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How To Retire Without Money
By Bob Belmont
CHAPTER 7 IN YOUR
OWN HOME TOWN
Page 4 of 12
But after
high school was completed he couldn't think of anything else
in particular to do so he scraped together what money he
could, bought himself a couple of used job presses and went
into business.
I don't know
if the idea came to him all at once or not, but Blake began to
collect old type more as a hobby than anything else. On
weekends or at whatever other time he found opportunity he
would drive through some of the smaller and older towns that
are nestled in the Catskill Mountains and dig around in the
weekly newspaper shops and the job printing shops for old
fonts of type.
For the
reader's information, type faces come and and go out of style
just as do women's clothes, automobiles, and practically
everything else in modern society. With advertising developing
the way it has in the past twenty-five years, tremendous
changes have been made in typography.
So Blake went
about collecting old type faces, the older the better. He was
sometimes amazed at the faces he would find, often the little
newspaper shops he visited would have, stashed away in some
back room, types that went back as far as the "Gay Nineties"
and once or twice even back to the Civil War. Blake picked
them up for a pittance. In fact, they were sometimes given to
him, the owners glad to be rid of the junk.
After a time
be began to use some of them in his job printing— just for
gags. For instance, if the local branch of the American Legion
wanted a flyer advertising a banquet or picnic, Blake would do
it up in the same style as printing was done before the first
world war.
Such flyers
were successful right from the beginning. The type faces were
so corny that everybody was amused by them. Blake's business
began to pick up. Soon local salesmen wanted visiting cards
done up in the style of the Civil War and businessmen would
have their stationery done in the antique types. Without
thinking about it, Blake had become a specialist in a field
that was otherwise so depressed that it was practically
impossible to make a living.
And then he
hit the jackpot.
Only ten
miles away, up into the mountains, was the art colony of
Woodstock which at that time teemed with commercial artists
who worked down in the advertising agencies of New York but
had summer homes in the Catskills. One of them stumbled upon
some of Blake's work and it gave him some ideas. He looked
Blake up and gave him an order. Before the printer knew it, he
had become the one printer, evidently, in the United
States who had a wide variety of antique types.
>>> CHAPTER 7 IN YOUR
OWN HOME TOWN Page 5
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