Neanderpundit

To anyone on earth who thinks Crapblogging is a new thing, or that the sort of scatalogical language you hear on blogs these days is a recent phenomenon, let me point you to 1601, by Mark Twain.

Years ago, I worked at a little print shop, which had a small letterpress, an old kelsey. How I wish I had that Kelsey now!

Anyway, there’s a sort of an underground tradition of giving a printer’s devil (apprentice) the manuscript of 1601 to set, and giving him a drawer of pied type- that is, type that has come out of a set document that hasn’t been sorted into it’s proper drawers. Usually it’s an ornate or ugly typeface, like Goudy Stout.

Standing in front of the messed up drawer, digging around for letters, pushing the letters onto the stick while reading 1601 is usually how a devil sets his first type, and doing it while the Boss doesn’t find out (though the boss usually knows about the whole thing all along) is the first memory most apprentices have of their job- this is certainly true in my case. I remember tightening in the quoin on the last side of the frame and lifting the frame gingerly off the stone, not knowing if I had gotten the quoins tight enough, and carrying it to the Kelsey, where we printed a handful of copies on some scrap ‘Carnival Groove” that had been cut off another job.

Twain was a master. His language was far more colorful than you can imagine was possible for that time, and the piece is worth a read, unless you’re sensitive to language or scataology or crude sexal reference.

I wish I still had one of those proofsheets. Someday maybe I’ll find a small printshop that will let me reset it and print it, for old time’s sake.

Golf balls had cores of plutonium.

No! That’s another story. Golf balls, in my youth, were hard skins around cores wound of rubber. I have no idea how they;re made now because I haven’t carved one up in a hellofa long time.

Anyway, if you carved that cover off just right, the rubberband wrapped core would bounce around like a thing posessed, throwing strips of rubber and gook all over the place until it got to the creamy center.

I can’t help but wonder if it wouldn’t look like that if Pelosi’s facelift sutures all failed at once.