Hello 2010

I think I've been doing this blog for more than a year now, and so far I've averaged about 6 posts a month, and believe me, that's not bad for somebody who has a hard time committing to anything for more than five minutes. However, it's been more than a month since I've written anything here, December and alot of January has been rife with significant but unbloggable events, on both the good and bad extremes, and that's about all I've had time to ponder. Two days ago I did a few grand worth of damage with my truck, which is pretty on par for the course I've been playing into the New Year. 2010 for yours truly seems to be on the explosive track.

Here's some good stuff that's been happening:


Harold Kyle of Boxcar Press does practically all the work readying a Miehle Vertical V50 for transport from Syracuse to Asheville, including a gracious loan of a complete trailer setup, simply because I really don't know what the hell I'm doing and I don't have any money to do it anyway.

1) I was given a free Miehle Vertical V50 which I have been obsessively restoring for weeks now (along with the sometimes reluctant, but mostly diligent help of the BBH crew) using all kinds of elbow grease, scrubbing tools, and harsh chemicals, the NARSTIEST of them being carburetor cleaner, which I can only use when everyone has left for the day. On some days, despite protective gloves and a respirator, five or six cans of spraying the stuff has me coming home with my body totally juiced with what feels like an early onset of Alzhiemer's. And by free press I mean I think I spent two grand so far on moving, rigging, and restoration, despite its total zero dollar price tag.


I had started in on the center metal roller before thinking about before & after pics. Shortly after that with about an hour of scrubbing and carburetor cleaner, I got the results below.



But my god the results from a caustic cloud of carburetor cleaner are astounding. As my friend Casey, who commandeered the six hour press move into the shop said, "We only use 3% of our brains. Which leaves 97% to burn." What is 97% of one brain cell worth is what I want to know.


Casey Gullage attempts to lift the V50 with a forklift as Emily stands by, hoping she can somehow prevent four thousand pounds of disaster as I pull the trailer out from under the press.


I made sure absolutely everyone at BBH could effectively complain about the detail cleaning of the V50.


The once rusty beast now shines at night.

2) NYIGF Ahoy! As always we're gearing up last minute to churn out new designs and refurbish some old ones. Printing Xmas cards in January seems pretty odd but it's got to happen sometime. The New York Gift Show in January is our biggest show and generally what funds what is in store for the rest of the year, so of course we are all excited to get this over with and get paid!





3) I've had 2 years of experience in High School Theater. Four years ago I had 6 minutes of televised fame as a letterpress practitioner on HGTV's "That's Clever." But I have never officially acted in front of a camera for anything until last week when I was filmed as Thomas Paine rocking out with his cockring out as he prints Common Sense in a "Founding Father's" "Music Video Spoof" of a pop song who's title and artist I will refrain from mentioning just yet. It was for part a promotional video for Soomo Publishing, which specializes in online Poly-Sci educational supplements. It premiers on YouTube in February, it promises to be hilarious, and it captures your humble narrator in his dorkiest glory to date. The film shoot happened at Bookworks and was separate from most of the footage shot for the video.



Thomas Jefferson has a sunset violin solo.


TJ and the Founding Fathers unfurl their flag of Awesome.


This photo of my costume fitting at the Asheville Community Theater does not do what I had to do in front of the camera any kind of justice.

4) A Beautiful Snow Storm. West Asheville got 17" in 24 hours and all sorts of chaos ensued, both locals and travelers were stranded, as of day three 37,000 were still without power, rescue missions and snowball fights were as frequent as liquor drinks, but I gotta say, all of my experiences in Asheville when it's shut down by snow have been nothing but good times. The city of Asheville reportedly spent $500K on cleanup and emergency services over the course of the week.


A snow covered Haywood Road brings out the alcohol starved snow zombies.


A snowball fight between patrons of the Rocket Club and the Admiral raged for hours.


More than ample snowfall has more than ample possibilities.

5) Scoring Stalls Emptied. We keep all of our fresh prints waiting to be scored on display in wooden stalls in the front window of our studio, and often some piles have gotten up to 4 feet high, totaling up to 15,000+ prints in the window at any given time. Despite the dozens of interns who have hacked away at the ever growing "to-be-scored" piles, in three years since we've employed them they have never been completely depleted. No longer, thanks to the combined efforts of our new daily interns "Team Awesome," who decimated the scoring stalls in a mere 18 days.


It hasn't looked this way since they were first built in 2007.

