14T10:09:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-12T20:35:00.000-08:00

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 . . .

2008-01-11T06:38:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-06T08:24:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-05T07:40:00.000-08:00

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.

Maize Jenny Pawed a Studio

2007-12-18T05:02:00.000-08:00

There's a scene I remember from a Monty Python movie – possibly The Meaning of Life -- where Death has shown up at a door of a house where some British folks are entertaining guests from Gringoland. Death is there to do a job but he's been mistaken for one of the local rustics, and thus ends up at the table with the Brits & the Gringos.
Something about the Gringos pisses Death off so much that he finally speaks, saying something like "You Americans are all so bloody pompous!"
As a Gringo and as a person who has lived in what could be called Third World societies, I think I know what Death in the movie was talking about.

There's a certain kind of self-absorbed, petty, puerile, self-aggrandizing sense of self-importance that hangs over many Gringos. It also is part and parcel of most cultures in that there's always somebody who thinks that what he or she does is the most damned important thing on the planet, even if it is nothing but changing the bed linen in a $20-a-night motel off some rural state route. Even if Buddha says that all work is important.
Sometimes this is to be expected. Everybody wants their presence on the planet to be part of the grand cosmic plan. Everybody likes to feel that they have some kind of value to the ongoing process of the universe. It comes with the frontal lobe.
On the other hand there are some who look at what little they know about something artsy and see themselves as artists. From graphic artist I suppose. Thus such artists figure that they don't have a shop or a business. They have a studio. Like a letterpress studio. You know. You've seen 'em. You might even know somebody who has one. Hell, you might even have one your own self, bein' an artist and all.

A studio.

Now somewhere in the deep past there might have been a time where a printer's digs were connected with the art of making something out of colored materials and paper. Like the artistry in a page of illuminated text from a hand-copied book. That kind of art. And it would make sense anyway, going on what other languages say about print shops.
L'atelier in French, for example, is a word that can be translated into an artist's "studio," except that it also means shop as in work shop. Or printery.
In Spanish it's taller and means the same things as the French word from which it is obviously derived.
So I have an atelier, although I'd be hard pressed even on a good day to call it a "studio" because I do arty stuff in there. And when I talk about the shop in Spanish I always call it el taller.
Es un taller, my shop.
But it ain't no studio, see?
I don't look at it as some sort of space with big windows letting in the sunlight so that my sense of color and tint may regale itself in the beauty of what's smeared and rolled out across the ink disk. Even if that does look a lot less like the catacomb place in the garage that I presently share with my wife's car.

Simple put, it's a print shop, not a pompous little studio.

I bring all this up because I had a conversation with a friend in Michigan who told me that I would never be a hip sort of printer smashing expensive type into expensive paper because I didn't have a studio. I asked him if he was still calling his type casting operation a type foundry.
Neither of us could come up with a good word to explain that, at least in English.
See, the whole thing about a studio versus a print shop or whatever is how the word shop shows up in French & Spanish, which might explain where nominally monolingual Gringos would misinterpret something and call a print shop a studio.
In the long-back there was a word in French for shop. L'atalier, as previously noted. It shows up in English since about 1840, at which time it was where the artist hung out, although it's got a more down-to-earth meaning (as in: work shop ) by about 1890.
For those less pompous the word taller is used in Spanish to name auto garages where you'd get your car fixed. Or a place where you show up for work. And given that my printery is now seriously in the garage – as opposed to behind a wall in the garage building – I'd be tempted to get snooty enough about it to say that I had un taller by the Spanish definition.

But un taller does not a studio make. Not even in French.

