Kerry talked with Kate Askew of Yella Dog Press

Original broadcast 8-3-17 - Reaired with new content added on 12-15-17

Our guest is Kate Askew, owner of Yella Dog Press in Little Rock, Arkansas. Kate is a native of Little Rock who graduated from Vanderbilt University in 1985. She worked for many years as a book, paper, and ephemera specialist for estate sales, and in 2002, she started her own business buying and selling rare printed materials. Eventually, buying and collecting antique texts led her to a desire to create her own. Kate saw a printing press for sale in the classifieds of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and purchased it, along with several fonts of type.

When the movers were unloading the press in Little Rock, they dropped it on its flywheel, breaking both the wheel and the drive shaft. Kate connected with prolific Arkansas printer John Horn, who helped her fix her press and taught her how to set type. She soon met Lamarie Rutelonis, another apprentice of John Horn. They pooled their equipment and resources to set up a print shop in downtown Little Rock. In their first three years, they moved locations twice, and finally settled at the bottom of Cantrell Hill with another of Horn’s former apprentices, Gladys Whitney. Together they formed High Cotton Letterpress Co-op, which includes Kate’s shop, Yella Dog Press.

Kate also owns Kate Askew, Auctions & Appraisals, LLC where she works as a licensed auctioneer and an expert at appraising the value of the written word. She currently lives in Little Rock with her family and runs an Etsy shop under the name Yella Dog Press.

Up In Your Business is a Radio Show by FlagandBanner.com

 

 

Behind the scenes with Kerry and the UIYB staff during the rerun!

EPISODE 47

 

[INTRODUCTION]

 

[0:00:03.2] TB: Welcome to Up in Your Business with Kerry McCoy. Be sure to stay tuned till the end of the show to hear how you can get a copy of this program and other helpful documents.

 

Now, it's time for Kerry McCoy to get all up in your business.

 

[INTERVIEW]

 

[0:00:18.6] KM: I’m Kerry McCoy, and like Tim said, it’s time for me to get up in your business. For the next hour my guest, Kate Anderson Askew, owner-operator of the Yella Dog Press and founder of Kate Askew Auctions and Appraisals, and I will be getting up in the business of printing presses, rare book collections and how to become a successful online reseller.

 

We hope through our storytelling of how we maneuvered the path of independence and leadership in pursuit of our dreams that you will be inspired. For me, it began over 40 years ago when I founded Arkansas Flag & Banner. During the last four decades Arkansas Flag & Banner has grown and morphed from door-to-door sales, to telemarketing, to mail order and catalog sales and now relies heavily on the internet. Each change in sales strategy required a change in company thinking and procedures. My confidence, leadership knowledge and my company grew. My initial $400 investment now produces nearly four million in annual sales.

 

Each week on this show you’ll hear candid conversations between me and my guest about real-world experiences on a variety of businesses and topics that I hope you’ll find interesting and inspiring. Running a business or organization is like so many things, it takes persistence, perseverance and patience. I worked part-time jobs for nine years before Arkansas Flag & Banner grew enough to support just me, but it’s paid off now because it has now grown and expanded so much that to operate efficiently we require our 10 departments and 25 people to manage them. Thus, reminding us all again that small businesses are the fuel of our economic engine.

 

Before we start, I want to introduce my technician, Tim Bowen. Say hello, Tim.

 

[0:01:56.4] TB: Hello, Tim.

 

[0:01:57.5] KM: My guest today is Kate Anderson Askew, sole owner and operator of the Yella Dog Press in Little Rock, Arkansas. Kate has always been a ferocious reader evidenced by the library in her home and her avid love of books and the printed word. For many years she’s worked for estate sellers as their book, paper and epher — I’m going to see if I can get that word —

 

[0:02:20.6] KA: Ephemera.

 

[0:02:20.8] KM: Thank you. I have been practicing —

 

[0:02:22.3] KA: Ephemeral. Ephemera.

 

[0:02:24.3] KM: — And is ephemeral specialist, which is a new word that I just learned while doing your research. In 2002 she started her own business of buying and selling rare printed materials via the internet. When Kate spotted in the classified section of the newspaper an antique printing press complete with handset types available for sale she purchased it and took her love of the printed word to another level.

 

In 2008 Kate officially opened the Yella Dog Printing Press. This is not your atypical printing company. Her method of printing doesn’t include an inkjet, laser or even an offset printing machine, instead she handsets each individual letter number or character on to her 1903 Chandler & Price Platen Press or her Vandercook 4 Press. Inks up the platen and literally cranks out original one of a kind limited edition prints on posters, cards or other paper goods.

 

In addition, Kate is a licensed art book appraiser, and you said you let your auctioneer license lapse.

 

[0:03:30.3] KA: I did. You can’t do everything.

 

[0:03:31.4] KM: I know, right? So I’m talking that one out. She does that under her business, which is her LLC Kate Askew Auctions & Appraisals. I guess you’ve dropped the auctions.

 

[0:03:40.5] KA: I’ve changed that. Yeah.

 

[0:03:41.4] KM: What is it now?

