It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, so I decided that it was time to dust off the Mail Me Something list and set up something for the holidays. I set some type tonight, and I hope to start printing, on the new press, tomorrow. Two colours (red and black), on white index cards. Text by Dickens. Here’s where I’m at right now:

By the way, if you’re a subscriber and you’ve moved (say, from PEI to Toronto, or Nunavut to Toronto, or something like that), please get in touch with your new address so I send this to the right place.

I am old.

As far as I can remember, I didn’t used to be old. Back in the late 1980s in Ontario I remember being young. I had a good group of friends, mostly around my own age. We played charades and drank beer and made tofu casseroles and talked about Saul Alinsky and swam at the swimming hole. Life was good.

Then everything came crashing down: marriages ended, people moved away, feuds started, and Catherine and I skipped town and escaped to remotest Prince Edward Island.

My social life on the Island since, such as it is has been, has consisted mostly of spending time with people over 60 or under 30; people in both groups are distant enough from my own age so as to allow me to exist in a sort of age-free neutral zone. Because I’m neither a 25 year old rocker nor a 75 year old hipster, I’ve been able to coast along inside a delusion that I’m neither old nor young.

This all came crashing down yesterday when Catherine and I, in what appeared to me to be some sort of social destratification accident, were invited to the edge of Brighton for a house party attended mostly by our peers: couple in our 40s with children.

In the run of my day-to-day life I have some evidence that people like this exist in Charlottetown — I see them in them in the shops, and follow them on Twitter — but to be suddenly confronted with my own demographic, en masse, after a 20 year drought, was bracing to say the least.

This is how old I am?

I don’t mind being old: it’s been my goal, since I was a child, to get older.

And it wasn’t like there was anything wrong with my 40-year-old peers (although their taste in music could use some work). As much as it’s possible for me to have a good time drowning inside any group of people, I had an entirely pleasant time.

No, the shock to my system was more about the sudden jump out of hyperspace: when I last checked in with my peer group we were young and wild and free, and now, by all appearances, we have children, we talk about velorailing in France, and we’re in charge of the universe.

This isn’t a novel revelation, of course: there’s an entire genre of sitcoms based on this plot device (although usually they involve divorce and star Hank Azaria).

But is is a kick in the head for me; the Whole Earth Catalog told us that “we are as gods and might as well get good at it” and suddenly realizing that I’m an adult makes me realize that it might be time to pay closer attention to that notion and start to get some stuff done.

My social hermitage being what it is, it’s likely that the next time I check in with the peers we’ll all be in our mid-60s, and another 20 years will have flown by. So it’s best that I leverage this sudden realization of my oldness and run with it for all it’s worth.

Don’t let us get sick
Don’t let us get old
Don’t let us get stupid, all right?
Just make us be brave
And make us play nice
And let us be together tonight
— Warren Zevon, “Don’t Let Us Get Sick”

I was interested to learn this morning from CBC News that the combined assets of the O’Leary and Evangeline credit unions, which voted last night to merge, will be $100 million.

This got me wondering what the combined assets of all Prince Edward Island credit unions is, and how this compares to the provincial debt.

With some assistance from the communications office of Atlantic Credit Unions here in Charlottetown I was able to find the first figure: there are $784 million in assets under management in PEI credit unions (that’s a pretty-amazing $5600 for every person on the Island).

A quick call to a helpful official in the PEI Dept. of Finance guided me to the latest Public Accounts where I learned the second: depending on how you slice it, this is either $1,695 million or $865 million, depending on whether you express the figure as “what we owe” (the first) or “what we owe minus what we own.”

Interesting.

Did you know that recent versions of Apple’s Pages word processing application can export to the ePub format? Presumably this was a step taken by Apple to enhance the utility of its own iBooks application, but ePub is ePub, and Readmill can read it too.

Last week I had a PEI Home and School Federation meeting and in advance of the meeting I receive a Microsoft Word copy of the Federation’s Policy Manual. Because I wanted to review the manual and highlight and share relevant passages with my fellow board members, I loaded the Word file into Pages, and exported it as an ePub, then emailed myself the result and opened the email on my iPad and opened the ePub in Readmill’s iPad reading app:

I then used the Readmill reader on the iPad to read the manual and highlight passages; as I did this, the highlights accumulated on the Readmill web page for the manual, from which I could share them, comment on them, and otherwise have the highlights take on a digital life of their own. Like this, for example:

Our membership represents a diversity of opinions and views. We consider that it is a parental right to express these views. We consider it a strength of the organization to represent a wide range of ideas and ideals.

