Lead type and minor problems are good companions.

I'm assisting Katie Baldwin sporadically (a word I can't use without thinking of Clueless) this summer. She has the kind of make-do basement print shop that I'll someday assemble, and job printing with her feels like practice. This week we're printing a poetry chapbook with lead type and minor problems, which are good companions. Typos are much easier to fix in lead than in polymer plates, and when line spacing looks weird on the page, I simply have to lean over the press bed to realize wait, that leading is a point too thick, let me just pull this one out. We had a major setback today, discovering that some of our pages had oily impressions on them, yikes! The problem was simply solved and we only lost one printing day, which in the grand scheme of things is pretty par for the lead type course. 

In disappointing news, our farmshare from Keystone CSA has been cancelled for the summer, only halfway through. That's a giant bummer, and we have to cross our fingers that our money will even be refunded. Getting a farmshare has been the most rewarding thing about living in Philadelphia, and I can pretend like going to the market every Saturday with ten dollars and leaving with a watermelon and some garlic scapes is better than getting the same boring squash and granola every week, but it's not. The share is super cost effective and Keystone was nice because we also got meat, cheese and eggs. If we get our money refunded and we can get a share with one of the few winter CSAs in town, it will be a little more expensive and harder to pick up. I'm going to try to be positive, though. The other local summer shares have WAY better produce than Keystone did, so maybe they're doing us a favor. Really I just need a garden and a butcher, but that's a different harangue.