 

[0:03:42.2] KA: It’s just Kate Anderson Askew LLC, and that encompasses Arkansas Bookseller, Yella Dog Press and appraisals, my appraisal business.

 

[0:03:51.8] KM: Oh! You put it all under an umbrella.

 

[0:03:53.6] KA: Yes.

 

[0:03:53.8] KM: That’s what it’s like when you’re married to a lawyer.

 

[0:03:55.6] KA: That’s right.

 

[0:03:56.2] KM: He can do stuff like that for you.

 

[0:03:56.6] KA: Yeah, exactly.

 

[0:03:57.9] KM: I think you can do that online now.

 

[0:03:58.9] KA: Yeah, it’s not that hard.

 

[0:04:01.0] KM: Yeah. We’ll talk about that in a minute. It’s a pleasure to welcome to the table the most interesting, and you’ll like this, enduringly eccentric, Kate Askew.

 

[0:04:08.0] KA: Oh, that’s so sweet. Thank you.

 

[0:04:09.7] KM: You’re welcome. This is not your usual MO.

 

[0:04:12.9] KA: No. It’s not.

 

[0:04:13.6] KM: You like to be behind the book or printing press.

 

[0:04:15.8] KA: Well, or one on one. It makes me really nervous.

 

[0:04:18.7] KM: I’ve known you for a long time and I think we need to disclose which we already disclosed on our Facebook Live episode before the show. 

 

[0:04:24.4] KA: We’re cousins.

 

[0:04:25.1] KM: By marriage.

 

[0:04:25.5] KA: By marriage, but we claim each other outright.

 

[0:04:28.1] KM: That’s right. I’ve never met anybody like you.

 

[0:04:32.4] KA: I’ve never met anybody like you. You’ve been a huge influence on my life. You were the first person who looked at me and said, “Girl, you are a afraid to make a dollar and you need to stop that.”

 

[0:04:42.3] KM: That’s so true about you.

 

[0:04:43.8] KA: I know, but you told me that — I don’t know, 25 years ago you were like, “Girl, this is how you’re going to make some money and I’m going to help you.”

 

[0:04:49.8] KM: And you still don’t care.

 

[0:04:51.4] KA: It’s not that I don’t care. It’s just sometimes it gets in the way of doing my work.

 

[0:04:56.5] KM: You are motivated by passion.

 

[0:04:59.4] KA: Motivated by passion but also motivated by covering the rent on my shop. That does come into play.

 

[0:05:06.1] KM: Neither one of those — That’s so funny you should say that, because I was thinking about that when I was making up your questions today, which it looks like we’re not going to follow it all, my questions, which is great.

 

[0:05:16.5] KA: Maybe we’ll get to them.

 

[0:05:16.9] KM: I don’t know. I was thinking about that this morning. I thought you follow your passion. You work towards what is self-interesting and motivating to you and I, on the other hand, was motivated in my young life to have to work for money because I had to make rent and I had to — I didn’t really have a payroll but I had to make rent and pay for myself.

 

Not that either one of them are wrong, but they’re great motivators to help you find your dream and seek what you want to do. I love that both of our past have led us into places that are fulfilling and —

 

[0:05:54.8] KA: And things that we love.

 

[0:05:55.8] KM: And things we love.

 

[0:05:56.6] KA: I fell into a book buying and selling as a need to not have to be in a cubicle, because I knew I’d stayed home for a while with my kids and I wanted to get back into the working world. I didn’t want to be in a cubicle. I started buying and selling things on eBay and I realized that that was a really great way to be on your pajamas and make some money. I started out — This was 1998, I think.

 

[0:06:27.8] KM: You were the first successful eBay seller that I ever knew.

 

[0:06:31.2] KA: Oh, that you knew. Okay. Yeah, but not — I was late to the game in ’98. Anyway, I started buying and selling things and what I realized I was good at buying and selling were books. I grew up in a bookish household, a very booking household. My dad is a book collector. He’s never been a dealer, but he’s a lifelong book collector so I had a great love of books, great love of reading. Was an English major and Vanderbilt.

 

[0:06:53.9] KM: I was going to ask you —

 

[0:06:55.4] KA: Yeah. Studied all kinds of literature and spend a lot of time in the rare book stacks at Vanderbilt. When I realized I was good at buying and selling books I thought, “Well, that makes sense. That’s what I know,” so I’ve decided to stick with what I knew and exclusively began buying and selling books.

 

[0:07:14.2] KM: I wondered if your degree in college played in to your career, and it actually did.

 

[0:07:18.7] KA: Yeah. It did.

 

[0:07:20.2] KM: Because not everybody can say that.

 

[0:07:21.2] KA: I kind of segued a little bit, because when I first got out of college I remember I had a degree in English literature and I minored in philosophy, in psychology I think. I can’t really remember. I had some kind of minor. I think it was those two. Jess, who’s my husband now, we’ve been married 30 years, he was finishing up —

 

[0:07:39.7] KM: Congratulations.

 

[0:07:40.7] KA: Thank you. He was finishing up law school in San Francisco and we had just kind of started going out and he said, “Look, we might have something here, but i don’t do long distance. So why don’t you grab a couple of girlfriends from college, move out to San Francisco and let’s see if we can make a go of this.” I thought, “Well, okay.”

