The Scarlet Cockerel – Number 63, June 1978

OBVIOUSLY last issue didn’t quite beat that sneaky deadline set for the creaky postal system’s outrageous hike in postage from 14 to 20 cents apiece. (Just recently excavated from our piles of accumulations: an unmailed issue 21 with its single required 2 cent stamp of 1944 still hopelessly virgin!) [Sigh]

But to fight inflation this time, Don Quixote-like we’ll foil those buzzards by confining distribution exclusively to the Kennewick convention, No postage!

SC 63 – 150 copies – end of June 1978 by Ralph Babcock

from the press at the sign of The Scarlet Cockerel and leaden silvers

John Gillick’s Problem with Low Overhead
by John Gillick

IT IS a well-known fact that Michelangelo Buonorotti was the greatest ceiling painter of all time. I wish he was still in business.

Some five years ago my wife asked me to paint a bedroom ceiling. I asked what color, and she said white, of course.

I gave it one coat, but dark spots showed through, so I gave it a second coat. Still dark spots. I suggested painting it black, but my wife said no, white.

After ten coats, the spot and streaks still showed. I am a stubborn fellow, so I just kept on painting. My wife said ask the man at the paint store, and he said I guess you’ll have to give it another coat. By this time, my golf clubs were rusted, and the grass got so tall I bought a goat. The grass continued to grow, and the goat is now out of sight.

Someone said maybe a poltergeist was at work, but I don’t believe in that humbug.

Finally, the job is finished. The ceiling is gleaming white, spotless and unstreaked. Because of the paint on the ceiling, we have to enter the room on our hands and knees. We haven’t been able to open the closet door for three years. Fortunately, I took my summer suits out before that happened.

Michelangelo, where were you when I needed you?

AN ARTIST (or writer) presumably must derive some primary satisfaction in mere creation of a multicolor oil landscape or portrait (or his 200 page novel). Then what matter its exposure – or distribution)?

Upon completing maybe 40 to 100 copies of any AJ leaflet, generally we could rest quite contentedly. Distribution…?

For NAPA we endure those self-flagellation rites of dragging thru handfed slipsheeted 500 press runs, taking pains with ink and color register; not like a once-achieved one-time jigsaw puzzle that once seen in its completion is never saved or framed; but as a hopeful gesture for welfare of our hobby group in hopes others will also share their strivings and accomplishments.

An Ode to Rowfant’s 80^th
by Carr Liggett

He’s a very rash fellow who tackles an Ode;
A duffer like David who sang on the road
To his fight with Goliath, devoid of a qualm,
Armed only with slingshot and 23^rd Psalm.
For an Ode is the solemnest prosody known,
A classic few bards dare attempt all alone.
So what do they do when required to produce one?
A truly genteel one?… no unchaste or loose one
Besmirched by mod metaphors fit for Astarte?
An Ode for an elegant Rowfant Club party?…
To which… oh, amazing and happy surprise!…
After feeling for years that they may have been slighted,
Our sweet Rowfant ladies once more are invited
To share in Book worship and doxologize
The eightieth year of this book-bosky dell
Of Arctomys Monax, who’s happy to dwell
Where Rowfantian punch and its sainted martini
At times are heard babbling like famed Hippocrene,
That fount by the grot of those daughters of Zeus’s,
The Muses bards pray to for help or excuses,
Euterpe, Calliope, even Erato… grotto,
Such bards pray as I’ve prayed, “Emerge from your
Oh, nymphs of Mount Helicon’s classic abode,
And help me concoct a Parnassian Ode!”
(Olympic, Parnassic – it’s Pegasus’ choosing…
Those ancient Greek myths can be very confusing.)
“Dear Goddesses, just a Rowfant dithyrambic,
That needs not, of course, be a breathless iambic
Like Bysshe Shelley’s weather report, The West Wind,
Or Wordsworth’s Imitations of, say, Immortality,”…
Rowfant loves Odes with a faint whimsicality.
I prayed them softly, I prayed like a klaxon,
In six different tongues, even old Anglo-Saxon…
I prayed till my wife, overhearing, abhorred me –
… The Muses ignored me.
Do classes in classics now have the new rule:
No unconstitutional praying in school?
Ah, good ancient Muses, as old as the hills,
Inhabiting grottos with no central heating
To ward off the flu and its fever and chills –
In such low-rent pads even gods take a beating!
Can it be arthritis that stops their appearing?
Or senile dementia?… Are they hard-of-hearing?
I wonder when some modern poets are read
If the Muses are now in a rest home – or dead.

