What is the origin of Frank Thomas NNOF?

[steve B]

Well, it's limited but I do have experience in most of the departments of a small print shop.

I worked in one in High school. While I was technically there to do cleaning, the place had us do other tasks after our regular work was done, sometimes before if things were busy enough. So I got cross trained in everything eventually. To them it was handy to have extra help available if someone was hurt or sick. Generally though the other guys would slide into the tougher jobs, and I'd get into one of the easier jobs.

I had a piece of art I did made into a small poster, so I've done original art. (After the yearbook company cut it in half )

I helped a couple times in the camera room. - Yes, literally a camera that was room sized. Lighting and original art on a large sliding holder, camera in the wall, and darkroom behind the camera to develop the huge negatives. Other than the size and ability to scale the size of the resulting negative it's just like operating most other cameras.

When the camera guy drank a bit too much and "cleaned" the camera room stirring up a ton of dust just before shooting a big job, I got to spend a few days fixing the masks with some special whiteout or tape. Interesting stuff, semi transparent red scotch tape that would block the light used to expose the plates.

I helped a couple times in the platemaking room, another biggish job and even essentially untrained I helped get it done a bit quicker. Made probably 5-6 plates?

My last week one of the press operators got hurt and I got to run a 35" Heidelberg sheetfed press. They didn't expect I'd be as fast as the regular guys, and told me to just concentrate on quality. By the end of the week I was doing pretty well on speed too.

I got to do a lot of stuff in the bindery. That was "my" area to keep up with (and the stockroom, but that's not anything fancy) I didn't get to do any setup work, but ran a bunch of the machines. The only ones I didn't get to run were the cutters, but they're simple and I was around them every day for a bit over 2 years. In a later job I ended up going back there and repairing one of the cutters (I did 11 years of hydraulic repairs)

Also did a bit of shipping/receiving, plant maintenance, carpentry, painting....
But no front office work, like cost estimating or sales etc. (I don't count the hour watching the phone while the office people had a meeting about something. It didn't ring, so it was pretty much just sitting there. )


Topps I think farmed out some of the printing at the time, and was more of a high production lower quality sort of shop. They also did FAR more proofing than we did. The handful of proofs I saw at our place were basically photo mockups of booklets done from the masks and hand folded/stapled.

Steve B