I don't know if the idea came to him all at once or not, but Blake began to collect old type more as a hobby than anything else. On weekends or at whatever other time he found opportunity he would drive through some of the smaller and older towns that are nestled in the Catskill Mountains and dig around in the weekly newspaper shops and the job printing shops for old fonts of type.
For the reader's information, type faces come and and go out of style just as do women's clothes, automobiles, and practically everything else in modern society. With advertising developing the way it has in the past twenty-five years, tremendous changes have been made in typography.
So Blake went about collecting old type faces, the older the better. He was sometimes amazed at the faces he would find, often the little newspaper shops he visited would have, stashed away in some back room, types that went back as far as the "Gay Nineties" and once or twice even back to the Civil War. Blake picked them up for a pittance. In fact, they were sometimes given to him, the owners glad to be rid of the junk.
After a time be began to use some of them in his job printing— just for gags. For instance, if the local branch of the American Legion wanted a flyer advertising a banquet or picnic, Blake would do it up in the same style as printing was done before the first world war.
Such flyers were successful right from the beginning. The type faces were so corny that everybody was amused by them. Blake's business began to pick up. Soon local salesmen wanted visiting cards done up in the style of the Civil War and businessmen would have their stationery done in the antique types. Without thinking about it, Blake had become a specialist in a field that was otherwise so depressed that it was practically impossible to make a living.
And then he hit the jackpot.
Only ten miles away, up into the mountains, was the art colony of Woodstock which at that time teemed with commercial artists who worked down in the advertising agencies of New York but had summer homes in the Catskills. One of them stumbled upon some of Blake's work and it gave him some ideas. He looked Blake up and gave him an order. Before the printer knew it, he had