 Highlighted by Peter Rukavina in Home and School Policy Manual

This is an example of Readmill’s great power and competitive advantage: Kindle, Kobo, Nook and their brethren, while useful in their own way, exist as platforms with the ultimate goal of getting you to buy more books. They are the razors for which you are to buy an endless stream of razor blades. Readmill, because it’s not looking to sell you books, is not similarly shackled, and so can optimize for things like openness and sharing and reuse, freeing words from the boundaries of their books and allowing them to take on a life of their own.

Contrast this, for example, to the Kindle approach to the same functionality: I read the book Ah-Choo!: The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold in the Kindle app on my iPad and made a lot of highlights. I can login to kindle.amazon.com and see and manage all my highlights for that book, but the individual highlights don’t have their own URLs, and there’s no way for me to share my highlights with others — when I logout of Amazon.com the page I was looking for my highlights devolves into a generic summary page with a selection of popular, uncredited highlights. That’s what digital reading looks like without optimizing for sharing.

Yes, I’m sounding like a cheerleader for Readmill, but I see great potential in the Readmill ecosystem, and it’s already proving to be a useful part of my day-to-day workflow.

This summer in Berlin I had the pleasure of meeting the founders of Readmill. I’d been a beta-user of the service for a few months and, truth be told, didn’t know they were a Berlin company until Eric Wahlforss suggested I pay them a visit (as it turns out they share office space with Amen, a company co-founded by my former Plazes colleague Felix Petersen; it’s a small world).

After many months stealthing around in an invite-only beta, Readmill took the covers off yesterday, and anyone can sign up now; if you’re interested in eBook-reading, and you have an iPad, I encourage you to do so, as Readmill is doing some really, really interesting things. Like this:

When will craftsmen learn to avoid the delusions and pitfalls of colour, and assert the strict taste embodied in black and white ?

 Highlighted by Peter Rukavina in The printers’ handbook of trade recipes, hints & suggestions relating to letterpress and lithographic printing, bookbinding stationery, engraving, etc. With many useful tables and an index

That’s a embedded version of this highlight I made in this book that I’ve been reading in the Readmill iPad eBook reader after grabbing the free ePub-formatted version of the book from Google Books.

For me the killer feature of Readmill is its highlight-management: here’s a web page listing all the highlights I made while reading that book. Every highlight has it’s own URL — here’s one, for example — meaning that highlights can be emailed, tweeted and otherwise shared. What’s more, all my highlights are also available via an API, meaning that I can search them, sort them, re-use them and tunnel them into other applications and services.

All of this adds up to Readmill being much more than an eBook reader — indeed the Readmill folks will admit that their iPad app is more of a platform catalyst than a “product” in its own right. No, Readmill is really a eBook data management platform: look under the hood and you find all the hooks and infrastructure you need to bake Readmill’s features into any eBook appliance or service. And that’s the real reason why Readmill is exciting.

Which is not to say that Readmill’s iPad eBook reader isn’t also a thing of beauty and elegance: it is, hands down, the best eBook reader for that platform, with just the right mix of simplicity and features to make eBook reading pleasureable and more-than-just-digital-paper. While it’s limited to reading books in the open ePub format (so it can’t read your DRM-locked Kindle and Nook books), that is, net-net, a positive and not a negative, for to be truly useful and practical eBook infrastructure can’t be shackled by the restrictions that DRM imposes (it might be less of a negative for me, I admit, given my interest in books from the 1800s about letterpress, books that are long out of copyright and plentiful in ePub form).

Readmill is the first platform to come along that’s made me excited about the potential of reading digitally: you can friend me up at http://readmill.com/ruk and we can go reading together.

When I first acquired my tiny Adana Eight Five letterpress last year I was a little obsessed with tuning up and cleaning the press to “perfect” condition before actually getting down to printing. Then I read a post on the excellent letterpress-focused BriarPress.org website that said, in essence, “stop fussing about and just start printing!” So I did.

It was a good idea: there’s no better way to get to know the ins and outs of a letterpress than using it for its intended purpose. It will never be perfect, and, in the end, it’s far more important to develop a personal relationship with the physics of the press than it is to make sure every washer is polished.

With this in mind, after the press sprang to life on the weekend I was eager to print something — anything — on the Golding Jobber No. 8 that’s now playing the older-brother role to the Adana. I decided that a 1947 CFCY radio coverage map loaned to me by Ian Scott and Daphne Large would be the perfect thing: it’s too big to fit on the Adana so I’ve never had a chance to print it. And it’s a pretty neat map. Here’s the result:

It’s by no means a perfect print: it’s printing on rough cardboard; I only used one of the three rollers, so the ink coverage is uneven (the white line through the announcer’s body and Eastern Kings is due to a nick in the roller); and I haven’t learned yet how to make the subtle makeready adjustments on this larger scale that even things out. But it’s still pretty neat.