 

I got three of my friends to move to San Francisco with me and —

 

[0:08:03.6] KM: How fun is that?

 

[0:08:04.7] KA: Yeah, it was really fun, but I didn’t have a job. My parents were too keen on me going out to San Francisco because they said, “We don’t know anybody there.” I said, “Now, you will.” They said, “Well, you’re going to have to get a job before you go because it’s not like we’re going to fund this adventure.”

 

When I had been visiting Jess I had met one person and I called that person because he said he was starting a business. I couldn’t really remember what it was and I called him up and said, “I’m looking for a job. Do you have one for me?” He said, “Sure. I’m starting a securities business and I’ll put you on the OTC trading desk as my assistant.”

 

[0:08:39.8] KM: What’s OTC stand for?

 

[0:08:41.3] KA: I didn’t know either, but it’s over the counter stocks. I didn’t have a finance degree. I didn’t have any kind of business background, whatsoever. I said yes. Told him when I’d be in San Francisco, and I went to the bookstore and bought a book called Understanding OTC Trading, and I read it on the way out to San Francisco. I got there and he said I had to pass my series 7, which is a standardized test for securities traders. I got up the book and I studied it and I passed that test.

 

The moral of the story is people always said, “What are you going to do with that English degree? Ha! Ha! Ha! What are you going to do?”

 

[0:09:22.5] KM: Study for your series 7 test.

 

[0:09:24.1] KA: What I tell people is with a liberal arts degree, if you can read, write and follow instructions you can do anything.

 

[0:09:31.7] KM: What a great point.

 

[0:09:33.7] KA: What trading securities taught me was, first of all, I can do anything, because I flew by the seat of my pants. Also, it taught me how to buy low and sell high and you can leave some money on the table. It doesn’t matter. If you sold it for more than you bought it, you’re good. Don’t sweat it. Just keep going. Buy something else and sell it.

 

[0:09:53.4] KM: Are you still doing that? Are you a day trader?

 

[0:09:55.3] KA: No. I’m not. No. I do it sort of with books though.

 

[0:10:00.1] KM: Oh yeah.

 

[0:10:00.4] KA: Yeah. I’m really good at going in just like traders sometimes do, just get a feel, “I think that’s a good buy.” I can go in and look at a library and kind of look at it and go, “Yeah, I can money off of that.” That’s kind of how I’ve done it.

 

[0:10:13.0] KM: You never know what stepping stone is going to lead you to your destiny.

 

[0:10:17.2] KA: That’s right. Early in my book buying career, I came across a huge collection of medical books that I went to a sale and it was way out on Geyer Springs and Chico. I thought, “They aren’t going to be any books there. I don’t know. It’s a sale. There aren’t any other sales today. I’m going to go,” because that’s where I was getting my books were at estate sales in the beginning.

 

I went out to this estate sale not knowing anything and open these warehouse doors and there were 12,000 books in there. They’re all medical books. I bought 300 books. I put them in my Mini Cooper. I drove home, unloaded them. I went back the next day, I bought 300 books. Went home, unloaded them and that night I just couldn’t sleep and I turned to Jess and I said, “I got to have those books. I got to have all of them.” I bought all of them. I bought 12,000 books.

 

[0:11:07.4] KM: 12,000 books.

 

[0:11:08.8] KA: Yes, and it took 10 years to sell them all. After I bought all these medical books, it turned out the guy who had owned them had been a neurosurgeon. I had to throw myself into medicine, and one of the biggest compliments I got was somebody email me and said, “I want to buy this book.” It was like a $600 book. It was a really nice book.” He said, “But I also want to know where you got your background on neurosurgery.” I just wrote back and said, “Look. I got a background on whatever will make me a dollar today, and today it’s neurosurgery.” That’s how the securities background, I think, buying and selling played into book buying and selling.

 

[0:11:49.3] KM: Your literature and your degree in English taught you how to read everything and comprehend.

 

[0:11:53.5] KA: Also just being comfortable with books and comfortable with other languages. All you have to do is know a little bit of a language to figure out what you got.

 

[0:12:01.4] KM: Get the vocabulary.

 

[0:12:02.1] KA: That’s right. If the book is in Latin, I know a little bit of Latin. I can figure it out. Now, I can get on Google Translate and figure out anything.

 

[0:12:12.2] KM: Really?

 

[0:12:12.7] KA: Yeah. If it’s in French, or Latin, or Italian, I can figure it out.

 

[0:12:20.1] KM: You’re listening to Up In Your Business with me, Kerry McCoy. My guest today is Kate Askew, owner-operator of the very cool Yella Dog Press Company in Little Rock, Arkansas, which we’re going to talk about in the next break. She’s the founder of the Kate Askew — You changed your name. I’ve got to change it. Kate Askew Appraisers.

 

[0:12:38.3] KA: Yeah. It’s just Appraisal and Consulting. I do estate consulting and appraisals.