Having thus gotten this far, I might mention that what I enjoy most about letterpress printing, other than the huge amounts of time that I can waste out there en el taller just cleaning up, is the joy of being able to do something so completely mechanical to the end of producing algo tan artistico.
I can't think of anything more studio-ish.
But I am not in the mood to have a studio if having a studio means that I have lost all contact with the grapheme in a wild misunderstanding of what letterpress is all about.
See, I look at what letterpress does as a part of a grapheme-ordered communications system that reaches back to cuneiform, if not before. Letterpress finds its most beautiful example in the graven images of Egyptian hieroglyphs and eventually gets to hand-copied, illuminated pages before showing up at Gutenberg's type-founding atelier millennia later. And to me that's the beauty of it, a beauty that, for all of the artsy stuff involved, does not come out of a studio like a painting of a sunset or a can of soup.
Printing is an ancient tradition of communication using graphemes to represent sound. I don't see that happening in a studio because human speech doesn't happen in a studio and because the communication of ideas is itself outside of locus. I don't talk or think or write from a studio. I don't read in a studio, although I may study what I read. My changing of speech sounds to graphemes be no different.
I have a print shop, not a studio, even if Buddha does say that all work is important or that I might be an artist. Unless you want to take the tack that everyone is an artist in that they manage, in some form or the other, to create themselves out of experience and education and never truly finish that evolution until they snuff it, at which point they become memories, which in themselves can be creative, which goes to the failure of coincidence thing again . . .

Where the Hell Did You Learn That?!

2007-12-12T08:10:00.000-08:00

One of the first memories I have of my father & his print shop is standing in front of his press, staring at the treadle. I remember this most easily because I had been told early on in life to leave Dad's stuff alone. Get hurt. Lose fingers. But I also remember one day in Indianapolis when I got snagged by the neighbor's rose bush by the fence and thought "If I just slip my hand away contrary to the way I was moving, it won't hurt." So at some point I stood in front of that press and thought that it would be easy to push the treadle as long as I didn't put my fingers anywhere near the rest of the mechanism.
So I did it. I put my foot on the treadle and, since the treadle was at the bottom of its movement relative to the press, nothing happened.
I remember smiling.
And I remember ratting myself out to Dad later on – maybe a few days later – and not catching hell for it. From that it's quite easy for me to understand how that moment became one of the first memories I have of my father's shop.
The next real memory I have is having learned at some point early on how to hold a composing stick. I think there might have been a lay-of-the-case lesson in there somewhere, but the proper way of holding the stick is a solid memory.
After that we get to the lesson of how to lock up a form in the chase, even if it's a linoleum block or maybe a couple lines of type. That memory is solid because it's associated with my wanting to have a business card like the character Paladin had in the television western Have Gun, Will Travel. To that end I had carved a lino cut of the chess piece on the card and then, having printed that, setting the words in type, followed by the lesson about locking up the form.
As general knowledge this information was stored in memory by the reinforcement of having pilfered my way through some composition for a business card that I printed, first for a now-defunct and then barely-existent jazz band, and later for a hippie Indian music "group" that I'd formed in a moment of considerable petrification.
So let's just say that I learned enough early on to print on my own and not pinch my fingers. And that I had this knowledge stuffed away somewhere when, after Dad died, I started reconnecting myself with a piece of his past that I could keep alive in me. But it was not a single-handed venture at all. Years in college and years of time spent keeping up with the rest of the planet long before had made a book-reader of me. And I can easily credit my mother most with that, since she taught my sister and me to read before we got to kindergarten age.

I remember at some point in the process of setting type for the jazz band thinking "There's got to be some kind of reference book around here." It only made sense at the time because Dad was a collector of books and reference books in particular. He had two or three dictionaries, a couple thesauri, a book on rhetoric & a few other word and language-related books. I couldn't imagine that he wouldn't have a book on printing around as well. But all my searches and all the cobwebs I pulled out of my then resplendent mane proved fruitless.
"Papa i no got buk tasol," as they say in Tok Pijin.
Thus, when it was time for me to re-establish my understanding of the art of printing and thus keep my father's memory most alive in me, I turned again to the world of reference material and found The Practice of Printing by Ralph W. Polk in the university library. I checked the book out on the usual thirty days allowed faculty & staff and then renewed that check out another couple weeks.
Everything in the book was familiar territory to me: the composing stick, the lock up, the press parts, the strings around the forms and the proper use of furniture, leading, quoins, gauge pins, tympan paper, make-ready, all of it. What I knew about but didn't know I learned from that book and all the while it was as if my father were standing there behind me urging me on, reminding me of this or that signature moment in whatever memories I revived.
I must have gotten pretty good at it, 'cause it just worked out so well. Over the course of the next ten or twelve years I managed to get high honors and awards from the two amateur press and hobby printer organizations to which I held membership. I got awards for writing and overall excellence on what was, in the end, a one-off sort of ephemera that will clutter a special collection somewhere after I've snuffed it.

