Thursday, February 19, 2009

February 19, 2009

The Denver Boot
It was Friday the 13th, and a winter storm was coming down over the Rocky Mountain front range onto Denver, which soon proved to be an omen of events to come.
The day started out well. Andra and I had visited Publication Printers, just a mile south of downtown, where Zone 4 is printed. A poster in the lobby says, “Official Printer of the Denver Broncos.” Our sales rep gave us a ten-cent tour, beginning with the huge prepress department where customer files are downloaded from an FTP site, and four sets of thin aluminum plates are made up, usually eight pages to a plate. In the four-color process—cyan, yellow, magenta, and black—four plates must be made for each set of pages. Once checked for accuracy, the plates move to the web presses (a “web” is simply a large roll of paper on a spindle that is pulled through the Heidelberg presses, where the images on the plates are transferred to a rubber “blanket” and then to the paper—hence the name “offset”). It all happens at lightning speed. The tour moved to the bindery where saddle stitch “signatures” are stapled together, and perfect bound pages are glued. Our rep left us at the shipping department, where young men zip around the cavernous warehouse on machines that look like a cross between a fork lift and a Segway. As they pick up and drop pallets of boxes full of magazines, they look like they’re having a lot more fun than anyone else in the building. It must be like getting paid to race go carts.
We picked up 1,000 copies of Zone 4 No. 1 that we’d had the printer hold for us last week when the issue printed. The other 4,000 copies were shipped to newsstand distributors and subscribers. Then we drove to downtown Denver, checked into our hotel, grabbed a box out of the trunk, and headed over to the Convention Center to promote the magazine at the 50th Colorado Garden & Home Show.
We’d walked just three aisles before an undercover security agent nabbed us. He said only exhibitors could hand out materials. We said, “Didn’t know that. Sorry. We won’t pass any more.”
To which he said, “Leave the show immediately.”
I said, “Well, we did buy tickets.”
He got on his walkie talkie and said to his superior that he had a “problem couple here.”
Realizing he wasn’t about to have a conversation with us, and that a couple of gray-hairs distributing subversive propaganda that promotes growing your own vegetables and patronizing local food sources didn’t have much chance of winning an argument, rather than suffer the embarrassment of being handcuffed, collared, and thrown out on the street, we left.
On the way back to our hotel, Andra, who always seems to come up with the right comment, smiled at me and said, “We got the Denver boot!”
We might be subversives but we’re not parking ticket scofflaws; there was no Denver boot locking a front wheel of our car. To lick our wounds we treated ourselves to a performance of Richard III, and the next day left town quietly—with 996 copies of Zone 4.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

February 3, 2009

First Copies Have Arrived!
At 10:30 this morning a trucker delivered a pallet of Zone 4 issue No. 1. Half of our initial print order was shipped to distributors directly from the printer in Denver. We're sending out the rest, for now. Our mailing list includes subscribers, the media, advertisers, and small retailers. Printing labels, stuffing envelopes, and lugging mail trays to the post office is not exciting work, but we're anxious for your feedback. So please, write, email, telephone, yell, make smoke signals—let us know what you think!

And tell a friend about Zone 4.

Publication Printers did a great job. True color, no mistakes. As we knew they would, having closely checked other publications on their customer list. Thanks also to all the writers, photographers, proof readers, and others who helped. 

Issue No. 2 is well underway. Besides informative and colorful features, Dr. Bob's Q&A, recipes, and much more, we'll announce the winner of our first Backyard Blunders contest. Get your hands on No. 1 for more information.

Stay tuned!