 

[0:12:45.3] KM: Okay, which where she uses her expertise and experience as she gives value to the written word, books and art. Really, you said any personal property besides a house.

 

[0:12:54.3] KA: Any personal property. Yeah, besides a house.

 

[0:12:56.7] KM: You are also a very successful online reseller of said items that I just mentioned, which I didn’t realized came from — You got your savvy in that from being in —

 

[0:13:07.6] KA: Securities trading. Also, first of all I’m extremely ADD, and so —

 

[0:13:12.8] KM: You are? I would never have thought that.

 

[0:13:14.0] KA: Yeah. My husband calls it the bird squirrel problem. It’s like, “There’s a bird. Oh! There’s a squirrel.” It’s like stick with one thing. Anyway, having different things to do; printing, book selling, appraising and, also, I’d like to be with people. I worked in the estate sell business for a long time with Roy Dudley who’s still a really good friend of mine, and I was his book and paper specialist, and consulted with some other estate sell dealers too, but Roy’s business is so incredibly fascinating that I totally fell into it. When you’re doing that, that’s all you want to do. I wanted to be able to do my books and printings. Now, I consult with him every once in a while, but I don’t work with him fulltime.

 

[0:13:53.5] KM: In the first part of the show we talked about how you went up to San Francisco and got your series 7 license and was a day trader or —

 

[0:13:53.5] KA: No. Not a day trader. Just over the counter and listed stocks trader. Then I moved to Little Rock — 

 

[0:14:08.7] KM: Got married.

 

[0:14:09.1] KA: Got married.

 

[0:14:09.8] KM: And work for Stevens.

 

[0:14:11.6] KA: Worked at Stevens for a while. This was ancient history. This was so long ago.

 

[0:14:14.7] KM: Just so the people will follow the train here. Then you quit that job and raised children, your girls, for a couple of years. 

 

[0:14:20.2] KA: Yes, I did. I had two small children and my husband, Jess, was beginning his law career, and we just couldn’t do it all. Something had to give and it was my job and I went home to stay with the children and I loved it.

 

[0:14:37.3] KM: Then you decided to go back and help Roy Dudley first or you got interested in eBay trading books online first?

 

[0:14:44.9] KA: First, I got interested in trading books on eBay first and I was buying a lot of books from Roy and he said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I buy and sell books.” He said, “Well, I need a book specialist.” That’s when I started working with him and did books, paper and ephemeral items. Ephemeral items are anything that should have been thrown away. If you have your Harvard Yale football ticket stub from 1921, that would have been something that should have been thrown away and it’s not. That would be a piece of ephemera.

 

[0:15:12.9] KM: Posters.

 

[0:15:14.4] KA: Posters that would have been — Let’s say it’s a poster that would have been pasted to a barn wall, advertising like Barnstormers or something like that. That’s ephemeral.

 

[0:15:24.8] KM: Do you do the research online? How do you figure out what the value is of stuff?

 

[0:15:30.7] KA: I do online research and I’ve got a good base knowledge, but I can also — I used to not have the internet obviously, so you just have to fly by the seat of your pants. With the internet, now you can really pretty much pinpoint what you have and that’s really fun. It’s just really fun. I get into the thrill of the hunt and the history of things. I love Arkansas history. I have a lot of really cool historical Arkansas things. I know this is radio, but I brought — William Woodruff was the printer to the territory in Arkansas. He was the first printer in Arkansas and he started the Arkansas Gazette in 1819 and it’s still the oldest paper west of the Mississippi, the Democrat absorbed it, so it’s still the same, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

 

I love anything that William Woodruff printed, but his things are pretty rare. Arkansas was a territory when he was printing, but I do have two books I brought —

 

[0:16:31.9] KM: In plastic, to take care of them.

 

[0:16:33.4] KA: Well, I have them in their little sleeve just because they’re fragile. One is the 1825 Acts of the Territory, and one is the 1834 and it says, “Little Rock. Printed by William E. Woodruff, printer to the territory,” and I think that’s really cool. 

 

[0:16:49.3] KM: How much do you think those books worth?

 

[0:16:51.4] KA: You know, I really don’t know. These were actually gifts of a friend who knows I love William Woodruff so I’m not sure of the value. I’ve never looked it up.

 

[0:16:59.3] KM: Because you’re not selling them.

 

[0:17:00.1] KA: Because I’m not selling them.

 

[0:17:02.8] KM: Before we went on the radio, we were doing Facebook Live and you showed on Facebook that little tiny, tiny book.

 

[0:17:11.6] KA: My tiniest book. Yes, the young people and the old at my house like to see my tiniest book, which is probably about —

 

[0:17:19.5] KM: One inch by one inch.

 

[0:17:20.7] KA: One inch by one inch, and it’s actually a modern book. It was printed in 1989, but it was letter pressed printed handset. To get to where the printing is, after buying and selling books for about — I don’t even know, several years, I began to be obsessed with how books are made. How the printing is done. What kind of paper it is. How the binding was made. I decided I was going to teach myself how to set handset type, which his ridiculous. That’s like saying I want to teach myself how to fly an airplane. You can’t do it by yourself, but I didn’t know that.

