Wow, what a ride since our last post in May… What we expected to be a couple weekends of moving turned into three months of endless trips to the hardware store, multiple liftgate truck rentals, hours of rigging, jacking, and ratcheting, a pretty-much blown suspension for the Toyota, sore muscles, frazzled nerves, and as many favors from friends as anyone could ever hope to get away with.
All that, along with our involvement in planning the Slaughterhouse Chicago scooter rally, meant three months without printing, without income, and without any spare time.
But thankfully, it’s done. Infinite boxes of paper, envelopes, tools, ink… both presses, a hundred fonts, a hundred jumbled galley trays, cabinets, leading, furniture, reglets, spacing… the Ludlow, the type saw… it’s all in the building, mostly functional, and as organized as it’s ever been. On top of that, we somehow ended up with a full-size paper cutter and a die-stamping machine that we haven’t even started to figure out. Anyone know an electrician?
So here we are, all the promise and excitement in the world, with the print shop we’ve been dreaming of for several years… and the worst flu we’ve had in several years, writing this from our third day in bed.
To make matters worse, Our favorite event of the year, the Hamilton Wayzgoose, the event that introduced us to the welcoming community of printers we love, has been cancelled. The Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum board abruptly cancelled programming that couldn’t have cost much — largely leaving the museum and its resources empty and unused —with no substantial explanation.
Several BIPOC printers and museum insiders suggest that the board, mostly small-town Wisconsin businessmen from outside the letterpress printing community, is pushing to abandon the museums diversity initiatives, and called for the board’s total resignation.
After a couple semi-apologies and unclear clarifications from the board, most Wayzgoose speakers, presenters, workshop hosts, volunteers (including Midwest Ephemera), and participants had dropped out of the event. The Board finally announced yesterday that the event was cancelled, not mentioning this community reaction, and again throwing our beloved staff under the bus. They seem to be kicking any actual resolution or communication down the road to their newly-recruited general manager who takes over next week. She sure has her work cut out for her.
I’m happy that the community solidarity was so loud, and hopefully this starts to repair longstanding institutional issues with the Museum that have apparently been hidden from the community by a long-suffering museum staff. Midwest Ephemera wouldn’t exist if not for the Hamilton Museum and its staff. The loss of this year’s Hamilton Wayzgoose is pretty hard to take. Losing the museum itself would be much worse. Losing the amazing community that has developed around the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum would be unthinkable.
But hey, if life gives you yellow ink, print lemonade. We (Midwest Ephemera and our pals C’mon Home) had been looking for a date to host an open house/shopwarming party, and now that weekend is free. Looks like it’ll be Saturday, November 8, look for more details soon. If you’re in the area and missing Wayzgoose, or just want to see what we’re all about, or just come over and drink our beer, c’mon by.
And hey, to anyone who wants to print, whatever your age, race, color, gender, or creed, I don’t have anything like the resources of the HWT&PM to offer you, but I will do what I can to help you, and I think you’ll find most of the letterpress printing community equally welcoming.
With all this noise in the background, we’re finally printing again, though this flu has slowed things down at the moment. We’re working on an album cover for an old friend’s band, a booklet of lyrics for a new friend, and some business cards.
We hosted our first workshop for a couple friends, which went great, and taught us how important it is to have plenty of masking tape on hand for workshops. We’ve hoped to teach even longer than we’ve hoped to print, and now we’re doing both! We’ll soon announce a series of monthly workshops, as well as private workshops by appointment.
We’re also looking forward to getting more jukebox/music ephemera in production, and OMG it’s September and quelle surprise, we only have one APA bundle piece done. Slowly but surely, we’re on our path to casual/accidental world domination.
Thanks for all your support, especially to our moving team; Calvin, Tracie, Sean, MK, Sean, Renee, Emma and Ryan at Doubletrip Press, Johnny(?) who wandered by on Halsted as we were loading the papercutter, and most of the Vespa Club of Chicago.
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