One of my prized pieces of equipment in the print shop is a numbering machine. It’s an ingenious piece of kit: every time the press makes an impression, the number increments. I’ve used it for raffle tickets and trading cards and, this season, for our This Box is for Good boxes.

There’s one right way to orient the numbering machine on the press, at 90° to the lockup, positioned so that the rollers strike the No. last. Orienting it some other way results in incomplete inking, and/or skipped numbers.

To help me remember this, I made a cheat sheet.