Elegy for a Printer

Bartash through the Bardo.

by Josh O’Neill

It takes us about a year to produce and procure all the content that goes into an issue of LAAB magazine — then nine minutes to print three thousand copies.

The machines move so fast you can barely see the paper. Fifteen people touch it along the way, including pressmen, flyboys, and the binders who hand-collate it into twelve-page sections. I got to watch this dizzying process in person, because Bartash Printing, the cold-set newspaper press that produced LAAB #0, was located just a few blocks from the church tower headquarters of Beehive Books. I could wander around the corner to say hi to the printers and sales reps, who kept the hulking web presses cranking twenty-four hours a day.

Note the past tense; these massive machines are gone now, and the warehouse is shuttered. Those fifteen people who made LAAB #0 crisp and beautiful, along with two-hundred-some other press workers, have lost their jobs. Bartash Printing ended its 66 year run just a few months after LAAB debuted, another casualty of the excessively (and perhaps still prematurely) eulogized Death of Print.

I try not to be sentimental about these things, though I valued the fact that for a brief moment LAAB was a homegrown Philadelphia product. In speaking with some Bartash alumni I heard wild stories of mismanagement, incompetence, fraud, and frivolous lawsuits against former workers. In 2017, Bartash was sued by the U.S. Department of Justice and fined $305,000 for underpaying temps (though Bartash representatives claim that the underpaid workers were contracted through an agency who didn’t share data about their pay rates). While I’m sure the industry climate didn’t help, these florid tales of negligence and graft in a once-thriving family business imply an outfit whose days might be numbered even in the most favorable circumstances.

But Bartash was not its owners or their bottom line. Like any business or institution, it was a community: hundreds of people who spent their shifts working the great content-hungry machines, churning out much of the city’s trash, and some of its treasure. Everything from daily Jewish newspapers and penny-saver circulars to the Philadelphia Secret Admirer and horse racing forms for distribution at Belmont Raceway rolled through the presses, all manufactured at the same high level of craft and production. Bartash provided a source of sustenance and reliable salary for plenty of locals in Southwest Philly. African and Korean immigrants ran a lot of their presses. There was room to grow there, too — most of their pressmen worked their way up from “flyboy,” or low level press worker, to well paying jobs overseeing the machines. Many took the skills they learned and left to join union shops.

“I spent 20 years there… I bled their ink, I thought I’d retire there,” says one former Bartash worker who asked not to be named, before launching into a byzantine tale of legal and personal battles with the former president, Helene Rubin. He describes being fired, repeatedly sued, and eventually hounded out of the printing business entirely, before getting hired back on at Bartash in 2016 with a substantial raise, and finally going down with the ship when the bank foreclosed. (Rubin, the grand-niece of founder Joseph Bartash, was named the 2017 Person of the Year by the Graphic Arts Association shortly before Bartash’s implosion. She did not reply to requests for comment.)

“I did the math,” the Bartash worker goes on. “52,000 hours logged. More than five years spent inside the warehouse. When I’m in the neighborhood I’m drawn back like a magnet. Before I know it I’m pulling up. I just sit in the parking lot and smoke a cigarette and look up at the building.”

There’s nothing in there. The web presses were powered down and sold at auction, mostly to printers in Turkey and India. Everything was up for grabs, from horizontal balers to extendable step-ladders to thermal image-setters to wooden stools. The building was sold off to the developer David Damaghi. In a few years, it’ll likely be replaced with turn-key apartments for transient student residency, in the not-yet-gentrified-but-ripe-for-it neighborhood of Bartram’s Gardens. I have no evidence or information indicating that that’s Damaghi’s plan; it just seems to be the inevitable fate of all large buildings between Cobbs’ Creek and the Schuylkill River, once a developer gets involved.

Here’s a completely unrelated, but perhaps also startlingly relevant story: Damaghi also owns a once-abandoned building in the Bronx. In 2013 the celebrated graffiti artist Banksy tagged the building with an image of a little rich boy spray painting GHETTO 4 LIFE on the wall. Damaghi immediately installed plexiglass and a $4,000 gate in front of the image, and began the process of developing it into some kind of (possibly Banksy-themed) high-end apartment complex. Because of course he did.

