admin

Saturday, October 25, 2008—Jack Williams, of Effingham, New Hampshire, demonstrated his wooden common press at Strawbery Banke in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on Friday, October 24, 2008. The demonstration was part of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project’s Portsmouth Literary Festival. Jack built the press himself, from plans drawn by Clinton Sisson, of the Smithsonian Institute. Sisson’s plans were drawn up from careful measurements taken from a press in the Smithsonian’s collection which was once used by Benjamin Franklin. This is a newer video of the press, with higher resolution and additional detail not present in the earlier version. The man in the introductory clip, wearing a …

Read moreWooden Press Demonstration

Monday, October 20, 2008—As has been our practice for some time now, we’re making available here a pdf file of the paper preceeding the one we just published on paper. Complicated enough? We thought so. We’d also like to note here that we will publish our next paper, not on October 31 as we normally would, but on Friday, November 7. We are making this adjustment to our publishing schedule in order to avoid what would otherwise be head-on collisions with two national holidays: Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008—We are thrilled to announce that on Friday, October 24, at Strawbery Banke, the general public will once again be able to watch this wooden printing press in action. The hand-made press, built by John. A. “Jack” Williams, of Effingham, is virtually identical to the one used by Daniel Fowle during the first thirty years of this paper’s existence. In fact, the form and operation of printing presses went almost unchanged from the days of Johannes Gutenbererg, until the introduction of iron presses in the early 1800’s. From 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Jack will be inking the type, putting paper on …

Read moreSee the Wooden Press in Action!

Friday, October 10, 2008—We interrupt our slothful puttering to spread the word of a catastrophe — a real catastrophe. We refer not to the loss of some anonymous fat cat’s billions in theoretical profits, nor even to the recent saddling of American taxpayers with a trillion dollar burden designed to “make whole” those many fictitious billions. No, we’re talking about Cursor.org shutting down. This is a real catastrophe. For as long as we’ve known it, Cursor has been the most useful distillation of the days events available online. Not to pretend to elevate our own feeble online efforts to their eminent usefulness, but for the …

Read moreA REAL Catastrophe

Monday, October 6, 2008—Two days without a post. Read this, then ask if you really want to complain about that. Stock markets around the world are diving into the sewer, thanks to “conservative” American knuckleheads who insisted on de-regulating banks and finance. Today we learn that Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA) recently said that some Congressmen were told if they didn’t pass the big bailout bill (which has yet to save the global economy) the federal government—which is to say, Dick “Dick” Cheney—might have to “impose martial law.” Is it un-American to ask if this is what the Founding Fathers really had in mind? In the …

Read moreShining City Down a Sewer

Friday, October 3, 2008—OK, so we didn’t quite get a post up yesterday. We were experiencing a slightly higher-than-normal level of chaos around here. Did the world end? All right, then. What we’re looking at just to the upper right is a bundle of 50 copies of our Volume 253, No. 1, bearing today’s date. We just completed our 252nd year, and we have hopes of making it through the next. We’re displaying a bundle of papers to make one point: in a nation going rapidly to hell because the lie to truth ratio is about a million to one, hardly anyone we know is …

Read moreBeginning Our 253rd Year