Travelin' Man

What better way to gear up for the summer printing season than a little escapism? While slaving away at our C&P Pilot in the ol' basement, our thoughts often drift to far-off lands....

Wildwood

Duckpin's apprentice-for-life, Christine, just returned from Wildwood, New Jersey. She was there as part of the Society for Commercial Archeology's "Wildwood Daze" conference. (Christine moonlights as a preservationist when she's not slinging ink.) According to their mission statement, SCA is "the nation’s oldest organization devoted to the buildings, artifacts, structures, signs, and symbols of the 20th-century commercial landscape. The SCA recognizes the historical significance the automobile has had in shaping our landscape and culture."  

Christine was there to present her paper “A Need for Speed: The Cultural Landscape of Stock Car Racetracks” which examines the impact of race car culture on the built environment. But more importantly, she was there to tour the Wildwoods. While there, she captured some great signage from this mecca of Doo-Wop design. We'll be using it as inspiration in upcoming projects. Hope you can, too.

Click on images for the wicked big size

Giving Thanks

A few photos from a Duckpin Thanksgiving spent out in Shenandoah National Park: a log, a sign, a cola dispenser, and Neoproterozoic columnar basalt jointing.

Click photos for wicked big versions.

Siding Signage

While traveling through the small town of Aquasco, Maryland, this summer, we spied this old building embalmed in it's own kudzu. Fittingly, it advertises various undertaker services -- including embalming.

Also fitting is that this phenomenon of faded advertisements is referred to as ghost signage. There are several collections of images out, and we sometimes visit them for typographic inspiration. Perhaps the most apropos one we've stumbled across is a ghost sign advertising Casper Beer. Boo!

Slots Are Our Friends

Is anything sacred with slot machines?!?!

While traipsing around Las Vegas, we stumbled upon the slot machine above. Now, we've seen some oddly-themed slots before, but this one caught our eye. (And not just because the whole premise of this machine is built around one really bad pun.) Pictured above the "Easel Money" marquee are a series of fictional painters, including the requisite dude with beret. But are those characters really fictional? Seems one of them is heavily inspired by our favorite painter ever, Bob Ross.

And that's no happy accident.

Modernist Poster Sale

It's time again to salivate over Swann Galleries' annual Modernist poster auction. As always, it's packed with treasures from the heyday of avant garde graphic design. Though the catalog is wide-ranging — from wartime PSAs to sporting events to film debuts — pictured above is sampling of travel-related posters we culled from the 200+ posters being offered. You have until 1:30pm to wipe that drool and start your bidding.

Click on the images for a jumbo view. Bib not included.

Rest Stop Frames

The ol' dogwood tree in front of Duckpin Press HQ is blooming and that means summer is just around the corner. And summertime means road trip time.

Do you have any road trip plans? Lizzy Oppenheimer sure does. She plans on photographing what many folks overlook. Namely, overlooks. (And picnic areas, rest stops, and roadside shelters.) She's been at it since 2009, but has a long way to go. You see, she plans on photographing every rest stop in America. That's going to be one long trip.

Her photos so far have a great open-road feeling to them (three appear above). If they're any indication of what's to come, this is going to be one terrific journey.

Happy travels wherever you may be headed this summer. And while you're on the road, why not check out a rest stop or two?

Mobile Printing

In the depths of steamy DC summers, Duckpin's basement print shop is a cool respite from the spiking heat outdoors. Its cave-like qualities (cool, dank, musty, full of bat guano) aren't ideal, but they do provide some comfort, and I relish the opportunity to hide out down there.

But what if you could avoid the summer heat -- and humid basements -- all together by taking a print shop on the road? Well, Kyle Durrie from Power and Light Press would like to find out. She's planning a cross-country tour in a tricked-out bread van outfitted with a complete print shop. With a modest donation you can follow her adventures by collecting her letterpressed postcards dispatched along the journey. Even better, for a little more, you can get her to stop the van at your house for a personal letterpress demo! (Guano not included.)

See her pitch and read more about her adventure here.

Above: Kyle in action

Summer Vacation

It's summer -- time to get yourself a tankful of gas and a cooler full of sandwiches and hit the road. If you're not the chain hotel type, you might enjoy Motel Americana. You'll find a great trove of vintage postcards, including those above (click for larger view). Neon enthusiasts will love the dozens and dozens of motel sign photos as well. For those who can't resist the lure of the road, this should be your first rest stop.

Dingbats and Diners

Two years ago, Duckpin spent the Fourth of July hopping around Southeast Arizona. One of the highlights of our stay at the Shady Dell RV park in Bisbee was our morning breakfast at Dot's Diner, the tiny greasy spoon pictured above.

Few things are more joyful than finding the perfect diner when you're on a road trip. But what if you didn't have to hit the road, and instead just leave the front door of your workplace? Well, that's how the first diner was born. In 1872, a small wagon packed with food pulled up in front of the offices of the Providence Journal, ready to feed the newspapermen who, by the time they finished their shifts, found the doors of the town's restaurants locked for the night. According to an article in Mental_Floss magazine, a nickel could buy you a ham sandwich or half a cranberry pie. The wagon proved so popular that imitators soon followed, and eventually the typology of the modern diner was born: round stools fronting a running counter. Just like Dot's.

So who was the wagon owner who first fed the ink-stained wretches at the Journal? It was Walter Scott, an enterprising printing pressman. Seems it took one to know one.

West Baden Springs

We couldn't help but squeeze in some Indiana sightseeing on the way back from Dave Churchman's. Above are photos from the West Baden Springs Hotel just outside of French Lick. The gorgeous dome was the largest in the world at the time it was built. And for awhile there in the '80s and '90s, it looked like it was going to be unbuilt. After a long period of neglect, the hotel was saved from demolition and recently restored to it's former glory. Well worth the 300-mile detour.

Poop Rainbows, part 4

For our latest Poop Rainbow™ installment, we bring you the All-Vehicle Edition. Hat tip to our own printer's devil for the Buffalo bus [upper right], inspired by a recent trip there.

Click on image for larger view.

What the hell are we talking about?

Amtrak Posters

Train advertising has always been predicated on selling an idea more than the service itself. Ride a train and see the world in style, they promise. Worry-free site-seeing is a noble pursuit, but the reality of train travel hasn't always squared with the sales pitch.

When looking for some letterpress inspiration, we ran across these excellent posters for National Train Day. The designs harken back to the heyday of train travel, perpetuating the romanticism of riding the rails. While Amtrak's brand identity has certainly outpaced its service in recent years, these posters still kinda make us wanna give those rails another chance...

Pinball Hall of Fame

The cooler weather has us reminiscing about a jaunt we took to Las Vegas over the summer. With the city sizzling under the early afternoon sun, we ducked into a paradise of gaming: the Pinball Hall of Fame. Housed in a non-descript strip mall (is there any other kind in Vegas?) the Hall of Fame is essentially an arcade stocked with pinball machines from the '40s through the present. All are playable and most cost just a quarter. The machines have been restored and kept in tip-top shape by the Las Vegas Pinball Collectors Club.

The Hall of Fame is a playground for those who appreciate mid-century graphics. The playfields and backglasses are rife with colorful illustrations -- and a pretty comprehensive parade of hairstyles from the past 50 years. Unsurprisingly, our favorite was the Bowling Queen machine from 1964, shown below:


The Hall of Fame is certainly a labor of love and the beneficiaries are us folks who prefer to get our kicks from flippers over one-armed bandits. Heck, twenty dollars will last you a few hours here. How many other places in Vegas can boast that?