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mid a mash of printing equipment and other metal things, Don Black is as welcoming as an old friend, even as he pushes a line of, maybe , 14-point type though a table saw without a guard. His fingers, aged by 70 years but clearly still steady and powerful, move just centimeters away from a spinning blade that has been forged to cut metal. He does not so much as flinch as his son Craig squeezes past to the back of the shop.
Moments later, Black, seated now is using two fingers to peck at a keyboard attached to some great, strange machine. It begins clunking away, belts turning and arms moving.
Metal slides against metal and plugs fall tight into place, somewhere from high up the back of the machine. Another line of type is cast. This place is completely unfamiliar. Don K. Black Linecasting Services: Two stuffed warehouse bays of printing’s past – a working model of chaos theory.
Drawers of lead and wood type, brass matrices, plugs, are stacked floor to roof – about 10,000 sets of Linotype and Ludlow each, among other rare things related to typesetting. There is no beginning or end. The only chance of understanding the shop would come from picking a drawer and working outward, up, down, right, left, one surprise at a time. Despite its apparent randomness, the place breathes a confident tone of underlining order.
After a few minutes, pockets of stitching or hot-foil stamping equipment, cutters, folders and drills, all help to develop the shop’s floor plan. Most of the company’s revenues come from refurbishing used equipment like these, but that is easy to forget walking the aisles like an archeologist who stumbled onto William Caxton’s tomb. It is hard to resist even looking into an open metal barrel, beat up as if it held industrial waste. The bottom of the barrel provides an unexpected glint of gold. It is actually a small, gathering pile of scrapped brass type.
“There is a lot of money sitting around here if you wanted to go that direction, but once it is melted down it is gone forever,” says Black. “You have to make that decision and live with it.”
Read the full story in the October 2006 edition of PrintAction |