My reset of the print shop clock dates back now nearly 25 years. Since that time and up to the present, every lesson I learned from my father, from books and from others in the printing game has made absolute sense.
Physics is a very broad discipline and its laws and rules and theories cover all the bases. You cannot expect things to stay in place if you only smash 'em together with one clamp. You cannot expect things to not wear down if you don't provide enough lubrication or isolation of parts rubbing together. You cannot print well if you don't lock up the form correctly, pay attention to how you hold the composing stick or perform other actions that prove a serious flaw in research or learning.

Así la vida. Such is life, as Dad said. That's the way it plays.

Prior to a recent discovery I did not know that letterpress was still interesting to anyone. Prior to that recent discovery I did not know that there are younger folks interested in this as a hobby – or, perhaps more importantly, as a business – and from that ignorance comes a huge lesson. It's a lesson that reinforces what I know and what my father taught me about setting up a job and getting it on the press and off again. The lesson comes down to a simple question:

Who the hell is teaching these people?

Look at the picture stolen off page 106 of Practice of Printing. It shows a form locked up in a chase. It's noted as the way to lock up a two column form. The same rules of locking up a single column or one line of type or a lino block of a chess piece. You'll notice that there are quoins on two sides, confirming the existence of a simple law of physic having to do with squeezing stuff so it don't fall out of the chase.
Now look at the next picture. It's a picture off the web, off a website that claims allegiance to letterpress printing. It's almost the same form that is shown in a video where the presenter shows how to set type in the stick and how to lock the form up in a chase. And we'll get to the other problems in that video (and subsequent pictures on a web site) later. For right now let's just say that this picture is a fine example of a bad lock up.
See, the laws of physics say that the form shown is going to spring. The only tension holding the few lines of type in the chase – and notice they're all different lengths – is one quoin. Just one.
Now the way I was taught, a form is square first and tight second. If you start out setting in 20 picas and you have 10 picas full of copy and it needs to be centered, quad the line out until it's tight. Then the next line, on a 20 slug, for whatever space it takes and quad that one center. In the picture here, every line appears to be set on its own slug and none of them are square to the rest. It's a ragged looking lock up and, if the press were something more speedy than a Kelsey P, I'd bet the type would come flyin' out of the chase & make interesting noises as it passed through the press to the deck beneath.

Who the hell is teaching these people?

And then there's the packing, which in the next picture you will notice is comprised of the drawsheet paper and nothing more. In other words, the distance between the type and the steel of the platen is whatever micrometer's thickness the drawsheet. Only that and nothing more, Lenore. Only that and nothing more.
Now I know for a fact that there's supposed to be a chunk of press board in there, mainly 'cause (a) that's the way Dad did it, (b) that's the way I was taught to do it and (c) it says about as much on page 124 of Polk's book. To wit:

"The tympan usually consists of one or two sheets of pressboard, possibly a sheet of tag, and three or four sheets of book paper, under a heavy manila drawsheet. A hard tympan, i.e., one consisting of hard materials, is ordinarily better than tympan of soft packing, as the former gives a sharp, strong impression, without punching the type into the paper. It also causes less wear on the type. The platen should be adjusted for an even impression."

Which is exactly as I was taught and is exactly what was taught – at least until the "revival" of letterpress began, probably upon the death of so many folks who really know how it works – by folks using Ralph Polk's book as well as many other such books from era of letterpress.