 

As you said in your intro, I was searching the classifieds and I found a platen press, a huge platen press which is one of those flywheel presses and type that I bought from a man in Hot Springs and I bought it for $200.

 

[0:18:16.2] KM: Oh, wow!

 

[0:18:17.2] KA: And the movers broke it. They were delivering it to me and it fell on its flywheel. It crushed the flywheel. It broke the driveshaft and I had a broken printing press in my garage. I called around to find out who could fix this press and everybody said to me, “You need to talk to John Horn.” I knew John. I had met him at the Art Center but I actually didn’t know he’s a printer, so I called him up and I said, “I broke a printing press.” He said, “Did you buy that one in Hot Springs?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “I was going to go get that. I couldn’t imagine who else bought it, but let me come look at it.” He came to look at it. It turns out it was an extremely rare press. There’s only one other one known in existence and it can’t be fixed, but through the broken printing press I met John Horn. He said, “Do you want to learn how to set type?” I said, “Yes, I do.” He said, “Well, come on out and I’ll teach you.”

 

[0:19:11.4] KM: Oh, wow!

 

[0:19:11.9] KA: And so he did. That’s how I learned how to handset type was from someone who was willing to take the time to teach me.

 

[0:19:19.0] KM: If your movers hadn’t broken it, you might not have met him. You probably would have though.

 

[0:19:22.4] KA: I don’t know. That press still sits out at John’s.

 

[0:19:25.9] KM: That’s not the one that’s in your shop?

 

[0:19:27.2] KA: We couldn’t fix the one that I broke.

 

[0:19:29.1] KM: He could never fix that.

 

[0:19:30.3] KA: These are huge pieces of cast iron and you’d have to be — It’s a huge drive shaft that would have to be cast.

 

[0:19:36.5] KM: Yeah, I think that that guy should have paid you from moving it.

 

[0:19:38.9] KA: Well, it was Christmas. What are you going to do? People make mistakes. It was done. It was spilled milk. That’s how I came to printing. Then there were other people who were learning to print out of John’s and I’ve got together with [inaudible 0:19:55.7], another printer, and we pulled our resources and opened a little shop.

 

[0:20:03.2] KM: This other printer was an apprentice of John’s also, right?

 

[0:20:05.8] KA: Yes. Another John Horn apprentice, yes.

 

[0:20:08.0] KM: Together you made a coop.

 

[0:20:11.9] KA: We made a coop and we have a third person in our coop too and the three of us pulled all of our equipment. It’s really hard to find this stuff. It’s hard to find the wood type. It’s hard to find the metal type. I scoured the U.S. all over, up and down I40 for 10 years buying wood type and metal type and have a really nice collection now.

 

[0:20:34.6] KM: It’s hard to find type?

 

[0:20:36.1] KA: It’s really hard to find it. Especially now, it’s really changed. In the past 15 years ago, if I found it, I could afford it. In the past 6 to 8 years, there’s been a huge resurgence in the interest in letter press printing and a lot of people say it’s a balanced thing. The women who started Twitter knows how to handset type. It’s sort of the more technological we are the more people want to go back to the basics. 

 

[0:21:02.1] KM: What did you say? The women who started —

 

[0:21:04.0] KA: Twitter. Handsets type.

 

[0:21:06.4] KM: Is that why she does 42 characters?

 

[0:21:08.7] KA: No. I have no idea. All I know is that she handsets type or I read that. You can’t believe everything you read on the internet or Twitter. No. I just think that the more technological we get the more people want to get back to the basics. In the past 6 to 8 years all the universities are offering book arts programs and they’re buying up all these equipment. Stuff that people used to say, “Get it out of here,” is now really expensive. It’s good that I’ve got things when I got them because the price, I couldn’t get it now. I couldn’t afford it.

 

[0:21:40.2] KM: Yeah. Those printing presses that are in your place are so heavy they have to be on a slab.

 

[0:21:48.5] KA: On a palette. You got to have special equipment to move it. Obviously, I learned the hard way. It’s just really specialized moving. I’ll tell you, the way a lot of people print, because there are a lot of people who are able to have a Chandler and Price Platen Press like have in the garage is if you are a — While a young person with your computer skills, then you can design whatever you want on an in-design program, send off and have a plastic plate made and you can put that on your press and print with that, so you don’t have to have wood type and metal type. Most of the letter press printing you see is done off a polymer plate.

 

[0:22:26.4] KM: What’s polymer made?

 

[0:22:26.8] KA: It’s a plastic plate that people send off for.

 

[0:22:31.0] KM: But that’s not what yours is.

 

[0:22:31.7] KA: That’s not what I do. I do a little bit of polymer, I will say. My teacher calls is heresy, but I do a little bit of polymer plate things because people want things that I can’t do. In that case, I’ll do polymer plate. 99.99% of what I do is handset letter by letter, justified by hand on my Chandler and Price or my Vandercook.

 

[0:22:54.9] KM: You were at your place the other day and I drove by and I saw your car there because you’re not always there, and I had my grandkids with me.

 

[0:23:03.2] KA: They were so adorable and they were so interested in what I was doing.

