If you’re anything like me, forever mailing odd-sized things around the world, you’ve probably had cause to wonder “what’s the limit on how big or small I can mail things?” So, to help you and to help me, I took Canada Post’s information on this and made printable size-guides, one for mailing in Canada and the other for mailing to the USA or elsewhere. They look like this:

While it’s little-known outside of inner circles here on Prince Edward Island, each bona fide Islander is issued an “Islander Membership Card” in the hospital at birth. The card entitles one to experience the benefits afforded only to Islanders — things like exemption from Anne of Green Gables-related activities, discounts at Swiss Chalet, and access to the special version of Compass where the real news is delivered.

While not technically secret, Islanders aren’t exactly encouraged to tell others about the cards. And for many so-called “people from away” like us, getting access to a card — or even confirming that the cards exist — is a hard-fought battle.

So you can imagine my delight when I found, in a collection of letterpress cuts passed to me by an Islander just before Christmas, the original coat of arms of Prince Edward Island used to make the cards. As you might expect, my first action was to immediately run some off:

These are prototypes only — the ink impression on the Parva sub ingenti needs so work — but I’ll be able to run these things off by the thousands in a week or two. Prince Edward Island will never be the same.

With the move to the Reinventorium finally complete, and my head-cold-induced fog finally on the wane, it was time to go back to the print shop this afternoon, in part to take the new set of rollers for my Golding Jobber No. 8 for a ride.

John Falstrom of Perennial Designs in Lyme, CT has been of invaluable help with the Golding press: not only as he advised on parts and supplies, but he also custom-fabricates roller cores and trucks for Golding presses, and one of the first things I did from him once my press was in place was to order a set, which John quickly turned around and then forwarded directly out to Ramco Roller Products in San Dimas, CA for covering. The service from both John and from Ramco was fantastic. Here are the rollers themselves:

And here they are installed on my press:

I wasn’t looking for a deadly serious job to take the rollers out for a ride with, so I opened one of the cigar boxes full of letterpress miscellanea lent to me by Ian Scott, one with a partial alphabet of large metal letters:

I came up with a vaguely-meaningful word to set: tearseep. And then added an exclamation mark. Consider this a sort of “Hello World!” test for the press and the rollers.

(I’m still getting used to the settings on the camera in my new Nokia Lumia 800, so pardon the inconsistent photos!)

The letters in Ian’s cigar box were pretty banged up from years of use, but I sort of like the weathered banged-up look that this results in when they’re printed with.  I only ran off a limited run of 13, which I’ll sent to a random scatterling of subscribers tomorrow.

If you happen to be shopping around for a name for your rock band, I humbly offer TEARSEEP! up as an option, and offer to provide you with all the letterpress-printed collateral materials you’ll need when you go big.

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.

Regular readers may recall the photo of my virgin office at 84 Fitzroy Street on the day I got everything set up there back in December 2003:

Well, here’s the same photo for the 2012 version of Reinvented Inc. now that we’ve moved office around the corner and down Queen Street to the second floor of The Guild:

What you don’t see in this photo are the piles of boxes holding myriad bits of metal type and bank statements, and the as-yet-unassembled analog typesetting part of the operation. But thanks to a morning’s work of hard work by me, [[Johnny]] and G., we’re completely moved out of the old office and into the new one (for the record, that “Rent me for $19.95 a day” ad you see on the side of U-Haul vans — in the end, with insurance and fees it actually comes out to $48).

Given that it’s all de rigueur to give your digital office space a fancy name these days — see also The Makers Loft — I have, with [[Oliver]]’s help, christened the new space The Reinventorium

reinvent |ˌrē-inˈvent | — verb [ with obj. ] — change (something) so much that it appears to be entirely new: he brought opera to the masses and reinvented the waltz.

orium — suffix — forming nouns denoting a place for a particular function: auditorium | sanatorium. ORIGIN from Latin; compare with -ory.

So, in other words, this is the place where all the reinventing goes on.  It’s where stuff gets reinvented.

Oliver is proud of the new name, [[Catherine]] doesn’t like it at all and [[Johnny]], I think, is trying it on for size and reserving judgment. But it’s too late: there’s already a Twitter account, domain name, and an SSID that you’ll see when you’re in the neighbourhood.

Once the letterpress operation is up and running again I’ll be setting and printing invitations to an office open house where you’ll all be welcome to come and reinvent yourselfs. Or at least have a coffee.

Back in the fall, when I was spending time out at Campbell’s Printing arranging to purchase and the get delivered my Golding Jobber No. 8 letterpress, I had a good opportunity to talk with Bill Campbell about his life as a printer.  Part of Bill’s working life was spent at the Journal-Pioneer newspaper in Summerside, and Bill had many stories to tell about his days there, the people he worked with, and the equipment he used.

This afternoon I found myself in downtown Summerside for a meeting and, after lunch at Samuel’s Coffee House (very highly recommended: espresso, in Summerside — who would have ever thought!), I decided to drop in to the Journal-Pioneer office next door to see if there was any vestigal printing or typesetting equipment around that I might take a look at.

At the front desk I introduced myself and the friendly woman there asked me to wait a moment and then disappeared around a corner. A few seconds later she motioned for me to come around, and I was ushered into the office of Publisher Sandy Rundle with whom I spent a very pleasant 30 minutes swapping newspaper stories and learning more about how production and printing work in the digital age (when I worked in the composing room of the Peterborough Examiner we were still a decidedly analog shop).

Prince Edward Island’s scale can be frustrating, confounding and stiffling; it can also result in happenstance like this, where guy off the street is invited in to chat with the publisher of the daily newspaper.