So either I'm nuts, the books are wrong or somebody ain't payin' attention. And the question of "Who the hell is teaching these people?" really should be more like "Where the hell did you learn that? with an interrobang on the end. That is, after all, what we're talking about here.
Somebody ain't doin' the research. There's tons of reference materials out there and nobody seems to either know about 'em or even want to know about 'em. And that leads to horrible violations of the laws of physic and a horrible break in the continuation of an artform that has for a long time recognized the need for a vigilance toward the laws of physics.
In order to dispel any further contention that I am a snooty old man stubborn to the extreme, let me say right now that I am simply trying to point out what I have seen as error on the part of some folks who went to the trouble of putting a helluvalot of effort into their web space and youtube.com space where such effort would be best served (if not better served) if they'd put some research time into how letterpress printing is supposed to work.
If this makes me a snooty old man stubborn to the extreme, tough.
And this is not to say that I am the pope. Like all monkeys with frontal lobes I do make mistakes and I have done shitty work. I have misspelled, misspoken and crushed my share of type. And not wanting to sound like Jimmy Swaggart, I will admit freely here and now that "I have sinned before yewwww!" Y-e-dubya!
It is to say that if you want to do something, you have a fifty-fifty shot.
You can either do a full ass job or a half ass job. And from what I've seen in my recent explorations of what is supposed to be a "revival" of letterpress printing and interest in such is pretty scary. Almost as scary as a half ass job.
So here's that book title again: The Practice of Printing, Ralph W. Polk, 1959. You can buy it online as noted or you can search it on Abebooks.com and/or Alibris.com.
Also from the Polk brothers is Elementary Platen Presswork
There's also this 'n, a bit more recent and, since the author does show a proper lockup on the visible pages, probably a good way to start in PostModernist stylee, Letterpress: New Applications for Traditional Skills, David Jury.
Or you could find a copy of Practice of Presswork by Craig Spicher, 1929. That's if you order today. It may not be available in a couple days hence. I might even buy it. Have two copies that way.
An interesting side note to Spicher's book is the fact that it was Linotype/Intertype cast, at least as evidenced by a huge pile of text that stops on one page and continues elsewhere. Once you get past that, it's still a very reasonable how-to & should at least be read if not bought for your library.
And last but not least, there's Printshop Practice by Loomis.

If that ain't enough to get the point across I don't know what'll set the record straight. The way I was taught and the way I learned it and the way I relearned it – and all my experience from handset through the three-magazine Intertype machine that I ran for a while says that what I saw on the InterWeb is wrong. And those who are working like this cannot, in good faith or honesty, call themselves printers.
And for all my mistakes and sloppy work, I will snuff it some day proud to have been taught what I do know by a man who did the work for a long time before he got into hard-core journalism, that kind of journalism that's three or floors up and two hallways away from the composing room or the pressroom. And that man, my father, even to his last days, was a printer. He was a printer and I'm just tagging along.

The Challenge of Art to Psychology

2007-12-07T10:18:00.000-08:00

Last rant ago I mentioned that Dad & Mom had tried to put together and publish on a regular basis a little magazine about arts & crafts. It was a hard haul for them, I'd guess, because the first such venture, Tagalong, didn't get past the second year. The second such try, when we'd moved from Amarillo to Indianapolis, also died a short time after re-entry into the arts & crafts world. That second attempt, The Hobby Shopper, was less print-oriented and more general in scope. The few issues that I have from that time had columns worth of classified advertising, much more than the Texas attempt had had.
I think it'd be safe to venture that the post-WWII world was not quite yet up to speed on arts & crafts as a general activity for the average white American family. Those who were involved in it had other sources of income that allowed for what today would probably be the "Martha Stewart" school of pastimery. To be sure, the print shop was a hobby shop for Dad but it also made a few shekels on the side. The "little magazine" movement was tempting but the realities were something else entirely.