 

[0:23:06.0] KM: My grandson was so interested in what you were doing.

 

[0:23:08.5] KA: It’s visually exciting and it’s big equipment that moves fast and it makes something.

 

[0:23:15.2] KM: Tell our listeners how you do it exactly. You go to your drawers — 

 

[0:23:20.7] KA: I have cabinets full of type and —

 

[0:23:22.3] KM: You have to be careful when you open the drawers because there’s so heavy.

 

[0:23:25.7] KA: That’s right. They’re called cases. Actually, that’s where upper case and lower case comes from, because the bigger letters were above the smaller letters. So that’s where upper case and lower case comes from because those drawers you pull out are really called cases.

 

[0:23:41.9] KM: That lower case is the heavier case, and the upper case is the smaller?

 

[0:23:45.2] KA: No. Upper cases are the bigger letters. Upper case and lower case is, at some point, how it was situated in the cabinet. 

 

[0:23:51.5] KM: Okay.

 

[0:23:52.7] KA: You have to decide what font you’re going to use and then you have to have that font. Any newspaper, anybody who printed anything, you were only as good as how many fonts of type you had. That’s how you would decide what you’re going to print, is by what you have. If you were lucky enough to have lots of different types, then you had a lot of choices, but you’re limited by what you actually physically have, which you’re not if you’re on a computer program. In a computer, you can have whatever you want. We’re lucky in our shop because we have a really nice collection of wood type and metal type that we use.

 

[0:24:27.2] KM: Is there an advantage for wood or metal?

 

[0:24:29.2] KA: Well, it had to go to metal because it was so heavy. Once the led got a certain height, the bigger the font, it’s just too heavy to cast with led.

 

[0:24:43.1] KM: So you had to go to wood.

 

[0:24:43.7] KA: You had to go to wood.

 

[0:24:45.5] KM: Okay. Then you take those and you took my grandson’s name and you spelled out his name then you inked — 

 

[0:24:52.9] KA: Then you have to put ink on the press —

 

[0:24:54.9] KM: Or just the platen.

 

[0:24:55.8] KA: Aha. In this case he was using the Vandercook, so it’s a little different. You just put the ink on the rollers and you put the letters on the bed of the press then you put the paper in and you roll the paper over it and everything has to be typed high, .918 is type high. 

 

[0:25:18.6] KM: What does that mean?

 

[0:25:19.5] KA: Just .918 of an inch. Everything on the bed has to be the same height so it hits the paper at the same time and that height is .918. If you’re a polymer plate printer you have a special bed on your press with that bed and the piece of plastic, it’s .918. It’s type high.

 

[0:25:42.1] KM: This is a lot to learn. No wonder you had to have John come teach you how to do it all.

 

[0:25:44.7] KA: Yeah, exactly.

 

[0:25:45.7] KM: It looked really easy when you did it, but that’s because you did it all for us and then you inked up the —

 

[0:25:49.8] KA: Most things look easy till you realize how you have to do it. That’s the truth.

 

[0:25:54.0] KM: What I loved about it is everyone that we printed was just slightly different. It was kind of like screen printing. I kept thinking about Andy Warhol while we were doing it, because I thought everyone of these is just slightly different.

 

[0:26:04.2] KA: There is kind of a letter press look, because most of the wood type and metal type people find has been beat up, because it was used. It wasn’t a work of art then. It was work. It was utilitarian. You couldn’t print a poster or a billboard or a newspaper unless you had that type, unless you had that font of type.

 

[0:26:23.5] KM: You’re listening to Up In Your Business with me, Kerry McCoy. My guest today is Kate Askew, owner-operator of the very cool Yella Dog Press Company in Little Rock, Arkansas, and she’s a successful online reseller of books, and what’s that word? 

 

[0:26:39.3] KA: Ephemera.

 

[0:26:39.7] KM: Ephemera. A new word for you there. If you’ve got questions or comments for my guest or for me, this is your chance to call.

 

[0:26:48.1] TB: The number if 501-433-0088.

 

[0:26:52.7] KM: Or you can send an email to —

 

[0:26:53.9] TB: The email is questions@upyourbusiness.org.

 

[0:26:58.0] KM: I’m tweeting, so you can tweet me @askkerrymccoy, and we’re using #upyourbusiness. Before the break we talked about Roy Dudley Estate Sales and how you loved working for him, which was really cool.

 

[0:27:14.6] KA: Really fun.

 

[0:27:16.0] KM: But you’re not doing that anymore.

 

[0:27:17.2] KA: I do.

 

[0:27:17.8] KM: A little bit.

 

[0:27:18.3] KA: Every once in a while I still consult with Roy, but I used to work with him fulltime and I don’t do that anymore or just because I wasn’t able to get my own printing and bookwork done because his work is so fascinating.

 

[0:27:29.6] KM: It really is. To work as an appraiser, do you need to be licensed?

 

[0:27:35.9] KA: Yes. I am licensed with the Certified Appraisers Guild of America. Actually, Roy and a friend of ours, Melissa Goulden and I all three went together and got our certification several years ago. It was really, really fun.

