Early on in this madness, I began collecting stuff. I think that most of the hobby of letterpress hobby printing involves a male drive to hoard. Thus I seldom, in the first twenty-odd years of this game, ever gave up a piece of equipment or a font of type. This led to the collection of equipment tolled in the present-day description of the print shop. Just before the last clean-up cycle, Cindy convinced me to print up a book of all the type & ornaments I had, along with a description of what was what and what worked where. Thus did I come up with the title you see here, Too Much Is Always Better Than Not Enough. Not that cleaning up left me any more room, except to hoard more stuff all over again, which is another story for much later. Or a web log about printing.

Start Small and Grow Big

There are a few copies here and there of some early things I printed as part of my membership in the NAPA and later the AAPA. This is the second issue of the resurrected Tagalong, taking its name from the journal that my father printed in Amarillo, Texas not long after I was born. I had, by the time I printed this one, accumulated enough Kennerley in 8, 10 and 12 pt to print up four pages at once. This was the first attempt at an eight-pager. Other than the fact that I had to hand staple it with a modified office desk stapler, there's nothing truly amazing about it. The focus of this one issue was my having found an old college professor doing a poetry reading, to which I went & enjoyed.

This image from the twelve page signature of the first little book of goofy thoughts that I printed around 1983 shows one of three signatures but not the cover of the book itself. It marked the beginning of my adventures with strange thoughts and half-baked sarcasticisms about new age philosophy & superstitionisms. Nothing great as printed stuff but fun to have done anyway.


After we moved to Medway and before I found a C3 Intertype caster down the street, I began printing what has become the only serious level of writing that I've ever worked at. This four page paper (front and back shown here), printed on an 11x17 sheet pressed my printing abilities to the limit. When I acquired Dad's old C&P OS 12x18 press, producing a paper this size proved just as difficult. I eventually went back to running the journal off on 8x10, two pages.



Over the first fifteen odd years after I started the print shop I was a member of two so-called "amateur journalism" clubs. The first was the National Amateur Press Association and the second was the much lower-key American Amateur Press Association. One of the members of both groups whom I came to know as a friend and teacher was Joe Curran.
     Joe had been in the US Marines during WWII and had retired from the FBI. He and I used to joke like old hippies about his having been sworn to protect the country from the pot heads & I had been too stoned to notice. When I first met Joe he was a healthy, robust & friendly sort of guy, the kind of person you just has fun being around. He had a beautiful sense of humor and a clever wit. When I saw him at the AAPA convention in Tampa one year, he was reading the want adverts in a local. I asked him what he was up to. He said he was looking to buy a Lincoln Continental. I asked him why he waited until he got to Florida to look for one.      "I'm lookin' to pick on up in an estate auction," he said with a smile.
     A couple years later I saw Joe at the Akron, Ohio, APA Wayzgoose. He was sitting in the hotel restaurant with a set of pills out on the table in front of him like a hand of cards.
     A year later he was gone. Heart attack while driving from his home to a visit with fellow hobby printers in Tampa and Clearwater.
     When I got the news I immediately set to thinking of how I could honor my old friend. I knew that I wanted to make it a simple act, just a few pages of text, my thoughts & my feelings. I came up with the below edition of Tagalong. At the AAPA convention later in that year the organization presented me with a Laureate Award for the four pages about Joe shown below.


According to the official records, I joined the Amalgamated Printers' Association in 1983. It was a few years before I was able to get to one of the organization's conventions, called The Wayzgoose. I went to the one in Indianapolis for a few hours and spent a few hours on the road to get to the one at Akron. After the Akron 'goose I ended up in the dentist's office getting a tooth fixed. When I got home, and while the Novocaine was wearing off, I sat at the C3 Intertype & ended up with enough copy for a twelve-page booklet. The front page of the inside text is shown to the right. A center spread from the inside is shown below. I sewed each signature into 170 covers and sent 'em off to the mailer. I consider it one of my best Intertype keyboarded ephemeral publications.


My wife, Cindy, and I are the parents to two young men. The oldest, Ian, was born in 1975, long enough before Dad's passing & my resurrection of the printery to have missed getting any sort of hooplah or announcement of his birth beyond what appears in the newspapers.
     Our second son, Anders, got a twelve page announcement, hand set in old type and printed off in multiple colors. The two page spread below is the inside first page and announcement page. The wood block print is made off on of Lucy Stovall Douglas' engravings, which she kindly gave me to use for the announcement. Not shown is the inside spread of family history and genealogy stretching back five generations. It was a lot of work but a labor of love.


One of the group participation activities of the APA is the annual calendar. Members either ask for or are assigned a month for which they make up a page and submit to another coordinating member who assembles the calendars and sends them off to the mailer. The page below for 1991 is one I printed using a lino cut that Dad had done.

I have been very inactive in printing over the past six or eight years. I've printed bits and pieces here and there for friends or family. I printed the wedding invitations for my eldest's sons marriage & the graduation announcement & invitation for my youngest son's high school commencement.
     A few months before this writing a friend at work got his ham radio license. I offered to print QSL cards for him. The result reinvigorated my interest in letterpress trouble-making and the printed piece that did the job is the card shown here.

That's pretty much representative of the kind of things I do for fun (or for art if you must be critical) or by way of a couple rusty old Viking-age skillingar. The next gallery is pictures of the presses, type, tools &c. At the bottom of the next gallery is a link to an ExCell file of the type faces & fonts in the shop. You can get to them by clicking on the pointer below.