But welcome, Rowfantesses, young, fair and dear!
Who needs the eld Muses as long as you’re here?

II

Twenty years ago, good gentle folk,
An after-dinner speaker rose and spoke
Of “Rowfant’s Sixty Years of loyalty
To noble Books that do so variedly
Delight the mind by what’s inside themselves,
Or how they look undusted on the shelves;
By what they cost or by how rare they are;
Six decades by the Julian calendar
Of bibliophilic friendships in the home
Of Arctomys Monax,” frugal gastronome,
Who cheers his gloomy house with candle light,
Rings Rowfant’s camel bell with all his might,
Hates radio as cultured woodchucks would,
But likes well-tempered harpsichord, if good;
Who serves with table-talk his beer and cheeses
And humbler fruits than the Hesperide’s…
Till each capped candlestick of brave finality
Rests in the Library’s niche of last egality,
The shrine of Rowfant’s little immortality!
Today deserves a mightier Jubilate
For anniversaries accrued to eighty
Since February Eighteen Ninety-Two,
When twenty men, much wiser than they knew,
Gentlemen of a rarely cultured bent
Surprising in a backwoods settlement
Like Cuyahoga, which by all accounts
Half of the natives still cannot pronounce;
Men of affairs who could both read and write,
Collectors of books and oddly erudite,
Gave all the local Philistines the snub
By founding the now famous Rowfant Club.

Their cause was splendid of the Holy Grail,
Sublimer than one that put Thoreau in jail.
Like wine, they said with well-read debonarity,
The best books are distinguished by their rarity.
This being true, they added, shrugging a shoulder,
The greatest books, of course, must be the older.
They would ransack the attics of the earth,
As Locker-Lampson had, for books of worth
That brought his English Rowfant Library fame,
So Rowfant clubmen coveted the name.
What joy!… a first edition of Mother Goose,
The earliest cook’s book naming charlotte russe,
The long lost Passenger List from Noah’s Ark,
The manuscript of Shakespeare’s Hark, the Lark,
That first delightful Wonderland of Alice’s
Lurking in English rabbit-holes and palaces,
Pepys Diary, Eighteen Twenty-Five edition…
Fred Locker inspired their bibliomaniac mission.
But why envy him or the Bodleian athenaeum
Or even that British incredible Museum?

They dreamed of first editions of John Donne,
Of Chaucer, Milton, Goldsmith, and then on
To Swift, Doc Johnson, Coleridge and Scott,
Byron, Burns and Lamb… until they’d got
To Ruskin, Darwin, Tennyson and Gissing,
And hundreds of other geniuses I’m missing,
Including Americans, hitherto neglectible,
Who were at last becoming quite collectible.

So they collected, meeting on Saturday nights
To talk, to hear, with insatiable appetites.
They published books of exquisite rare quality,
And filled up Rowfant shelves – but no frivolity
Of hoi polloi books tidily kept off
By bibliopoles like Maggs and Keisogloff,
Old members; and the club eschewed the lewd,
Altho pornography then was not so crude
As late best-sellers far outstripping flirty;
Old porn was carnal, yes, but seldom dirty.
So the Rowfant Library, learned and austere,
Is visited by scholars every year;
And I must add what’s odd but strangely true:
It’s visited once in a while by members, too.

Friday turned Rowfant night by spouse request,
Those lovelies with whom Rowfant has been blest,
Who understood the wisdom of the rule
That rarely lets wives beyond the vestibule
Of Arctomys’ house, nor other lady factions,
Presence to threaten sensory distractions,

The perturbing glimpse of feminine form and face,
Charming chic and full of lively grace,
The lilting laughter, provocative perfume
That could distress the calm monastic gloom
And put the membership on tenterhooks –
Good lord, how could they keep their mind on Books?

It was the late Carr Liggett whose talent titillated 1969 Columbus NAPA conventioneers with his vivid Ode detailing Chris Columbus report to Ferd & Isabella.

Both Ligget and Helm Spink enjoyed membership in the bookish Rowfant Club of Cleveland. Printed at last, now this long-standing galley can be distributed.

The Scarlet Cockerel Story
by Ralph Babcock

AMATEUR JOURNALISM has no single prescribed or immutable true format. It means many things to its varied adherents. Each enthusiastic participant is welcome to play freely to his heart’s content (develop his own tune – perhaps even on bongo drums).