 

[0:27:49.3] KM: Roy is an appraiser too.

 

[0:27:51.1] KA: Yes.

 

[0:27:51.5] KM: For books or for different things?

 

[0:27:53.2] KA: Just like me, personal property. Roy has three certified appraisers on staff and we had the best time going to get our certification, and that’s when I decided to get my auctioneers licensed too. You can only do so much, and I like to go and try things and go down a rabbit hole. I was not a good auctioneer. I was terrible at it.

 

[0:28:16.8] KM: I would be terrified to do that.

 

[0:28:17.5] KA: I thought I’m a fast talker, I’m going to be able to do that. It didn’t work. That’s okay, because if you don’t try thing then you don’t know if you’re going to like it.

 

[0:28:27.5] KM: Hear that listeners?

 

[0:28:28.1] KA: You got to try things and you got to fail.

 

[0:28:30.3] KM: Can’t have that fear of failure hold you back.

 

[0:28:33.0] KA: A lot of what brought me to printing was just the love of the printed word. Also, I write poetry and it’s a way for me to showcase my own poetry. My husband calls it loud poetry because I do it on big posters.

 

[0:28:50.9] KM: And you lose some pretty loud words.

 

[0:28:52.7] KA: Yeah. You use big words. Sometimes four-letter words. 

 

[0:28:57.4] KM: I’m trying how to say that, curse words.

 

[0:28:59.9] KA: Not always.

 

[0:29:02.1] KM: No. This one doesn’t have a bad word in it.

 

[0:29:04.0] KA: This is one of the first posters I ever made of my own poetry and it says if it is a soul crashing, blood rushing, heart poppin’, jaw droppin’, head acin’, breath taken, plant tossing, ocean crossing, life bettin’, no regretin’ kind of thing, it just might be love.

 

[0:29:21.4] KM: Oh, that’s awesome.

 

[0:29:23.0] KA: Sometimes you just got to take a chance and go to a city that you’ve never been too and take a job in a field you don’t know anything about and you just don’t know where it’s going to lead you.

 

[0:29:32.0] KM: That is just beautiful. For everybody that wasn’t listening at the beginning, that’s how she did met her husband.

 

[0:29:36.6] KA: The other thing is if I love the history of Arkansas, and so that takes me back to William Woodruff who was the first printer in Arkansas, a printer to the territory in 1819. If you’ll let me, I was going to read a little bit from a letter that was written about his print shop. 

 

[0:29:54.9] KM: Absolutely.

 

[0:29:56.4] KA: This is a letter that actually my teacher found and set to tide, but it’s one of my favorite things about —

 

[0:30:03.0] KM: What do you mean your teacher?

 

[0:30:04.2] KA: John Horn. My printing teacher, John Horn. It’s a letter from Hiram Whittington in April of 1827 to his brother. He had just gotten to Arkansas because William Woodruff hired him to be a printer and he was coming from Boston. This was 1819. This kid was coming from Boston to Little Rock.

 

[0:30:24.0] KM: On a horse.

 

[0:30:25.3] KA: He came by steamed boat and canoe and foot. He talks about how hard it was to get here. He writes, “In the afternoon of Sunday on the 6^th day of December, we arrived in Little Rock. Little Rock is situated on the south bank of the Arkansas. Contains about 60 buildings, 6 brick, 8 frame, the balance log cabins. The best building in the place is the printers. It is built of brick and is as good as any office in Boston.”

 

“Little Rock Academy is a log hut and the state house is a little low wooden building about 10 feet by 16. The town has been settled about eight years and has improved very slow. The trees are not cut down in the town yet, instead in the streets — Of street we walk in cow trails from one house to another. The town and, I believe, the whole territory is inhabited by the drags of Kentucky, Georgia and Louisiana, but principally from the former, and a more drunken, good for nothing set of fellows never got together.”

 

“The secretary of the territory and the judges at the Supreme Court drink whiskey out of the same cup with the lowest born and rolled together in the same gutter. There have been more than a dozen murders committed here, but the murder was always acquitted. The greatest drunkards fill the most responsible offices.”

 

Then he goes on to say —

 

[0:31:42.9] KM: Oh my gosh! That’s priceless.

 

[0:31:44.7] KA: It’s hysterical. Then he goes on to say, “Of the female part of the community I have not much to say as there are five grown girls in the township and they are all as ugly as sin and mean as the devil. It’s a famous place for parties. I have been to three since I had been here where they have a violin and dance all night and as there are not girls to form a sec, all the old women danced and lie in bed the next day. The men get drunk and generally have a fight before they get home. Last Sunday I saw two fringe ladies walking out each with a young coon in their arms. They are used instead of lapdogs.”

 

Then one more thing he said and then I’ll quit reading.

 

[0:32:17.7] KM: No! Don’t stop! Keep going.

 

[0:32:19.3] KA: One more thing he said to his brother, he was talking about the food they were eating and he said, “The Indians sometimes bring deer and buffalo meat to town and try to sell it, but the folks are such intolerance that they seldom purchase any. They think there is nothing like a dead hog.”

