The Shop

June 5, 2007

Daddy moved the print shop to four different locations in town. All of them were within four or five blocks of each other. As far as I know, he moved because business was growing, and he needed more space. The first shop that I remember was the one closest to the post office. It was there that Momma wrote the epic poem that she used for the Christmas card one year, and we all posed for pictures like printer’s elves. To save money, Momma made only one elf hat, a red cone of slick red paper with a cotton ball at the tip, and we all wore it in turn for our picture. I remember Genna’s picture had her on top of the Harris press, pretending to slather in some ink. Daddy’s picture had him leaning back in his old wooden chair smoking a ceegar with his feet crossed on his desk. I was sitting on what I called the belly-rubber, pouring some oil into the gears. Mom was at the Linotype. I don’t know where Mike was for the pictures that year. The punch line of the poem on the card was something to the effect of we were all working hard while Daddy “supervised.”

I loved our shops.

There was an endless supply of paper of all colors, weight, and finish to play with. There were hundreds of blocks that Daddy used to space out the forms for setting up type, and though Daddy wasn’t crazy about me playing with them (because he had to sort them all back in the right place), sometimes he’d indulge me. The blocks were filed away in an open metal cabinet with slots made just the right size for the width and depth of the block. Daddy knew where each one belonged and could put his hand up and pull out just the one he needed without as much as a glance. All of us kids grew up knowing, just by looking, whether something typed was 18 or 24 or 30 point, and we knew whether the typeface was Bodoni, Times New Roman, Helvetica, or script, we knew the difference between serif and sans serif, and we could read mirror image of type as easily as forwards because that was the easiest way to proofread letterpress.

Daddy’s first print shops were letterpress, naturally. Mom worked in the shop as much as he did, I’m sure, and was hurt when people considered the shops to be Daddy’s. That was the way things were in the 1950s and 1960s.

Becoming a printer came naturally to Daddy. Though his formal education was limited, Daddy was self-educated. Unlike most people, he was thrilled when the World Book Encyclopedia salesman dropped by the house. Even a mule could have sold a set of encyclopedias to this man who had a burning desire to learn. We were the only family I knew who spent the outrageous sum of $75 (on a convenient plan) for a set of encyclopedias in the house. Daddy started at the letter A and read the entire set in order. It was natural that a man interested in the educational power of the printed word would become a printer.

Daddy had a significant printing disability. He was color blind. He wasn’t a little color blind; he was entirely color blind. His world was blacks and grays and whites. If ink dribbled down a can and obscured the name of the color, Daddy would have to search someone out to make sure he was printing with the right color. Occasionally, no one would be around, and Mom would come back from lunch and find that Daddy had printed a stack of order forms in chartreuse ink on green paper rather than black on canary. Daddy would have to start all over.

Mom dealt with the customers and helped typeset. She ran the Linotype, an eloquently-named and magnificent machine that is all but extinct today. I loved to watch her set type. The keyboard resembled a typewriter, but had many more keys. Upper case keys were entirely separate from lower case keys. There were many other keys that had functions of which I was unaware. The keyboard was nearly flat, certainly not ergonomic by any stretch of the imagination. Momma held her hands nearly flat over the keyboard and slid her fingers around, like a Ouija board, lightly touching the keys and starting the sequence of events that would culminate in a line of type. When she touched a key, a brass matrix (I had to look that term up) fell tinkling into an assembler box, followed by others as she moved her hands around the board. If the line was too long, she would have to remove a word or add in a hyphen, and if it was too short, she would have to add spacing keys to justify the line left to right. Momma was incredibly skilled at this work and was efficient and accurate.

When the line of type was ready, she would lift a lever and raise the line up where she would commit it to a mold that would be filled with hellishly hot liquid lead. This would create a lead cast, inelegantly called a slug. These slugs formed the lines of type for print jobs. After the lead was cast, the little matrices would automatically ride in elevator fashion back up to the box (called a magazine) they started in, and would, by means of unique jagged edges, find their own way back to their proper locations. There they would lie in wait for Mom’s light fingers to call them to duty once again. The linotype was extremely eco-friendly. The matrices were used thousands of times and the lead, once a job had been printed, would go back into the hopper for remelting and reuse. Thankfully, the Web has not forgotten the linotype machine and there are still places that use these old machines to produce letterpress print jobs.

Daddy’s favorite press was the Heidleberg. He had served in Germany near the city of the same name during the war and had come to appreciate German efficiency and design. It was the only thing he remembered favorably from that time. My favorite press was the belly-rubber, I don’t know the real name of it. It had a big wheel on one side that could be hand-turned or would run with electricity, and it had a set of rollers it held from both sides of its flat belly with thin iron arms. The arms would roll the rollers down its belly, pick up ink, and roll it back up over its belly. The press would crunch to bring the platen up to the ink, open up again, and then rub its belly back down again to get more ink. It, like all the presses, talked: “WATCH yourself, WATCH yourself,” as the rollers rhythmically went up and down, up and down, and the belly would alternately crunch close and open up as it printed.

