Printing Porn

Thirty years ago my career began with a stint as a typographer, manipulating computer code to make a $200,000 photographic printer spit out galleys of type which would soon become books and magazines: The Whole Rat Catalog, The Professional Wine Reference, Vinyl Leaves, Business Week, Working Woman, Architectural Record, Aviation Week, Coal News (it all can't be glamorous). Parenthetically, can you imagine if someone walked into a publisher's office and proposed a new magazine called Working Man?

I was proud to be a member of an industry which had transformed the world so long ago and continues to have an impact today. Five hundred years ago 99% of the population lived and died without having read a single word in their entire lives. As you go through your day today, try to go 10 minutes without reading something. Benjamin Franklin, who had many diverse talents, began his will with the humble declaration, "I, Benjamin Franklin, of Philadelphia, printer..."

By the late 1980s PostScript and Quark Xpress reduced my well-paying skill set to about $10 bucks an hour and I unschooled myself into a new career that paid better.

As more of our printing is done with electrons, I think we tend to give less thought to the art of printing and where ink comes from and how printing has impacted the world and what it has led to today.


I sometimes miss my old career. While I enjoy being a purveyor of good food and coffee, I also really enjoyed designing type and page layouts. There was a precision to those skills that food service does not entail. On the other hand sometimes everything comes full circle and those old printing skills of mine may come in handy once again, re-purposed for food and coffee in ways no one could have predicted.