A few Saturdays ago, Adam and I ventured out to Wayne, MI to check out a sale that looked really weird and cool. The person had a ton of letterpress equipment and ephemera, so of course Adam wanted to check it out. It did not disappoint. 

The house was full of stuff, and the draw for me was that the listing said there were “1,000’s [sic] of books.” They weren’t lying. There were TONS of printing history, book design, and font books, and there were also a ton of chapbooks. Adam explained to me that people who are hobby printers used to make books periodically and then trade them with other hobbyists. Pretty sweet! Here is an example of a small one that a guy designed for H.P. Lovecraft’s poem, Saturnalia. 

I bought a bunch of books like this one, and the really nice thing about this sale was that they had everything priced really reasonably. 

Here are some pictures of all of the printing stuff the guy had: 

Inside those drawers are a bunch of tiny letters like this: 

There were so many drawers full of letters. 

I actually have no idea what that thing is but it’s large and heavy duty looking. 

Out in the garage, we spotted some other cool stuff:  

We bought a couple of drawers in the garage. Adam defied his own rule by purchasing something that doesn’t really have a place to go on our walls yet. 

The other really exciting (if you’re a nerd and a librarian) thing we scored was some old kik-steps. I don’t have a picture of them but they’re waiting in our garage for a major cleaning. We found three of them and they were all priced between 6 and 8 dollars. They are super useful so  we got them all. I already have a red one that Adam got me. It looks like this: 

Now we will have one for each floor of the house, and the garage! My mom had a good idea–it would probably be really useful for weeding. I told her that if this turns out to be true, she can have one. 

I actually went back to this sale on Sunday because everything was half off, and I kept thinking about all of the cool chapbooks that I had left being. Tomorrow I’ll post about those, as well as the cool posters and other ephemera we found. 

-Sarah