The remarkable Thrift-Edkins Aonian once observed that “The Scarlet Cockerel is one of the papers displayed when showing off AJ… Any SC is an event… How the Cockerel manages to accumulate so much distinctive material is his editorial secret and our confoundedness.”

Fossil Editor John Dow in 1965 devoted two-thirds of a twelve-page issue (No. 185 – uniquely titled The Scarlet Fossil) to reviews of “Babcock’s Bird” and its contributors. From that source (which we had helped nourish with background data) this account has blossomed, obviously with extensive revision and enlargement.

* * * *

An ardent young NAPA ex-president (already editorial laureate winner at 20, and alert to new dream potentials in Oakland, California, conceived The Scarlet Cockerel July 1935. Rising from news gathering and politics of his previous Red Rooster, it aimed far beyond the flimsies and general flapdoodle filling our AJ bundles.

The Scarlet Cockerel strived toward standards which won recognition for previous NAPA standouts such as Thrift’s Lucky Dog, Kendall’s Torpedo, Cole’s Olympian; and latterly, Crane’s Masaka.

Printed literally from coast to coast, during four decades SC’s sixty issues published 239 manuscripts from more than a hundred NAPA member-writers and in fact achieved laureate awards for forty percent of its issues (totaling 1400 pages.) In those years after its first appearance (late 1935) it became an outstanding editing and printing achievement.

“My heart is in the work” stated the colophon (a motto borrowed from Carnegie Tech where RWB studied) aptly describing his feeling toward his publication. “To me, SC means more than amateur journalism, although it was born of AJ and a desire to create something worthwhile,” he wrote 30 years later. “It has been a fascinating hobbyhorse, a means of expression, a release; relief from days of following orders, satisfying customers, pleasing and playing stooge to bosses of varying temperaments, stagnating on office routine and stupid clerical work – for these are the usual lot of a production manager in the printing business.”

These two pages will introduce a limited edition Scarlet Cockerel issue 60, which now is about one-third set. Included will be over 150 offset reproductions reduced from covers and text of previous issues.

Inevitably, Ever Higher: The Tax Take
by Ralph Babcock

HOW DIFFICULT it must be for modern generations (the babes since Vietnam; those since Korea, now students; and even World War II “kids” now themselves parents) to comprehend an era WITHOUT omnipresent sales tax – much less, a time of NO income tax – nor social security registration.

Yet not until the mid 30’s Depression days did LaGuardia’s initial 1% impost in New York City first rouse us: not surprisingly dubbed “The Mayor’s Tax.”

Later in college I encountered Ohio’s corresponding little paper stamps that had to accompany each sale; and westward jaunts turned up those center-holed brass, zinc and aluminum miniature tokens from Missouri and Kansas, Oklahoma, Arizona. The “take” then was small: less than one percent – a mill token for each 25 cent sale. Later, imprinting sales flyers amazed me to find Los Angeles in 1950 topping the usual 3 to 5 percent bit with demand for a full 6 percent. By the time I fled New York, that city wanted 8% sales tax and we outlanders were keen to get purchases shipped out of city or (if possible) out of state to avoid the local penalty.

My 1950 slide projector advantageously was shipped via Railway Express to Virginia (no UPS that far, then) and a city camera shop obligingly turned over a Kodak camera in time for me to scamper to a convention-bound train, meanwhile parcel posting the case with extra film to my New Jersey address to allow a tax-free sales bill.

In Boston 1946-49 meals under $1 were exempt from tax; generating many 75 to 99 cent luncheon specials. Now in 1977 Washington state retirees living on social security or limited pensions have rallied a successful referendum repealing state sales tax on all grocery food.

In 1960 I began to find it difficult to buy paper in small quantities from New Jersey dealers without a hassle over furnishing business license registration number, a regimentation (like social security and income tax) which no “under-age” 15 year old enterprising kid seeking odd jobs or to print cards, stationery and job printing had to contend with when I began after-school-hour operations in 1931-35.

Now one hesitates to undertake even a small job of printing as a favor for fear the all-seeing state government will demand license fee, sales tax, etc., and endless reports on why you haven’t filed statements every month, quarter or year.

When destroying my father’s 1920-42 records it was sobering to realize he (with three sons and occasional good years as a dentist netting even $10,000 taxable income) never then had to pay federal income tax over $200 a year!

