By Pat Detmer

(Pat Detmer presented elements of this essay as a comedy routine at the recent PPI annual conference.)

I started out as a proofreader at Book Publishing Co. in Seattle because I had a BA in English and knew how to spell. Proofreaders sat across from each other in a dark backroom and read aloud, and like Victor Borge, read punctuation marks as well. But unlike Victor Borge, it wasn’t funny.

As editor there, I cut and pasted. And I mean real cutting and pasting not hitting Control+C an Control+V. This was cutting with long, heavy scissors—pointed sharp ones! The kind they wouldn’t let me use after I went into sales!—and pasting with rubber cement. I’m sure that when I’m in my 80s, I’ll wish I had some of the brain cells that I killed inhaling rubber cement.

I moved on to a plant in Bellevue and bought paper. Merchants only delivered to the Eastside on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so you had to have the order in by 3pm the day before. My “special price” from the price book was “Jump 1 Bracket,” which prompts the question: Why are there even price books anymore? What a waste of ink! Think of the functionality of an online search engine, the ability to find colors and sizes and automatically see your special pricing.

But seriously, I know why they still print them: Because if they didn’t they’d lose the single biggest paper order they get all year.

My husband, Fred Canada, managed print shops and then began selling for A.B. Dick. He called them “presses,” but I’ve seen presses. These were “offset duplicators,” but I allowed this delusion since he was great at sales and that got us some amazing trips to Hawaii and Bermuda on the company dime.

I began selling for Zellerbach so long ago that, when I first went out, I could sell pre-cut business cards and 9# Erasable Onionskin. Nine pound! That’s toilet paper! Wouldn’t you love to toss a ream of that into a high-speed digital engine today? You can practically smell it burning now…

I got tired of selling paper and wanted to do something that might make a difference in people’s lives. I was thinking non-profit at the same time that Fred was thinking about buying a print shop. So we compromised and bought a print shop—thus fulfilling both our dreams. When I was sales manager at West Coast paper, he bought all his paper from me. I think I can safely reveal now that, to get the orders, I had to sleep with him.

But you know, it’s still a good business! There’s still fun to be had and money to be made. In fact, you can still make a small fortune in printing. Unfortunately, you have to start with a large one.

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Pat Detmer and Fred Canada are co-founders of The Quincy Group, a consulting and brokerage firm specializing in the printing industry. You can contact her at patdet@aol.com.