Printing --Conversation I

Most of my friends' dads were printers, and their jobs were safeguarded by the unions. They went to work on the A train, and stood in the noise, dirt and smell of the giant presses that sat in hulking manufacturing buildings in what are now the tonier sides of town: DUMBO, Soho and Tribeca.

This was the set I had; I eventually
stored the letters in a jar; discarding
composing rods. 

When the "Negroes" came, they moved into areas in and around downtown Brooklyn through to East New York, disrupting the "safety" of the long ride on the A. Some came from the South, and others, "The Islands" (the Caribbean), starting a shift: the printing industry gradually changed from white pressmen to black ones; and as the production sphere turned digital, IT and production became more diverse, too. What's interesting is that middle and upper management in the print industry remained overwhelmingly working class white in New York, and, as I'd discover many years later--in 2000!--in the Midwest also.

None of this affected me at the time. We were the second "Latins" on the block (my godmother and her family were the first). And, our was landlord "forgiven" for renting to us because--I think--my mom was an Italian national and we were light-skinned, though we had other discrimination issues to deal with.

Now this would have been nice to own.
Note the R and Q. Not entirely Clarendon.

However, most significantly, my parents had never experienced the sense of security--the cradle-to-coffin guarantee of a job, house and pension--that the white working class had in my Queens neighborhood. Partly because we were immigrants and partly because my parents had experienced WWII where all economies were upended, we had an inner sense that we would always have to create the padding to let us land on our feet. We never had anything to take for granted, and that was OK. It meant that education was everything, and I believe that's why, quite often, immigrants send their kids to school.

Back to how I was exposed to printing.

My print exposure constantly developed in many different environments. My dad, not at all a printer, loved print medium. He would sit down with me and show me, through a magnifying glass, how the different colors of the Sunday comics were made up of dots of four colors, and how the tightly placed "rosettes" created the illusion of the color photographs on the covers of LIFE, Vogue and Ms. magazines.

This looks closest to a Clarendon font. Look at the
Q and R.  It appears to be condensed, however.

But the real magic came when he bought me my first rubber print set. There were animals and letter stamps; I don't know how my tiny fingers could be so dextrous to handle the square letters, but they were. I think if I look for a set I'll find it; I'll post an updated image.

What's fun to note is that I added text to my drawings (and later, in art school, silkscreens) with that same rubber set. The images I've found around the Internet show some sets as well as others with wood handles. The font is of the Clarendon inspiration, but alas, the give-away is the R and the Q. I did find one with a version of Clarendon, included here.