Up till now payroll deductions for social security scarcely irked the payee (who rarely realized that his employer also coughed up an amount equal to the deduction missing from his take-home check). But the stupid fact pork-barrel grabbing legislative dreamers never grasped is that my entire self-employed payments of the past ten years now will be repaid to me within less than the first three years of retirement. After that – in my case, beyond only 65, it’s all government pour-out.

This IS a hobby, of course – and for Fun. But how matter-of-factly the great Silent Majority just accept whatever effort is dumped their way… continuing merely their mesmerized vacuous staring – as at TV – with time-out only for another beer, more popcorn, or a trip to the potty.

Letterwriting… wozzat?

To avoid highway traffic, our local airline to Seattle advertises: “Driving is beneath us.”

Considering Unusual Methods But Is It Art?
by Ralph Babcock

SEEKING to find some more information about acrylics (a special realm of fast-drying water-soluble color entirely new since our earlier introduction to watercolor) we stumbled across Collagraph Printmaking by Mary Ann Wenniger which Watson-Guptill published in 1975: $14.50.

Mrs. Wenniger’s how-to-book, which the publisher claims to be the first book available on that subject, is quite remarkable.

Part of its “art” seems as fruity as lots of the stuff seen hung out for view in outdoor “art shows.” (Maybe they’ll blow away – and get the ecologists goats, too!)

But what an eye opener: What design ideas!

The author suggests: Go soak your printing paper in a kitty litter box. Really…??? Saints save us! To swipe that Necessary in this domicile would be courting disaster unbelievable!

Yet among all the garbage about modern free form “design” remain shards of possibilities to explore.

Essentially, the collagraph process uses a base plate such as masonite, thinly coated with acrylic polymer gloss medium (thinned with water) or gesso; with a piece of cloth smoothed on, and adhered using another coating of polymer gloss.

Printers ink will then stick to low spots, such as apertures in the cloth mesh, knife cuts in the surface, or edges of tape and other superimposed cardboard cutouts; leaves, string, sandpaper, modeling paste, and other matter adhered to this base plate by added coatings of polymer gloss, or even Elmer’s glue.

Successive polymer coatings (as many as eight or ten) can render the surface progressively non-receptive to ink rolled on or wiped across it, up to a stage like mylar which she says absolutely will not hold ink at all.

Collagraph artists roll on, daub on, or wipe off ink somewhat after the method of etchings – or perhaps even glorified finger-painting style; gaining unusual textural results from wipings of these in-depth plates which the mono-level .918 letterpress, or lithograph offset from rubber blanket, or even overprinted silkscreen effects, never can convey.

Letterpress abides by and worships the gospel of exact .918 typehigh. Normally printers work from shiny smooth lead type or zinc or copper plates. Some claim even an oxidized surface on type interferes with normal inking or impression. Certainly, extreme usage often can wear down old type as much as one or two thousandths of an inch, requiring makeready tissue buildups when perfect new .918 high type appears next to badly worn letters. (For comparison, common bond and book paper measures about 3 to 5 thousandths of an inch thick.)

Hard paper, more sock, long or repeated runs, soft packing makeready, all contribute to wear on type, to break down hairline serifs (dots over i’s and exposed edges with ascenders and descenders such as l’s and p’s – especially at sides or top and bottom of page forms.

Even good offset now accepts need for perfect packing measured to within less than two sheets of paper.

By contrast, and in accord with modern flaunting of curves, collagraph seems to suggest making the most of bumps, scratches, and skin blemishes.

Look again: what a wealth of imagination-poppers.

An etching press does resemble somewhat a sophisticated advance over the vertical stack of wringer rollers which squeezed laundered clothes semi-dry some 50 to 60 years ago – before Easy whirlers and early Bendix washers (plus dryers) so revolutionized home laundry to our present all-electric era where hanging out wash to dry on clotheslines is virtually unknown, an unspeakable hardship no decent welfare case accustomed to buying frozen dinners, TV’s and such essentials on their monthly handouts can be expected to endure.

Those wives who chided our extravagance on purchase of new Kelseys or cast-off old commercial presses and dirty old used printers type, should glimpse prices quoted for the etching presses these collagraph artists use: $1200, $1700, $2300, or even $2800 to $4000! What’s that about poor artists? (Oops, I forgot, they can’t quite afford payments for an $8000 camper, too!)