4) I got a Pop-Eye shirt and a really cool wallet (not pictured) for Christmas.



Jesus, I guess that's not all the good stuff but that's all that you are going to get out of me. Up next, best 10 movies of the 00's.

The Summer NYIGF 09 Report: A circle of hell even Dante couldn't dream

by Emily Wismer, BBH Snarkmaster Supreme



Ah, the NY gift show. After many of these shows, Brandon writes about the great things to be seen, and there are great things - creative and skilled folks selling the fruits of their intense labors. Our journey, however, will be a bit different. Join me, your intrepid guest blogger, as I lead you into the bowels of a hell so wondrous, so tacky; an altar to the possibilities of plastics; a tour through a crystal castle the Snow Queen would envy; a search to find the tackiest gift of all. And be certain, the competition is fierce.



To be honest, the first 2 days of the gift show are a bit of a blur. There is set-up, and sweating, splinters in the fingers. I meet BBH's favorite bartender in NYC, Barry, and have the first 2 martinis I ever like. The blur is more literal for Brandon, who somewhere in the first night's drunken stumble back to the hotel loses one lens from his glasses and has to spend the following day in a perma-squint.


Barry Foley of the Hudson Yards Cafe

By day 3, I am ready to venture from our comparatively tasteful booth full of dirty cards into the wilderness of geegaws, knick-knacks, and tchockes. I aim first for the other lovely letterpress booths, seeing fine work by Oblation, 9Spot Monk, and Snow and Graham, and then, toes acclimated to these rapid waters, take the plunge. The water is cold, and loud, and a lot more colorful than I remember water being. The gift show is, above all things, an assault on the senses.

As I begin, I try to think of what it might be like to be a blind person led around the aisles, listening to the bings and hoots and whirs of various toys, the mood music and constant salesperson chatter. And after seeing a few more booths of flower-topped pens, rhinestone-studded hats, and enough tiny crystal animals to sink the Ark, I wish I were that blind person. I ask to take pictures of various booths for this blog, and am surprised that absolutely no one asks for my credentials or thinks I might be writing anything other than a boffo review. Is any press truly better than none?

And here are some of the highlights:


Flair Hair?

I'm not sure of the purpose of these furry visors. A joke when you take your client to the golf course? But I like that the sign specifies that they are "the original." Lord knows, no one would want to be caught dead wearing an imitation visor with fake hair, that would just be embarrassing.







The guy at this booth was so nice I almost felt bad that I was only taking pictures to make fun of 2 foot high Star Wars carvings that retailed for about $1500. But really, if you're willing to stand by and try to sell this stuff, I can't take responsibility for that. My personal fave was one I call, "ass with hands." It was life-size and I had a hard time picturing the classy individual who would hang it proudly on a wall to show off to friends, or their mom.



The totally tubular fuzzy phallic lamps. This is the name I've given them, and I think it works.



There were about 6 different booths full of these headless ladies who can hold necklaces, bracelets and such. For some reason, they really creep me out. There's something very, um, serial killer about them, and if I had one on a nightstand I think I would wake up in a cold sweat too often.





Ok, so when I first saw this booth, I thought I'd found the holy grail of tacky. This one had everything, a bizarre wall poster, sparkly porcelain animal heads the size of a moose trophy in a hunting lodge, doll heads that begged a psychiatric evaluation for the makers. And yet...By the time I'd toured the floor a few times, bored by the run-of-the-mill hideous, this became, by far, my favorite booth. Even now, I have a little dream of receiving that black, glittery chihuahua head and putting it above my letterpress, feeling its cheery stare on me as I slog away with my metal type and cantankerous old machine.

And so our trip ends, until next time Brandon is foolish enough to let someone else take over the blog. I'd love to tell you more about the slap-happy nature of the final gift show days, and to make make you feel the Tim Burton undercurrents that flow beneath the gift show, I'd even love to buy you a drink with Barry at the Hudson Yards, but you can't have all that nice stuff unless you chose to suffer as we did: don your badge, sit in a booth, and be part of the grand carnival, the search for the creme de la crap.



Emily Wismer is one of those apprentices at BBH that wouldn't go away when their apprenticeship was up, and now she gets paid to be a smartass. She has a letterpress studio as well, called Lady Pilot, which she runs out of her basement. You can check out her blog, Lady Pilot Takes Off, here.

The BBH "Booty Ad Campaign": More designs pre-NYIGF

This last one features the triumphant return of our resident naked dude, Edmund Foley, AKA Mr. Inappropriate.