Today I suspect that things are not much different, even with all the TV shows about home-making & crafts & the sorts of busy-hands activities that someone in the broadcast industry thinks will pull in the viewers. Those involved in making money off arts & crafts items seem to put in a lot of overtime just making sure the buying public knows the stuff is out there.
And then there is the so-called "Arts & Crafts" movement, the tip of which iceberg I noticed when I came across the Arts & Crafts Press, publishers of The Tabby, the "Chronicle of the Arts & Crafts Movement."
About six lines into discovering that it costs $65 for a year's subscription to The Tabby, I realized that my parents' attempts at getting into the arts & crafts publishing business was another case of being born too soon. Obviously, and considering that they'd have to give up their day jobs to do it, they would have flourished at least enough to pay their own bills with today's InterWeb allowing people to discover online that which they would pay good money for to read off line.
No, that's not a note of sarcasm.
It's a note of reality.
The reality lies in the obvious amount of time that obviously goes into producing The Tabby. One does not do nouveau arte deco with the colors and typography on the cover (shown above) without some serious time in the linoleum block/wood block engraving room with an order of color separations on the side. All that and the temptation to believe that the journal is printed letterpress (or maybe at least the cover) makes me remember the huge amount of time that my parents spent on just trying to get their dreams running.
The simple realities of my parents' experience, I am sure, drove Mom to go back to grade school teaching and the eventual masters in education which helped pay the bills and allowed my father to get out of printing the "hits list" for his employer's radio station. And even then I know that Dad did odd job printing for other folks with whom he was acquainted. Lawyers, doctors, city officials & the like.

Doing go-it-alone publishing is a killer & whoever goes into it – at least with my parents' lives as witness – should be ready for the interminably long late night hours, the constant attempts at cutting costs without cutting quality and a damn big pile of money growing somewhere to make it all worthwhile. Or to put it another way: if it's too much like real work, it's an enterprise best left to the gifted, wealthy or those blessed with a nearly limitless supply of caffeine or crystal meth.
Falling well outside those limits as I do, you can bet I'll never get involved, even if I have spent weeks and hours hand-setting & printing a twenty-four page whatnot for a printers' hobby organizations "bundle."
Sure, it'd be sweet to have a regular publishing bit to run off as proof that I am among the gifted, even if it were obvious that I ain't wealthy. And I've had enough experience with caffeine and crystal meth to know better.

Thus I am in awe at "The Arts & Crafts Movement" while at the same time envious of them what are able to involve themselves in it enough to make money off it.
It would be nice – and probably run if it weren't such a job – to produce, as I have often before for hobby printers outfits, some trifle of a few dozen pages that would elicit joy or a smile or a laugh or a shake of the head from some reader who, unlike the putative readers of blogs, would take joy from the reading. Be sweet, actually.
I suspect, however, that most of the stuff goes into the various "bundles" of hobby printers' and "amateur journalism" organizations' monthly mailings goes directly from the top of the desk into the recycled paper bin without too much more than a passing of the hand across the sheet. There are only so many joke cards or business cards of four page flimsies that one can collect and tolerate in the domestic environment. A couple years' worth of "bundles" is a huge pile of real estate and a considerable weight. And for as much of a hoarder as I can be (with 18 radios in one room & ten domestic cats running about la estancia) there is only so much ephemera I can handle at one time.
This should make it pretty clear that, while I do enjoy thinking that what I write and print is appreciated deeply over time, I am hip enough to my own assay of the way things work to know better. As I have said elsewhere, I ain't an artist. I don't live in an artists' commune with artists and I am not surrounded by artists sipping mint tea on the front porch while clove cigarettes smolder in the ash tray.
Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe art doesn't have to do anything. It just is, man.
Or not.
Probably or not.
All of this cogitation brings us back to a very simple problem, one that has been explored again and again over the course of human investigations into consciousness. As Lev Vygotsky so quickly noted, art is a challenge to psychology. Art stands in the doorway and blocks the smell of the passing trains. It gets in the way of perfectly hideous waste by giving us sunsets and people sitting on the grass with a Victorian picnic. It gives us literature and statues and even printing presses. And it serves no other purpose, in which state it does posit a direct affront by its place in human consciousness.
And for the life of me I can't figure out what's wrong with that any more than I can figure out why I enjoy printing stuff with old metal type, even if the stuff is something I consider slightly less brilliant than my ruminations in blogolandia. Not that anyone else is gonna notice.
And yeah, that is a "gimme."