Another difference from letterpress procedure shows in collagraph printmakers inking their plates away from the press, perhaps rolling on or daubing and wiping several times for two or even more colors or tones; then replacing plate on press bed to squeeze out the print in one impression. With transparent acrylic colors they may also make additional impressions for still further colors or embossing effects.

[In this fashion, brayer-inking a leaf, half dollar, or stalk of weed on an empty galley for example; then transferring by tweezers onto a clean sheet of paper on platen; and pressing against plain bottom-side of an old cut, locked upside down in chase; you could make single copy prints of many unexpected objects.]

Ever consider wiping and re-inking your 72 point initial, headband (or whatever) to achieve two-color printing in one impression? Probably too tedious for editions of 500, but on 100 copy runs hand-inked that way, perhaps not much longer than two single color runs, plus extra time for color form make-up, position register, extra press wash-up, etc. Easier done, of course, on a flat-bed handpress or proofpress. [Caution: From experience in three different places: Repeated rolling of prints from an unlocked text type form inevitably seems to suck up spaces, generating unwanted inked workups that waste time to find and poke down every 25 or so copies.]

Maybe we should have invested – ransomed, that is – an old Stanhope or Columbian or Washington style handpress – medically vital, or course for that exercise prescribed for lung and shoulder building… and also waistline slimming?

But you don’t really need one of those conversation builders or an old Acorn or Albion affair just to wring out fancy tints. Back off the platen screws on your pet Kelsey 5×8 or 8×12 C&P instead. [Better be careful on a 7×11 Pearl: all too many of those lightweights already have a cracked and brazed bed (or whatever).] Then add a rubber blanked; or thick spongy newsprint packing, or blotters – perhaps even dampened.

Using an etcher’s technique, collagraph printmakers talk of wiping plates and using up to three blankets or blotter sheets in their press packings not only to absorb moisture from dampened paper but also to overcome variations when squeezing out prints from their built-up surfaces a letterpress printer would find intolerable in his striving toward the ultimate absolute .918 level.

Theoretically, one might achieve easier access to printing form or plate simply by removing platen press rollers; then hand-inking selectively from the ink plate or nearby ink-mixing glass slab or inverted empty galley.

So it might be safer just to set aside your expensive $25 set of new rollers and hand-ink with brayer. Small hand-rollers (5” brayers or smaller) would also allow such special effects as part-area tints, interesting variations in selective inking: flooding, skimping, or even inking and then partially wiping off.

After fashion of making and wiping etching proofs, the book mentions felt or cheesecloth (or even newsprint) wipes or daubers. Old Gutenberg and ye colonial Williamsburg printers never knew our glue & glycerine (or plastic) rollers. Those oldtimers used to ink with leather ink balls or daubers. Recalling a chore that then understandably fell to the apprentice: that devil’s daily task of cleaning & softening those leather daubers with urine.

Mrs. Wenniger lists sources of supplies, and also suggests ten more books on printmaking for added reading. With over 300 photographs detailing how-to-do-it step by step, almost any pastimer should find in her book something of interest: if only hints on dampened paper, embossing, or ink color techniques.

How much in the book is truly new?

Beyond the rainbow roll-on (several colors applied in bands by one roller) there’s the artistry of blended colors in overwipes.

Described therein is a special etcher’s technique that permits fascinating multi-color printing in one impression by varying ink viscosity – using three different rollers of varying hardness, and inks of varied tackiness or oiliness (from normal or “dry” to quarter or half diluted with varnish thinner or linseed oil).

In addition to prints from sponge, cloth, flowers, grass, even crumpled tinfoil, printing from surfaces like coins is touched on; and embossing techniques from cut-out squares or chips of cardboard, on dampened paper and soft packings.

Handpress typeslingers sometimes may well have envied the many textures possible elsewhere from crayon rubbings over silkscreen. Modern offset has acquainted us with endless printed decorations to copy, and other texture choices, as well as Zip-a-tone borders and lots of alphabet sheets from which to burnish special heads.

Older NAPA members may recall our longtime interest in textures. An early Enterprise cover printed a sandpaper strip as handy cheap color tintblock. Small World for 1968 displayed some leaf prints hand-inked and pressed on a 5×8 Kelsey and later offset reproduced. SC 41 used photographed old lace in a heading. WM also tried out a bit of bookbinder’s leather-grain fabric mounted as tintblock.

