The Press Today

If there is one thing that best doesn't describe the present resurrection of The Tagalong Press it would be the word "studio."
     There is nothing at all remotely "studio-esque" about the print shop. While you might call what happens here art & a high form of creativity, the simple fact is that we have no grand pretentions. This was in my father's time a print shop. It started out again after my parents' passing to be a print shop and it remains that to this day.
     This is not a quiet corner of clean order and tranquility. This is a messy, cluttered, oily, ink-stained and unfinished space, this 160 square feet at the butt-end of a garage that can barely be called a "two-car." Even before we moved to the present location near the highway and only nominally out in the country, nobody with any sense would have thought that this was an artist's studio.
     It's a printer's work shop, not a studio.
     That being said, the shop started out on February 23, 1983 with the purchase of a 9x13 George P. Gordon press bearing a metal plate on part of the mechanism with the date June 16th, 1874. I paid John Renner in Springfield $500 for the press and, over the course of 25 years, it's served me and another printer friend pretty much unfailingly.
     Around 1985 I found a nearly-complete C&P NS 10x15 lying in a field behind the late Bill Tompkins' print shop. Some friends and I wrestled all the parts we could find into a pickup truck and my car and deposited them on the garage floor of our house in New Carlisle. Over the course of that summer & with much effort, I got the press working. It took two coats of paint & a few lucky catches of a few gears and some machine work to finish the press off well enough for use. I estimate that it now has close to a million impressions on it.
     Around 1988 I picked up a C&P Pilot OS from Jack and Henry Schwartz's print shop and parts depot in downtown Dayton, Ohio.
     By the turn of the century I had added a C3 Intertype caster, a 23 inch C&P paper cutter, a Poco 0 Proof press and Dad's old 12x18 C&P to the clutter in the garage. About six years ago I picked up a 7x11 Pearl Improved.

During the period of time between 1983 and 1996 I was involved in the American Amateur Press Association, the National Amateur Press Association and the Amalgamated Printers' Association, organizations with which Dad had been part off and on while he was alive. I served as one of the vice presidents for the AAPA and, with the help of Linda Donaldson of Portsmouth, Ohio & Guy Miller of Springfield, Ohio, organized and ran the 1993 AAPA convention in Dayton, Ohio.
     From the first resurrection to about 1985 I tried now and then to make a bit of money off all the equipment and clutter. I printed QSL cards for ham radio operators, a onerous and dulling task that I will never repeat. I tried printing stationary and envelopes, which I learned was another branch of printerly prostitution for which I was ill-suited. I even printed chapbooks of poetry for self-declared poets and also printed a few chapbooks of my own writing. Each of those efforts was nowhere productive enough to pay for the time & paper I put into them.
     By 1990 I'd figured out that my shop would always be a hobby shop and that would be that. No business. No type foundry. No fancy credentials or production plans. Ephemera, jokes and occasional newsletters for hobby printer and amateur journalism groups was and continues to be the fare of the shop.

Then came the big clean-up. About five years ago I gave away the Intertype machine. Dad's press, the Pearl & the Poco proofer went to a private press printer in Tennessee. The mats for the caster & a large measure of type & Intertype metal went to Phil Driscoll of Irish Hills Type Foundry.
     Part of this was caused by Cindy's desire to park her car in the garage. In the process of setting up for that, I also took down half of the wall that had separated the shop from the rest of the garage. Domestic tranquility was restored, but cats would get into the garage and knock over boxes of spacing material or pee on the exposed type.

The wall is going back up after Easter of this year. The 9x13 Gordon that I had loaned to Tom Ebbert is now back in the shop & rehabilitated. Large amounts of clutter have been eliminated & Cindy can still park her car in the garage. Domestic tranquility is once again restored.
     That's the way the print shop works today. It has gained a few extra tens of pounds of type metal and the layout has changed, but other than it's still a print shop dedicated to the idea that a stupid joke is always better than a dull ramble run by a crazy failed hippie who at one time fancied himself a writer & linguist but who now knows better.