Our new office has many great attributes, but being easy to get to is not one of them. After trying to describe the complicated route several times to various friends and colleagues I decided I needed to make a how-to video. So here it is:

The music is Au coin de la rue by Marco Raaphorst; video was shot with my iPad 2.

Another wonderful, useful gift from Bill and Gertie Campbell (see also Hamilton Type Case) was a “furniture cabinet.” 

In letterpress, “furniture” is the wooden or metal spacing material of various lengths and widths, that is used to pack the type into the chase. Like the wood you see in this example:

The type has to be held firmly in place inside the chase — the metal rectangle that holds it in the press — and the furniture fills up the “whitespace” to aid in this.

Before the Campbell’s Printing furniture cabinet (which came filled with furniture), I had a motley collection of furniture that wasn’t particularly well-organized. The nice thing about the cabinet, with its shelves of different depths, is that it’s easy to keep the furniture in order, and to find exactly what you’re looking for.

In big and serious letterpress shops there are entire sections devoted to furniture; here’s the section at Tipoteca in Italy:

My furniture selection is far more modest, but it’s enough to keep me going for a long, long while.

Remember back in December when I took a drive out to Campbell’s Printing in Tryon to pick up a type cabinet?

Well the cabinet made it to town, got assembled (with some help from Sergey) at the old office, and then got moved this weekend to the new office.

Yesterday I set out to reassemble it again, which is something of a challenge for a mind like mine that doesn’t naturally work in three dimensions. It took a while, and a night to sleep on the challenge of getting the top to snap on (this is where Sergey came in hand last time around!), but this afternoon I finished the job, loaded up the cabinet with its drawers and am almost back in action as a typesetting shop:

The cabinet was made by the Hamilton Manufacturing Company in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, the famous maker of wood type and all manner of accessories (now home to the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum). It’s built like a tank, and is caked with grease, grime and ink accumulated over its lifetime. I love it dearly, and it wasn’t until it arrived that I truly felt ready to set type.

It was a wonderful surprise to find that the case of Bodini I bought two years ago slid right into place: some kind soul’s drive for standards paying off many years later.

At lunch at Tai Chi Gardens this afternoon there were half a dozen other customers in the house, and all of the men present were wearing those sort of “too tall floppy toques” that are popular with the young rocker crowd these days (do these have a name?).

On my way out the door a woman who’d been sitting at the next table approached me.

“Are you from Iceland?” she said.

“No,” I replied, “why do you ask?” 

“Your 66 North hat!”, she answered.

It turns out that she is from Iceland, saw my 66 North hat, and thought she’d spotted a countryman. Alas I am only an Icelandic poser.

Ian Petrie’s recent post on the “potato shortage” on Prince Edward Island, Mashed Potatoes, is a worthwhile read. He writes, in part:

What’s really at play is a kind of psychological warfare:  once one of the hundreds of potato sellers agrees to a price, then everyone else is expected to match it, and it’s hard to say no to sale. Producers constantly live with the anxiety that they won’t sell their potatoes and will end up feeding them to cattle in the Spring. And it’s THESE producer/dealers that the United officials were really trying to talk to this past week: “There’s no over supply, don’t worry about moving your crop, and make sure you’re getting as much money as possible” Industry watchers know this kind of market situation doesn’t come along very often, and farmers can’t squander it.

We’re all lucky to have Ian’s deep knowledge of the primary industries still available to us; and it’s even better now that it’s not cloaked in the limitations of the CBC.