Print

My year editing the Horae at St. Paul’s was the first step in a career associated with print. I went on to the University of Denver where I majored in English, studying with Bob Richardson and John Williams and Bob Pawlowski and Helen Williams, writing poetry and fiction and studying literature, particularly modern American poetry.

I’ve come to realize that I have been living in the latest part of a continuum of change. How we live is defined in part by how we communicate. I grew up on the very tail end of the letterpress era, and made my living through multicolor offset lithography. The business was transformed in the 1990’s with the rise of desktop publishing and digital file formats, and is continuing to change as it is integrated with other distribution channels for information such as the internet.

I had no idea what I was getting into when I got my first job.

I worked on the newspaper, The Clarion, setting headlines on the phototypositor, waxing galleys, slicing them with exacto knives, and pasting up the paper. Looking for some practical experience, I stayed in Denver for a year after college and apprenticed at the Harvest Press with Roger Strawbridge and Seth Milliken, where I drove the truck, learned to run the Kluge letterpress, help feed a Heidelberg KORD press, paper cutter and folder.

I returned east in 1974 and became assistant to the production manager at the House of Offset, a large commercial printer in Somerville, MA, which was running two-color Millers and Miehles. I bought paper, planned jobs, contracted with binderies and finishers. Four-color-process offset printing was entering its heyday; Polaroid and Gillette kept all the printers in Boston busy with their marketing campaigns.

Soon Morris (“its on the truck”) Greenbaum, who owned Graphic Arts Finishers in Charlestown offered me the opportunity to manage The Mechanical Bindery, which he was starting in Everett. After a few year running businesses for other people, I figured I could start a business of my own.