I made a thing! That's right folks, in today's digitally saturated media filled NFT world, I made an actual thing.
The Pencil Pusher name is a play on words aimed at skateboarding creatives, but like most skaters I am not a huge fan of rules and regulations and just started inviting folks whose work I admired, and/or letting those who reached out and showed interest and enthusiasm to be involved.
I came up with the idea while working for Deluxe Distribution in San Francisco, and forever grateful for the 14 years they let me hang around "working". Anyone who know's me, know's I have an endless stream of idea's, and anyone who knows an "idea" person, knows that 97% of the ideas are garbage.
That said, this PPP name and idea popped in my head in and around 2008. Which was likely jotted down in various forms on post it notes and in sketchbooks, mulled over in traffic and overly analyzed awake in bed at 1am, until it was safely tucked away to spare the world from the sometimes unbearable stench of my brain farts.
Fast forward to the middle of 2020 and this global pandemic, and what became a massively awkward year for most of us, PPP somehow popped back in my head. It took a few things to spark the flame and stoke that fire, and one of those was in 2019 I joined a local letterpress group, which gave me access to an amazing studio, and some badass fellow print, type, design, paper, book and process nerds. This place is known as the NBLA or North Bay Letterpress Arts located in Sebastopol California.
So I was working on some record sleeves for a friend and stopped early, but with ink on brayer and a little time left in the day I wanted to experiment a bit. So I headed over down to drawer E23 where 120pt Railroad Gothic metal type lives, and type set the word GRAPHITE. I printed a few things not even knowing what it would become, and pretty much got something close to how it ended up here on the final production, 6 months later.
Well here it is, 9 months later...two issues done, custom pencils made to match and two more issues in the works.
Super grateful to all who helped, especially the contributors that saw the vision, supported the intent, and were willing to send me some stuff. Also so thankful for my wife and son for letting me dip out to the studio and keep the creative side of my brain active and healthy...
I have future iterations and themes in mind, some circling it back to the skateboard community, although I also have a LONG list of other books and zine ideas staring at me daily...so much to do and so little time.
I also admit to being one long winded verbose run on sentence rambler, and if I had to guess you probably haven't read this far, if you have...there's no turning back now.
I hope you enjoy the zines, if not...that's fair creative stuff is always subjective.
- AOM