The Rubylith Mask

… being, a nostalgic and biased account of those fabled days of yore, when the fierce Xactosaurus and the wily Waxodon battled Captain Compugraphic, in a never-ending struggle to master the planet known as Pasteup…

… featuring a brief pickup appearance by Rubber Cement, as Miss Sweet Bestine succumbs to the vapors following a thrilling rubdown by some shady Letraset characters…

Episode 1
History is filled with artifacts that have just plain endured until no one remembers their day-to-day function. Then, historians sagely formulate their conjectures, items are artfully arranged in glass cases, and we shuffle past the exhibits taking out-of-focus snapshots with our smartphones, whilst sending irrelevant texts about plans for dinner.

Personally, I’m at the pre-exhibit stage. I keep too many useless old things, because I just might find a way to use them again someday. Upon occasion I find I must review my various accumulations, to try to make room for the *newer* stuff which I simply cannot do without, either. Tough choices.

When I pruned the burgeoning graphics-hoard last year, I discovered that I have a plethora of outdated graphics tools that I absolutely cannot part with, to wit:

At least two disparate brands of non-repro-blue pencils (mostly un-gnawed, and unused since at least 1980), plus almost a full dispenser of “non photo blue” drawing leads and two pencil-shaped lead holders for same, plus one of the little Staedtler-blue twirly-barrel lead pointers. A genuine Letraset burnisher. Lots and lots of regular xacto knives (blades and holders), plus a retractable xacto knife, and another small xacto with a swivel point (great for cutting rubylith, in theory if not in reality). Two hand-held burnishing rollers. An almost-full roll of red 3/4″ lithographer’s tape. Drafting triangles, french curves, proportion wheels. Metal rulers, plastic rulers, grid rulers, e-scales (at least 3 from Compugraphic), two different styles of T-squares, a short pica pole.* (There’s a portable light box in the other room… somewhere.) Mimeo styluses, lettering guides, and shading plates. (But no mimeo correction fluid, – that dried up into a solid blue lump a long time ago.) And look – there’s my Osmiroid calligraphy pen! And the Higgins ink! And a bottle of Staedtler ink, too! And there’s my Rapidograph set, in the drum-shaped “humidor” that didn’t seem to prevent them from clogging after all but still looked spiffy. (Naturally, I had to collect the complete set of pens as well, even though the triple-ought pen only worked for about ten minutes before seizing up in the most expensive fashion imaginable. I still have about three of those nibs because they cost so darned much.)

I can’t find my rubber-cement pickup in the drawer to my immediate right, so I think I must have finally gotten annoyed with those little black snotballs on it, and thrown the whole shebang away. (Or wait — is it in my Emergency Travelling Toolkit? No, but I see at least one more blue pencil in there, as well as a mysterious collection of miniature bungee cords.). I can’t find any kneadable erasers, either – they worked pretty well as pick-ups too, as long as you didn’t confuse the pick-up eraser with the real eraser.)

I never really liked rubber cement, but I still remember my favorite hand-waxer. You know, that blocky black plastic appliance with the inconvenient electric cord emerging from the end of the handle — you plugged it in, stuck chunks of wax in the hole at the top, and in theory you could roll out a thin layer of melted wax on the BACK (very important, the BACK, not the FRONT but the BACK) of your type galleys. The wax would remain somewhat tacky, and your strips of type could be laid down carefully on your pasteup board, carefully nudged to square with the flat edge of your xacto blade, then burnished down to adhere. Of course, when you burnished the galley would sometimes shift a little, and you’d have to peel it up and do it again. But the glory of wax was that you could actually peel it up and stick it down again, and it would work. (A fellow Texan once told me a horror story about leaving an entire book’s worth of pasteup boards in her car trunk one day in August. I don’t know if it was apocryphal or not, but ever since then I’ve driven a pickup truck.)

And as far as the hand-waxer went, after a year or so the gaskets would wear out and you’d get wax puddles on the table beside your drafting board…so you’d save the little plastic platters that your cheap microwave dinner came on, and use those beneath the waxer so your wax-runoff wouldn’t collect quite as much cat hair. And you’d use old phone books as handy waxing surfaces: wax on one page, then turn to the next page for a clean surface for waxing the next galley. Oh, it’s a serious nostalgia attack here… and it’s grateful we are that those days are long past.

(to be continued)

If you have more time than sense, you can get lost in a nostalgic haze, following these links:

• http://www.forgottenartsupplies.com/
• http://www.creativepro.com/blog/scanning-around-gene-when-letraset-was-king
• http://www.creativepro.com/article/heavy-metal-madness-waxing-nostalgic-over-paste-up
• http://mikedempsey.typepad.com/graphic_journey_blog/graphicsnostalgia/

*Modern-day note – these days, you can use a pica pole as a makeshift slim-jim for unlocking your car doors in an emergency. Or so I’ve been told.