John Pursell (St. Louis printer who was Mailer during our NAPA presidency) first introduced us to the mezzograph, a lineless spatter effect (rarely seen in that letterpress era when $300 glass Levey photoengraving screens were a most formidable consideration). Quite useful to avoid moire patterns frequently encountered in re-making halftones from an already screened halftone print. Recent decades have seen mezzographs more often, as offset photography offered various texture screens in inexpensive $20 films.

Benday tints once were common to color comics, newspapers, and some old geography map area tints. In the 50’s one supply house offered plastic tintblocks in a selection of grains and rough screens.

Pre-Depression letterpress faked typewritten form letters from foundry type actually printed thru silk stretched between gripper bars. With tympan paper “friskets” similarly stretched between grippers, and cut thru to stencil out the separate areas, once we made a 3-color printing from a 96 pt. ATF cast flag-and-eagle single-color cut.

One midwestern amateur in the mid-1930’s developed an ingenious method of printing thru window screen wire, making artistic 2- or 3-color illustrations by varied cardboard cut-outs in his press impression packings.

“Spider” Webb, British APA teacher, will be remembered for his superb linoleum color prints, using the same block in successive printings with progressively smaller cut-down patterns in different shades and tints. He also printed direct from raised surface of coins.

Instead of expensive wood-grained paper or cover, down at Skyline Bend Farm some interesting bits of old weathered wood boards and fencing became handy tint blocks. (Now, of course, with rising lumber prices, half the cheap plywood and Masonite wallboard, Formies, and even new furniture is faked from beautiful photos of distinctive wood grains, printed on a huge scale.)

But elaborate printmaking such as the artists collagraphs described in the Wenniger book rarely exceed 20 prints – more like etcher’s editions of 50 or 100 signed prints. That would never satisfy NAPA Mailer demands for AJ editions nearer 500.

What then can one hope to achieve by color mixing on one plate – hand-inking, hand-wiping, finger-daubing, or general spot diddling?

Few AJ’s ever have pursued the endless possibilities of combining hand-inked single-copy prints: reduced or enlarged via camera, combined on the print-it-all Xerox or Instant Copy (including your own fingerprints?) systems, or even almost-as-fast speedy Multilith which can spit out 500 copies in only 5 to 10 minutes.

Applied to AJ in general, actual collagraph printmaking practice may offer very limited derivations; but one cannot deny it suggests a fascinating fringe of art beyond limited confines of old letterpress type: a realm that beckons tint-happy dilettantes dreaming to break away from excess typefonts or to supplement just a few cases of plain type.

There lies an entirely feasible sortie which could be made with barest minimum money or space: utilizing just one case of text type, plus one font of heading type, some sort of proofpress, colored ink to mix, and wild imagination.

Accent on the message. Keep it brief. Spark it up with color – spot or art.

That could raise your output far, far beyond the plebeian ranks of routine printing.

They’ll never get that from a cold composition idiot computer!

There is, indeed, recorded and shareable pleasure in adopting Keith Gray’s view: Amateur Journalism [as seen in the National Amateur Press Association] suggests a “creative challenge to eliminate boredom and offer a gratifying avenue for use of our leisure.”

Bell-Ringers This Past Year
by Ralph Babcock

NAPA hobby printers reaped a harvest this year, interesting to read tho sad to contemplate with the too rapid evaporation of hand typesetting.

Phil Cade explained his unique hobby operation of a Thompson typecaster making his own type & ornaments, as profusely displayed in his Limited Edition 21.

Mike Horvat provided insight into old typefounding practice in his offset reprint of Thomas MacKeller’s 1878 Walk Over our Type-Foundry (the famous M S & J).

And Alan Teas in PressTeas 1 cites his own enthusiastic youthful jump into monotype caster owning and operation, with background story on Baltotype just as that longtime type source finally closed its doors.

Bradofsky gave us the historical story of our 1884 NAPA president whose tuberculosis drove him to California, to found Pomona’s still thriving daily paper.

Fred Brink in Brink Press 6 wafts a skimpy glimpse of his Meriden visit to home of Kelsey, everyone’s original supply source; along with L. Miller’s Exercise in Nostalgia summarizing the old typographic craftsman’s lifetime growth – and sudden displacement by new kids with their computerized photographic composition.

All this, apart from a half dozen regular marvels: Campane, Small World, Silver & Gold, and NAPA West; and the type drooling brought on by Ruble’s DVEC 13, and Botterill’s Typografiks 1 and Words of Wisdom, Salute!