Re-Entry

2007-12-01T16:02:00.000-08:00

The irony is not missed on me. I'm starting a blog – one of many such blogs – about a printing technology that everyone thought would disappear with the advent of dirt cheap and graphically ugly computer graphics. For those not schooled in the mysteries, this is a blog about my relationship with old-fashioned, hand-set type, a collection of cast iron printing presses and all the accouterments of a supposedly by-gone era.
And for those unschooled in the irony, it has already struck me strange that I am blogging on a computer keyboard – which affords me limitless "virtual" type and paper – about having limited amounts of type and an ever-more expensive source of paper. But that's what this is and this is the first posting.

Suffice it to say that my childhood knew very few moments when there was not some sort of printing press in the house. A picture of me at the age of two with my father, George Bull Young, in his printery serves as evidence of that. I like to say that at some point he dipped my hands in ink and thus bound me to a servitude from which I have never yet successfully escaped.
Because of that baptism I have always been close to the printed word and from that to the word. Early on I became interested in language, probably because my parents both came from bilingual & immigrant backgrounds. Between what I know about linguistics and what I know about the mindness state and what I know about how type & paper affect the way we understand the grapheme & text, it probably makes sense that I would carry on my father's tradition.
Dad maintained until near his death the myth that he had learned printing from his father. The truth was, his father was a cobbler – and a violent, belligerent drunk – and it's likely that Dad picked up the trade because he needed a job and a relative with a local newspaper showed him how it all worked.
Work was the main reason Dad set up the printery. He started out doing the usual job work on the side: business cards, stationery, multiple copies of letters that someone thought should look like they were typed. At some point Dad fell into the delusion of publishing a "little magazine" and chapbooks. He managed a few copies of Tagalong in Amarillo before recognizing how much work it took out of his day after a regular day at work. When we lived in Indianapolis, he and Mom tried to get The Hobby Shopper off the ground but it also dropped out of existence. When we moved to Dayton, Dad tried for a time to print the "hits list" for a local radio station but it became so horribly time-consuming that he was eventually asked to stop.
During all of this time Dad always had a regular job. He'd gotten into the radio news business after the war and, except for the time he worked at the newspaper in Indianapolis – which was also part of one of the local radio stations – he was a radio newsman all day long. In 1964, when the sound of radio was starting its plunge to today's shock-jock, teenage-prankster, loud-mouth punditry, Dad was let go from the local radio station and, for a while, worked in the printshop of a local Roman Catholic university. Then he got a job as a newspaper journalist with a weekly newspaper and sneaked himself back into heaven.

There is something more substantially creative and satisfying about newspaper work. One way or the other it's always about an elevated presence. What the reporter writes and what the ad salesman puts into print hangs around the house for days. There's a sense of permanence even beyond that in the way that written information seems to live a lot longer in memory than the everyday chatter of what's on the radio today.
It is perhaps that which gave my father the greatest joy: the sense that he would be here even after the door closed and the press had been cleaned up for the night. He came to believe in the printed word very early, I would guess, and it was his constant companion until his last days. And while his voice may still be out in the cosmos as modulation on an electromagnetic wave, his writing and the lessons that I got from his print shop will remain here as long as I'm breathing.

I'll admit straight out that there is a certain egoism in starting a blog, and this blog, despite my tip of the hat to ancestry and custom, is surely as full of egoboo as anything else I might do.
In the interim this blog will sporadically recount the stories of the press and of the amounts of time and money that I spend pushing it all together. And if it also gets me out there in the shop more often – especially if I go out there and do nothing more than clean up and dust – it will be good enough for me.