Daddy would have already loaded the machine with the type he needed to print the job of the moment. Then he would load the paper, a sheet at a time, waiting for the belly to open, slipping a printed sheet of paper out and a new one in, pulling his fingers out of danger just before the belly closed to press the ink against the paper and crushing any fingers which did not make it out on time. He did this for hours at a time for a given job.

The shop was filled with fascinating and dangerous machines. Momma ran the cutter. It was a big, heavy iron monstrosity about the size of a upright piano. She would place a stack of paper to be cut against the rear barrier and tap it there with the palm of her hand to push it back securely. Then she would press a button, and a heavy bar would come down and sit on the paper to hold it immovable, though she would turn the handle in front to wedge it down even more securely. Next, she would reach on both sides of the machine and squeeze two large levers. These would bring down a fearsome blade that would, with a high-pitched whirring sound, slice the paper perfectly, absolutely, straight. Mom would gather the waste, a little stack slim paper slips, in an efficient motion and then with a sweeping motion with her hand, throw it into the canvas waste basket. She, like Daddy, would do this for hours at a time, if need be.

Mom also ran the stapler. She sat in front of this machine which resembled in size a Vegas slot machine. Mostly she stapled booklets, and this machine was well-designed for that purpose. Mom would have a stack of unstapled booklets to her right, and with her practiced hands would pick one up and slide it in over the upside-down V plate, pressing the food pedal twice — a split second apart — to put two staples in the fold about four inches apart, and then she’d pass the booklet over to her left to the stack which she had already started. She was not so lucky as Daddy was with the press. Once, she misjudged on the first staple and her left pointer finger ended up under the stapler mechanism at the same instant that her food pressed the pedal. She stapled her finger and, on what was a rare occasion, Daddy closed the printshop long enough to take her to the emergency room. A nail never grew on that finger again for the rest of her life.

The jogger was another essential tool. About the size of a flatbed computer printer today, it was used to even up stacks of paper so there weren’t any edges hanging out of the stack. This, for some reason, was man’s work, though Daddy didn’t mind if I played with it occasionally. My favorite thing to do was to get the tiny dots that were the waste out of the perforating machine and put about a half-cup on top of the jogger and then switch it on. At low speed, the dots behaved kind of like waves in the ocean, but when I turned that thing up to full speed, they hopped up and down like someone walking barefoot on an asphalt road in the middle of summer. Besides this, the most pleasurable thing about this machine was the sound it made as it jogged papers together: a ratatattat that, if you were holding the paper at the time, made your teeth rattle right along with it.

Some things, however, were not automated, and this included gathering and stuffing. This was considered woman’s work, and even I, when I was only five years old, was pressed into duty to get a job done by the deadline Daddy had promised it. A receipt book, for example, had the papers ordered in the following way: white printed copy on top, green printed copy next, and yellow printed copy next. These had to be put together by hand. Mom and Genna and I and any women working at the shop at the time would clear off a big table and stand there for hours putting these together in the proper way. We would dip our fingers in glycerin to help pick up the paper. Sometimes a job would be made more complex by the fact that the receipts would be numbered and we’d have to check the numbers as we gathered on a fairly regular basis to make sure we hadn’t gotten something out of order. If we did, we’d have to ungather the book and then re-gather it correctly. The books would hold something like 50 receipts and then we’d have to put a piece of cardboard on top before starting the next one, to separate out individual books. These books might then be stapled (with Mom using a flat plate instead of the upside-down V), or they might be glued. Regardless, we’d have to remember to slip custom-cut carbon paper into the back of each book as the final step in production for use by the receipt writer.

We gathered all sorts of things, from relatively small-in-size receipt books where we could pull up a stool and sit down to do the job, to multi-page jobs like high school football programs with lots of advertisements, where we would all walk around a table, one of us in line behind the other, gathering up the pages as we went and depositing the finished product in a pile just before we’d have to pick up the first page of the next program.

I mentioned gluing. This was another fascinating task, and it was generally Daddy’s job, although I saw Mom do this sometimes. Mom and Dad never wasted paper, and if there was waste of any size at all after Mom cut paper down for a job, instead of tossing it into the wastebasket, she would set it aside to make scratch pads. Sometimes Daddy would print Clark Printing Co. on this paper, but sometimes they just padded up the paper plain. Daddy had built a contraption expressly for padding up this paper. He put wheels on it to make it more convenient, and it looked kind of like a bookshelf, except it only had one shelf at the bottom. The whole contraption leaned to the back just a tad so that gravity would help hold the paper straight as it dried. Daddy painted the shelf blue to make it esthetically pleasing. Daddy would set a stack of paper on this shelf to be glued. Then he took up a comb-shaped tool with teeth set about a half inch apart and push it into the stack of paper. This would divide the paper into even amounts so that the pads would be of a standard thickness. He would slip a piece of cardboard into every division made by the comb. He would straighten up the stack (which had been thoroughly jogged before being placed on the shelf) and put a heavy lead ingot from the Linotype machine on top to hold it steady. The final step was to open up a jar of white glue and paint it on the outside edge of the paper. In a day or two the glue would be dry, and we would have dozens of scratch pads. Mom and Dad gave these away freely. It was good for business.

I remember all these things from the print shop on the corner across from the post office. I literally grew up there, underfoot.