First, a little about who your dealing with: My name is Brandon. Once upon a time I thought I wanted to be a writer, or a publisher, or a professor of creative writing. By some strange twist of fate I was thrown in the business of letterpress, which for me, was intended as an extra curricular outlet for expressing literature. But somehow, client work that I did not seek out kept falling in my lap, and by the time I completed my course work for my MFA, I was simply too busy being a press monkey to look for a real job.

I have been a letterpress printer for close to ten years now, and started my letterpress studio, Blue Barnhouse, in 2002. We have seen many changes, but it wasn’t until 2007 that we found our true calling: dirty and intelligently perverse greeting cards. There are currently 4 people in my employ, plus the usual handful of miscreant apprentices that pass through our studio on a fairly regular basis. Last year, which was our second year of slinging greetings, we sold more than 50,000 letterpressed greeting cards to retail stores across the nation and abroad.

So the greatest thing about this job; besides sleeping in late everyday; pounding PBR’s at Beer 30; bumping music at extraordinary decibels; and hurling totally innocuous expletives, sexual innuendos, and other forms of taboo hilarity at each other as we slave away in the studio; is the trade show, where a manufacturer can truly live a life like that of a rock star: getting kicked out of bars, trashing hotel rooms, showing up late and hungover to the booth, cracking up the masses with our trashy humor, leaving the booth early to hit more bars. Our travels, so far, have taken us to Atlanta, Dallas, Toronto, Chicago, and most often New York. It’s safe to say that we are veterans of the trade show, having exhibited more than a dozen times in the last 3 years.

What’s truly great about going to the trade shows, besides, you know, um

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