Dang, it's been two years since a “State of Mind” post? We just celebrated our fifth (!) anniversary… man… the years go by quickly.
It's tempting to say things haven't changed much — this remains a secondary endeavor to my day job, and I also put a lot of time and energy into the Vespa Club of Chicago and the Slaughterhouse Rally. It's hardly surprising that Midwest Ephemera is not growing exponentially. But, as I said last time, “Things are good!”

What’s happened in the interim? We’ve printed a lot of stuff, a lot of it’s on display here, but we’ve been getting more commercial print jobs (wedding invitations, etc). If we're not involved on the creative end, we don’t list that as “our work.” But that's been good for the bottom line — we’re turning a small profit and getting more and more comfortable with our skills and equipment, and learning new things every time we ink up the press. Best of all, we’re still really enjoying our time in the shop.

After waiting about a year for a position to open, MWE became a member (#1014) of the Amalgamated Printers’ Association about a year ago. It’s a great organization of 150 letterpress printers that all submit four prints a year to exchange with other members. You can see our four entries from 2024 (MWE-0049, 0051, 0055, and 0056) and our "proprietor card" (MWE-0048) in the portfolio. We’re looking forward to seeing our first print of 2025 in the next bundle, The A.P.A. bundles are always inspiring, and it feels great to be a part of it. A.P.A. also hosts an annual Wayzgoose, this year it's in Rochester, N.Y., and we're thiiiinking about it…
We scored a pretty big haul of great wood type last year and we've been using the Vandercook press more, and doing some larger work. It's been a fun experience, though after 180 one-color prints the other day (and winding up the ink rollers by hand) it's clear the Chandler and Price is much easier on one's shoulders.

Another exciting development: last fall we procured a Ludlow Typograph from a nearby commercial printer that was going full-digital. We got a good price, and spent a couple months cleaning it, tinkering around, and converting it from natural gas to propane (with tons of remote help from Dave Seat). Before long, it was working great, until Chicago winter froze the cooling system and it sprung a few leaks (note bucket in photo). But now we're now back in business setting hot metal type into slugs, which is nearly magical, like a Mold-a-Rama machine but with metal, and in my own garage!
“Why would you want that?” you may ask —and you would not be the first! Well, one of our big goals is to be able to 100% accurately reproduce jukebox title strips, and this machine is precisely the one they used back in the day. It makes the typesetting much faster (set it once, chunk out 12 slugs!) and Ludlow's "Tempo" typeface is the exact type used on the original cards. Sure, Futura or Twentieth Century or Airport Gothic are very close, but we want to do it right, right? Of course this requires having Tempo in all the weights and sizes used on the title strips. The machine came with a few fonts, but we've been slowly tracking down the other ones I need.

The Ludlow makes typesetting easier in general, the mats are easier to pick up, set, and distribute than regular type. A slug, once properly set, won't fall apart on the composing stone. And one only needs a limited number of mats to set an infinite amount of text (no more running out of letters!) Of course if I find a typo on press, I’d need to go back home and wait for the metal to melt down… then go to my work to use the type saw I'm storing in their warehouse, then back to the print shop… it sure would be helpful to have all this stuff in one place…
Which brings us to the most exciting bit… We're looking at moving into a new space, with everything organized in one place, with space to move around, host guests, and allow more room to grow. We've got a good lead on a spot… not sure if this will turn out to be the right place or if this is the right time, but having a small corner of an industrial space to do our thing has been a dream since we started talking about letterpress printing, and it's starting to look like a reality.
Hopefully our next post will be an invitation to our first open house. Or more likely, begging for help to move all this stuff. We'll see…
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