Remember that new printer we moved into the shop earlier this year? The one that is the size of a small house?

Well, we finally moved out the old printer, which was only as big as a large shed, but still taking up plenty of space and getting in our way.

Amy was just in Ohio for her grandma’s 97th birthday. She is amazing, and Amy intends to grow up to be like her.

There’s a lot we love about our work–running our own shop, playing with machines the size of a small house, always learning something new or improving a process, and getting to support creative radical endeavors. We love all of it, from greeting cards to poetry books to posters to zines and in between.

Here are two projects we printed this week that made us feel especially excited about our chosen line of work.

The Big Feminist BUT is an awesome comic anthology that we are all in love with.

Bikes in Space is a collection of feminist sci fi stories about bicycles!

We recently started using recycled black ink, and we love it. It shows up by the pallet–we’re expecting a new shipment any day now.

Our own excess black ink no longer gets wasted; it goes in a drum that we ship back to Wisconsin to be recycled again. The company is almost ready to unveil full color CMYK recycled inks too, which we are of course excited about.

Some jobs use more ink than others, and this metal magazine is one of them. We used 25 pounds of ink on this–that is a lot of ink!

Did you know that we love to make greeting cards here at 1984? Well, we do. Here’s a selection hot off the press of cards we printed up for Little Otsu.

We’ve been working long days lately to get ready for one of our favorite events of the year, the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair. This year it’s at a new location: the Armory Community Center, 333 14th Street, between Mission and Julian, from 10-6pm Saturday and Sunday, March 16th and 17th.

We’ll be there with a selection of samples that we’ve printed for you to examine as you think about your own projects. And of course, we will have a big stack of our ever-popular “Create, Scheme, Remember” blank books to give away. This year they even have an Orwellian theme.

You’re invited to drop by our table, pick up a blank book, and chat with Amy about your upcoming printing projects. See you there!

We just got a new toy. It’s called a Hammond Ben Franklin TrimOSaw. It will be used to cut dies, wood furniture (that is, furniture for letterpress die cutting, not chairs for sitting in), and hopefully for cutting our new kitchen cabinets one day. Here are some pics. It’s real pretty, we think.

This was a light week around 1984, after our hard push to finish the Food Atlas job. We finished up some exciting projects, and even more jobs are in the pipeline.

Here’s what we did this week:

- The Night Demon 7″ cover from Reinig Records.

- Antediluvian 7″ cover for Nuclear War Now Records.

- Replica 7″ cover from Prank Records.

- Taking the Lane zine #9 from Elly Blue

- A new printing of Fine Fine Music for our favorite pal Cassie J. Sneider, just in time for her upcoming hometown parade float–most genius idea ever!

- And last but not least, a record-book hybrid, Empty Holes, Empty Homes from blossoming noise. The book comes perfect bound, with a flexi record as the last page that tears out easily for your immediate listening pleasure! Here’s a picture of the record-page:

We love printing for music projects as well as wordy projects. Check out our record sleeve pricing on our price list, or email us about a custom quote.

Food: An Atlas is literally a giant project. We started it last week, and now the books are done and ready to ship off to their new homes. We loved making these, and can’t wait for you to read them.

FOOD: an Atlas by Guerrilla Cartography is possibly our biggest project ever. The book is a whopping 12″ x 12″ and consists of 172 pages of gorgeous full color, crowdsourced maps from all over the world.

When a book has too many sheets to collate in one pass, like this one does, we collate them in six sections that then get “married” together with a slip sheet at the end to separate them from the next book block. Don’t worry, we get all sorts of good jokes out of this.

The book is still in progress so you have to wait until next week’s blog post to see the finished product—but its going to be awesome! In the meantime, check out our pictures, and this feature about the project on NPR.