For your consideration... more designs!

As per usual, I belted out a slew of designs a few days before leaving before a trade show (this time NYIGF.) We'll see how many we actually get to print. Captions courtesy our extensive Tyler Dockery archive of fucked uppedness. Also as per usual, blogger makes the cards designs blurry amd illegible so click on em iffin yr hungry for quality.

2009 National Stationery Show Pt 2: Repping the Alumnus

BBH alumnus Kyle Durrie takes aim at a baby zebra.

In January I had secretly flown former BBH apprentice and employee Kyle Durrie from Portland to NYC to play a practical joke on BBH shop manager Sarah McDonald at the Winter NYIGF. It was a reunion of sorts, as we had done the last ever Toronto Gift Show together as a trio, and had a smoking good time.


Brandon, Kyle, and Sarah at Niagra Falls on the Canadian Side

The results at the NYIGF were similar, as this photo set of a night with Spitfire Girl will demonstrate. The long evening of debauchery ended very abrubtly. Kristin (the Spitfire Girl) and Sarah were doing cartwheels in the hotel hallway while screaming with hysterical laughter. They came back to the room with a very large and empty Star Wars toy box that had mysteriously appeared. Sarah put the box on her head. Kristin took a swing at Sarah's boxed head and sent her flying into the headboard. Seconds later there was a knock on the door and an armed security guard informed us that there were dozens of calls about the noise and the next call they got would result in us being kicked out of the New Yorker. Kristin's fiance Jason escorted Kristin out as if this was something he was used to.


The following morning I found a destroyed ironing board on the floor. "What the hell happened to the ironing board?" I asked. Photos later revealed that I had destroyed it while trying to demontrate how a proposed photo of Kyle being ironed should look.



This card by Kyle's young letterpress outfit makes me insanely jealous.

During Kyle's visit to the Winter NYIGF she frequented "The Arm" to work on her own line of letterpress greeting cards-- when the show was over, and we were chilling at my mother's crib, she showed Sarah and I what she was working on. Kyle had designed several cards for BBH and they are all favorites of mine-- when I saw her most recent work my jaw dropped to the floor. Clearly she was on the road to her own success.

A couple of BBH products by Kyle Durrie



She and I schemed about things over the following months, and this is what we came up with: She would work the booth at the upcoming Stationery Show for free in exchange for booth real estate to hock her wares, I would take a sales rep percentage of her sales, but would take payment in trade for her cards to sell at Blue Barnhouse. Win win win win win.



I'm pretty excited to have her along at the show, especially because I ain't paying her jack!

In all seriousness I'm really proud how far she's come along, we taught her pretty much every aspect of the BBH business model and my hopes are she'll have an easier time rising to the big leagues than we did. The name of her press is Power and Light, located in Portland, Oregon. You can check out some of her work on her etsy store. The store is currently scarce of product but I know she's working her tail off at the moment, and we should see an impressive line of products in her store in the coming weeks. You can also check out her blog here.

NYIGF Winter Gift Show Part 3: More cool stuff I couldn't afford but bought anyways.

Wall art from Erin Smith Art that caught my eye, and my wallet.

A week has passed since the show, and we're pretty much caught up on orders, saving those that are dated for later shipment. Sarah has a handful of reprints on her plate, nothing too serious. Farrell and Mike sent out 19 packages on Thursday, all sample updates for our reps, each carrying 50 new designs for 2009 plus a heads up on an across-the-board price hike on our stuff come May. I was kept busy all week by appointments with people I've been putting off for the last month and a half.

Some good stuff that's happened: We picked up a new rep in Ohio at the show. We had a nice flurry of orders come in at the beginning of the week from our Chicago rep, who exhibited at the Winter Chicago Gift Show.

Currently, our rep in San Francisco is showing our line at the San Francisco Gift show. Unfortunately for the Bay Area, the gift show's reputation has been flushed a little further down the pipe with every event, as both attendance and (good) exhibits are in serious decline. No orders reported as of yet but we picked up an Oakland rep as well as one for Reno/Tahoe--both are folks our SF rep networks with regularly.

Our SF rep reported on Friday: "Show only going in to 3rd day today...so far not so good overall. Seems like New York was the only good show this winter. Hope there are some dollars left for SF."

