Coming Full Circle..... almost

Isn't it funny how certain things can trigger memories, and take you RIGHT back to moments in your past? It might be a photo, a song, a smell, or food. Whatever it is, it becomes an instant time machine and you suddenly land decades before where you started. I have to tell you, that this week .... I took that path back to my childhood.

When I was growing up, my dad kept his hobbies in the basement. (Mom wouldn't allow any of it to ever creep upstairs!!) His hobby that took the most space, was printing. Which, not surprisingly, was also his vocation. Dad was a printer by trade. And he loved it. In his personal history, he mentions getting started in the newspaper business. More than once, I heard either my mother or my father say something to the effect of, "Once he smelled that printer's ink, he was hooked, and there was no going back."

It was TRUE. And it was what led my father to take his growing family from Idaho, to Wyoming, and finally to California. My Dad worked as a linotype operator for the local newspaper in California. A linotype machine was quite a feat of "modern" engineering. It made it possible for a printer to create an entire line of type ("line-o-type"... get it?), as opposed to setting each letter and space individually.

In our basement, we had printing presses. There was a big floor press, and a smaller tabletop press. The tabletop press looked like this:

I was intrigued by it, but Dad wouldn't let me near it, citing fingers-pinched-in-the-rollers reasons, although I also suspect it had something to do with the possibility of getting ink all over me and the potential trouble he would be in with Mom! To this day, though, whenever I smell newspaper ink, it smells like "Dad."

Without going into a whole lot of detail, the printing method for which these presses were used is called letterpress. There's a couple of really interesting videos you can watch that describe the process, here and here. Essentially, letterpress makes an impression in the paper, creating a dimensional, de-bossed (opposite of embossed) surface.

Now. I told you all that, so I could tell you this. I'm a little late on this bandwagon (so what else is new?), but letterpress is making a comeback in the home crafts market.

(Don't look now, but Todd is pretty sharp, so he's already jumped two steps ahead of me and is at this very moment, groaning out loud as he reads this, and thinking, "Not again!")

One of the blogs I follow is A Bushel and a Peck of FUN". Right now, and for a few more days, there's a giveaway going on for an Epic Letterpress Machine. This machine is an affordable way for average people to do letterpress printing without getting into the whole professional printing press aspect.

Of course, I want one!!! Are you kidding me?? What a cool tool! You BET I signed up for a chance to win! (In the next few days, you can too.... click on the link and follow the instructions.) And wouldn't it be ironic if I started doing this little baby-version of letterpress printing, when my dad did the real thing? It would kind of be like life coming full circle.......

P.S. Here's a bit of printing trivia that may or may not be true. The pieces of printer's type my dad used was made of lead. Each individual character or letter is called a "sort." So, a letter "A" is a sort, a letter "B" is a sort, and so forth. A printer would want to make sure that he had enough "sorts" on hand for a print job. Because, if he ran out, ...... he would be "out of sorts".