Introduction

My father, George Bull Young, became a journalist the hard way, the Mark Twain way, starting out in the composing room and then working his way to a copy desk. How and where he learned the printer's trade, part of his checkered & fabled past, led to one of my earliest memories being the clatter and clank of a press and the smell of ink. When Dad died, three days before Christmas over 25 years ago, his fascination with type and press was born again in me.
     I re-established The Tagalong Press in 1983 with the purchase of an 1870s-vintage Franklin Gordon 8x12 press and five nearly-empty cases of type. From that point in time the printery has grown to nearly fill a two-car garage with an untold amount of antique foundry and modern foundry type and two C&P presses & a paper cutter.
     These web pages are symbolic in that they record in the technology of the 21st Century the past and present of a communications medium far more ancient than the machines or the people who use them. These pages, as stories of my father's shop and mine, are a record of people in whom art is and has been the ultimate pleasure and the printed word a record of the future undisturbed.