Here’s a short time-lapse video I made with my iPad (using iMotion HD) that covers the 30 minutes from when I first arrived until the first print came off the press:

As I’ve mentioned several times over the last couple of months, my “Cousin Sergey” — Sergey Datsenko, married to my third-cousin — has been here in Prince Edward Island studying English since the beginning of October.  Sergey and his wife Aleksandra made contact with us this spring, the first contact we’d had with the Ukrainian branch of our family since my great-grandfather immigrated to Canada in 1908.

Sergey’s decided that he likes Canada so much that he wants to move his family here from Ukraine, and to aid in that process he’s looking for work here in Prince Edward Island. So, dear readers, I’d like you to give him a job!

Sergey’s resume doesn’t really cover the depth and breadth of his technical skills: he is a true “jack of all trades,” with experience in everything from agriculture (running tractors, fixing machinery) to manufacturing (developing industrial processes at a company that makes construction cranes and refurbishes excavators) to auto mechanics (he ran his own garage, purchasing, restoring and re-selling cars) to retail (he and Aleksandra have operated a grocery store, gas station and restaurant) to construction (he’s been a contractor, and owns a company that makes foamed concrete blocks). He’s also an exceptionally good cook, as you can see from the potato latkes in the photo here.

One of the things that living through the last 30 years of Ukrainian history has provided Sergey with is infinite flexibility: he’s improvised his way through economic and political ups and downs with imagination and determination, and I have every confidence he would make an excellent employee for an Island company looking for someone with his skills.

You can email Sergey directly at bigcompany1@yandex.ru or contact me if you’d like more background or to suggest possibly employers.

After two months of struggle — finding it a home, finding a way of transporting it, finding a way to replace the part the fell off the truck during transport — my Golding Jobber No. 8 letterpress sprang to life again. 

Profound credit goes to Sergey, a true jack-of-all-trades, whose hours and hours of measuring, planning, fitting, grinding, filing, drilling, adjusting and wiring are the only reason at all the the press is working today; without Sergey it might have been spring before I managed to get it all together (if ever!). Here’s the video evidence (it’s an amazing machine to just sit and watch, let along for its ability to print!):

A big day of developments in the letterpress world. Or at least in my small slice of it. First thing this morning I headed out to the edge of Charlottetown to Precision Mechanical to pick up the newly-fabricated replacement part for my Golding Jobber No. 8 sent up from their sister company, Kensington Metal Products. I’ll get together with Sergey soon to see how it works on the press.

Next it was out to Tryon to Campbell’s Printing in my friend Nathan’s truck to pick up a Hamilton Type Cabinet that Bill threw in as part of the Golding Jobber sale. The drawers in the cabinet are filled with the kinds of bits and bobs — die cutters, leading, furniture — that it’s always useful to have around a developing letterpress shop. The cabinet is a big honking heaviness of a piece of furniture, and was quite a challenge to move.

To start I attempted to back Nathan’s pickup to the back door of Campbell’s shop. In doing so I only succeeded in chewing up their slightly-inclined and very slippery lawn and not getting within 20 feet of the door that was my target:

Bill has a defter hand at the wheel, and managed to easily manoeuvre his truck into place, onto which we slid the cabinet with little problem. We then backed the two truck beds up against each other and transferred the cabinet from his truck to Nathan’s. Fortunately Bill and Gertie are nothing if not patient and accommodating, so the extra time, the poor driving on my part and the chewed-up lawn did not ruin the day or even cause a ripple of stress (they’re moving out of the house and shop next week, which mitigated the lawn-chewing issue somewhat!).

I strapped the cabinet and its drawers into place, thanked Bill and Gertie for all their generosity, and headed back to town. When I arrived at 84 Fitzroy Street — the “compositing” base for my letterpress operation — and measured the doors I realized that there was no way the cabinet was going to fit through the doors, and so launched into a surprisingly easy disassemblage. Nathan showed up just as I needed someone to help me move the lighter-but-still-pretty-heavy pieces into the house, and 15 minutes later he was on his way and the cabinet’s pieces and drawers sit in the next room waiting to be put together again.

Map Tales is a lovely little tool for telling stories with words, maps and photos. Jeremy Keith tells the story of its creation; here’s a little story about our daily walk to school each day up Prince Street:

(Update January 25, 2019: Map Tales went offline; an incomplete version of this “story map” can be found in the Wayback Machine).