Another busy week at the shop, it is. Another strange week in Nashville. I swear, I have been drinking beer and eating eggs everyday this week. In fact, I am drinking a beer right now–local Blackstone Brewery porter for $2.75 a pint at happy hour at The Flying Saucer. OK, OK–here is a poster I printed this week. A re-strike of an old Jim Reeves poster:

Posters like this are what we sell up front, along with other newer posters, postcards, etc., and Jim’s beautiful monoprints. What we do is look at the old poster and typeset it anew to look exactly like the old one, then mix the inks accordingly. It’s old, but new at the same time, ya know.

I am working on two new jobs as well. One is fairly typical: a benefit concert at the Ryman Auditorium featuring Vince Gill. The other is a strange one like my last job–that “Watercolor” poster. It is for the Conference on Financial Markets and Financial Policy at Vanderbilt University, in honor of Dewey Daane on his 90th birthday, and it is to include an image of Mr. Daane participating in a bull fight in Spain. Will it make sense to anybody but the guy ordering the poster and Mr. Daane himself? I don’t know. Customer knows best. This one also is going to contain a list of every speaker at the conference. That is tons of type, so I am getting a plate made, which means I have to type it up on the computer.

Check out the progress.

We don’t use computers ’round here. It’s all manual–hands-on. Looking at those fonts on the screen was tripping me out–these days I am so used to feeling fonts. I touch type, not punch on a keyboard. Some of those standard fonts on computers–Wide Latin, Franklin Gothic, Rockwell, etc.–we have those. I touch them, move them around, add spacing to them, and print them. Words are real!

On another note–what are the odds of two young women in Nashville who don’t know each other wearing the same vintage dinosaur t-shirt from different thrift stores to the same bar on a Wednesday night? I don’t know.