One thing to be sure, we were way in over our heads after the August NYIGF and it took us a few months to recover, but it wasn't just the show, we were riding a wave all summer that crashed on us in September and caught us by surprise, and the shop was overwhelmed with reprints as we ran out of most of the product from 2007.

I think we were a little more prepared to be slapped silly this time, but it's certainly evident that the decline in the economy continues. Next week we contact all our house accounts who normally would have been at the show and let them know we have some cool new stuff and are offering the same show specials to the folks who stayed at home.

Hitting the pavement is what its probably going to take to keep the gears turning this year. I'd be interested to see what the Stationery Show in May brings, whether things will start warming up or continue sliding away. We're already locked in, and I'm preparing to break even.

Anyhow, lets get into the more fun stuff. I couldn't pass up on several lines that were not letterpress, though I smartly staggered their ship dates a month apart so to be not hit over the head with expense. I've also featured some folks we've made friends with at past shows who are doing great work.

O + D

Olga from O+D (offensive & delightful)

Occasionally we are asked if we are familiar w/ O+D, as they too are famous for being an edgy and funny card line sure to piss at least a few people off. They cross the line, but I would say in a more direct and blunt way than we do, as most of our outrageous stuff is being written by someone who lives on the moon.

I would never carry anything that is remotely similar to our work-- and I would say though we share a similar genre we are clearly doing two different things. I think BBH and O+D's work compliments each other with virtually zero crossover as far as ideas go.



ALENA HENNESSY


Alena Hennessy, in the Handmade section, actually has been a client of ours for custom work and calls Asheville her home. Her products are wall art and textiles that incorporate elements of her paintings-we accidentally bumped into each other at our first Atlanta gift show and at that time she was already a seasoned exhibitor, and taught me alot about the world of gift shows when I was still green.



Alena has seen a lot of commercial success and pretty much is in a comfortable place with her clientelle-- though the show went well for her she has decided that after this show she will be taking it easy for a while and spend money she would have spent in New York on catalogues and mailing campaigns.

Maybe BBH will get there one day but until we've either saturated the market or start losing money on the shows, I feel its still worth networking and building our customer base.

ERIN SMITH ART


Erin Smith Art hails from Decatur, GA and was around the corner from Alena in the Handmade Section. She incorporates family photos into collage art that can be bought as wall art or greetings. The prices were reasonable and her designs clearly needed to join our demented family here at the shop. My favorite piece of hers is the headlining image for this post.


MONSTER FACTORY


We met these Canadian kids during the Toronto Show last year and saw them again in New York's Newest this summer. I always stop to talk to these guys because I have a great friend in the plush monster business, John Murphy of Stupid Creatures, who sculpts one-of-a-kind custom monsters out of discarded socks. (He also has occasionally been a guest artist/writer for Blue Barnhouse.)


A Stupid Creature by John Murphy.

We may not see Monster Factory at future US shows, as customs laws for manufactured imports regarding child saftey are about to become very strict and the mountain of paperwork, forms, and expense getting to prove their work meets these standards is more effort than its worth. They are looking into having a similar line manufactured in the US.


NOTED

A build your own ukulele.

I found Noted when former BBH crew member and a great friend of mine, Buzz Poole, paid his usual "visit to the BBH booth before drinks" and took a walk with me at the show. As we were gawking at the sea of crap, he recognized some acquaintances he had worked with via his current post as editor of Mark Batty Publisher. MBP was founded by Mark Batty, former CEO of ITC Fonts and likewise the former editor of arguably the best typography magazine of the 20th century, ITC Font's U&lc. MBP is well known for their books that focus on design and modern culture.


U&lc: Influencing Design & Typography, by Mark Batty Publisher

Noted, who's crew includes a trio of MBP veterans (a writer, a designer, and even a former printer of MBP books), carries a number of cool and inexpensive imports from Japan, most of which require assembly and/or interaction with its recipient; for instance: a build your own Pinhole Camera, mechanized paper art, build your own catapults, and some beautifully crafted gliders.
An animatronic paper Chinese dragon that roars and slashes its tails and claws with the turn of a crank.


Build your own Hishou Glider

Most of what I ordered will double as some fun father and son activities (and at a nice price, for a wholesale buyer) w/ my 7 year old son Toby.

That's about the breadth of what caught my interest at the Gift Show, excepting our favorite crazy kids at Spitfire Girl. Up next, a full length blog about my favorite stop at any given gift show.


Stay tuned for part 4 of the NYIGF report or Spitfire Girl is gonna shred you (and me) a new one.