To be a small press publisher with even the mildest pretensions to a social conscience in these troubled times is an odd and challenging proposition. We’re choosing to reconfigure trees, which create oxygen and consume carbon dioxide, into books and magazines, which do not. This is hard to justify from an ethical standpoint, or really from any standpoint at all. We specialize in strange and experimental formats, sometimes including huge trim sizes and elaborate die cutting. We often leads us to work with Chinese printers who almost certainly have labor practices that would prompt far more severe lawsuits from the Justice Department than the Bartash debacle, were they based in the U.S.

We’ve chosen to focus on print rather than digital for a variety of reasons. Physical objects have a life of their own, independent from any proprietary platform or device. Once you loose them into the world, anything can happen. They can be passed from hand to hand, disassembled, stolen, pasted up, reconfigured. A newspaper can blow into your face as you walk down a windy street; this is in fact our ideal delivery mechanism for LAAB.

So as we manufacture publications which contribute to the ongoing destruction of our planet, we also work hard to create business models that allow us to pay fair wages to the artists, designers, writers and creators who produce the content we publish. We’re trying to push against an industry climate in which freelancers are frequently just as poorly treated, underpaid and exploited for their creative capacities as manual laborers. We’re fully committed to creating economic opportunities and better working conditions for our authors and contributors. I can’t really say we’ve done the same for our press workers, who are often outsourced and hidden behind the scrim of a managerial class. I’m ashamed of that.

So ethical quandaries and uncomfortable alliances abound, as we try to keep the ship afloat without selling our souls. This week we heard about another round of major layoffs at the Philadelphia Inquirer, a once-great paper now shrunken and shriveled, spiritually and physically, to a skeleton of its former self. A friend of ours who works there has heard rumblings that to circumvent seniority rules, they may ax the arts section entirely. Mad Magazine — founded in 1952, the same year as Bartash — just announced the end of its historic run, less than two years after relocating to Los Angeles and coercing its work force to do the same in order to keep their jobs. The Nib — the best outlet for political cartooning on the internet and one of the few organizations anywhere that pays independent cartoonists something approaching a living wage — just announced that they lost their corporate funding.

As we mark the death toll, we watch our neighborhood change too, faster every day. The transformation that’s taken place since I arrived fifteen years ago, acrest a previous wave of gentrification, is astonishing to see. West Philly High, the massive and deeply troubled public school that served the entire region, is now known as West Lofts. The Lightbox Film Center at the International House, which has hosted free and cheap screenings of obscure movies from around the world for decades, is shutting down. The Penn Alexander School, the public elementary which the University of Pennsylvania funded with a massive endowment in what was ostensibly an act of outreach and support to an ailing West Philadelphia community, now sits in an area of such high property values that it caters almost exclusively to the children of the wealthy. Every day more Victorian row-homes get torn down and replaced with featureless rental boxes which stick out like styrofoam molars in West Philly’s gap-toothed smile.

We have a new printer: Richner Printing in Long Island. I can’t stroll down the street to proof on press anymore. They’re a lot more expensive; we hope some of that money is going to their workers. And we hope that their printing quality matches Bartash’s, which went above and beyond our expectations of what was possible in four colors on newsprint. (You’re the one holding the paper — you tell us whether they were up to the task.) For any institutional flaws or corruptions, Bartash did truly fine work for us before the bank foreclosed and sold the assets. We wanted to say that in print.

Like the former Bartash worker quoted above, I find myself stopping for a moment to stare up at the empty building — which is odd, since Bartash never meant anything to me. The building is nothing to look at: a block-wide two-story brick warehouse surrounded by barbed wire and loading docks, half-bald of its peeling white paint. But I pass by and look. I seem to do a lot of that these days; 2019 feels like a good year for stopping and staring.

LAAB has many functions, both good and bad, destructive and creative. As its brilliant creator and captain Ronald Wimberly says, it’s a process, not a product. It’s finding its way, and will continue to find its way as long as we continue to publish. It can and should be many things to many people — but I hope that as it changes and grows it can continue to see, and mark, and remember. As we navigate some crooked path between complicity, resistance, insurrection and surrender, I hope that we can at the very least bear witness — to the deaths of everything we’ve known, to social structures collapsing, communities dispersing, mythologies burning away like morning mist off a lake — and to this strange new something, churning unseen, preparing to be born.

This article originally appeared in LAAB Magazine #4: This Was Your Life!, published by Beehive Books, 2019.