 

[0:32:31.7] KM: Oh! Now we root for the dead hog. [inaudible 0:32:35.1]

 

[0:32:36.5] KA: Everybody here still loves a dead hog.

 

[0:32:38.5] KM: Yes, we do.

 

[0:32:40.2] KA: I think that’s really fun to see Little Rock through the eyes of an outsider in 1823.

 

[0:32:49.1] KM: That ought to make everybody want to start collecting old books.

 

[0:32:51.6] KA: Well, in old documents and go back and look at old documents, you just never know what’s going to turn up in your hands.

 

[0:33:00.5] KM: I don’t even know what to say after that. That was priceless. Thank you for sharing that.

 

[0:33:04.3] KA: You’re welcome. It’s really fun.

 

[0:33:05.9] KM: I don’t even know where to go from that. I guess we’ll go back to — This is going to be boring after that. I guess we’ll go — Oh, tell us what that other book is that you have there. You said is written by —

 

[0:33:13.9] KA: Oh, Geoffrey Chaucer. It was written by Chaucer. It was printed in 1561 and it’s actually a fragment. It’s not the whole book.

 

[0:33:23.6] KM: Tell who Chaucer is.

 

[0:33:24.9] KA: Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, and he is one of our most famous writers of all time and he wrote stories and really good ones and I found this fragment.

 

[0:33:39.5] KM: Why do you call that a fragment? It looks like a full book.

 

[0:33:40.8] KA: It’s not a full book. It’s part of a book.

 

[0:33:43.1] KM: It’s bound.

 

[0:33:43.9] KA: It is bound and about 300 years ago somebody bound it, but they took out — It was the book that had The Canterbury Tales in it and this story called The Romance of the Rose.

 

[0:33:56.1] KM: How old is the book?

 

[0:33:57.0] KA: It’s 1561. It was printed in 1561.

 

[0:33:59.4] KM: But it was bound 300 years ago, which is what makes —

 

[0:34:01.5] KA: It was rebound. It was printed in 1561 and about 300 years ago I guess somebody wanted The Canterbury Tales out of it and not the rest of it. This is the rest of it, but I can tell from the vellum binding, vellum being sheepskin, and the age of it about when it was bound. I’ll buy a fragment. I don’t care it’s not the whole book. It’s so cool.

 

[0:34:20.3] KM: It’s beautiful. Look at that font. What is that?

 

[0:34:22.7] KA: It’s black letter. When printing started, it’s arbitrary date of 1450 that they say that Gutenberg invented movable type.

 

[0:34:34.6] KM: Yes. We need to talk about that in a minute.

 

[0:34:35.1] KA: Right. The first fonts of type were designed after letters that the monks scribed. Everything before movable type was copied.

 

[0:34:48.2] KM: Movable type oddly enough was 14 A.D., right?

 

[0:34:52.0] KA: No. 1450.

 

[0:34:53.3] KM: A.D.

 

[0:34:54.7] KA: Yeah.

 

[0:34:56.7] KM: Who would have thought movable type was that old?

 

[0:34:58.7] KA: No. 1450, just 500 years ago.

 

[0:35:01.2] KM: Oh, I see. That still seems like a longtime ago. I would have thought it was in the 1800s.

 

[0:35:06.7] KA: No. 1450 is before the 1800s.

 

[0:35:08.3] KM: I know, but I would have thought that movable type started in the 1800s.

 

[0:35:12.1] KA: No. 1450. Although the Chinese had versions of movable type long before that. Just not cast in metal the way Gutenberg did it. Gutenberg figured out how to cast it in metal and how to have multiple letters that you could move. He printed a bible. It’s one of the most famous printed items. You can go to Germany and see it in the museum, Gutenberg Museum.

 

[0:35:31.6] KM: I was just surprised to hear that —

 

[0:35:34.8] KA: 1450?

 

[0:35:35.2] KM: Yeah. That seems like a really long time ago. I didn’t realize that.

 

[0:35:37.7] KA: It was a long time ago.

 

[0:35:39.2] KM: I know.

 

[0:35:39.3] KA: Before movable type, everything was handwritten and monks wrote it and not many people were literate and it was hard to get these things. You had to be a person of means to even have a book and to be literate. When movable type came along, all the sudden things could be reproduced cheaply and easily and people were able to learn to read and information was able to get to people. It was a huge revolution.

 

[0:36:12.2] KM: It was like the internet.

 

[0:36:13.1] KA: Exactly. What the internet did for our age. Right.

 

[0:36:19.2] KM: Information age. Another information age.

 

[0:36:21.7] KA: Right. That’s how that all got started. This font in this particular book is copied. It’s a black letter font. It’s copied from the type of writing the monks would do in the monasteries.

 

[0:36:37.4] KM: Oh, I see what you’re saying. They replicated what a handwritten —

 

[0:36:40.3] KA: Yes. Exactly. Then later, people realized —

 

[0:36:43.7] KM: Look how tiny it is.

 

[0:36:44.5] KA: Later, people realized that that was kind of hard to read and so other fonts were developed, designed.

 

[0:36:52.9] KM: Because this has a lot of seraphs on it.

 

[0:36:54.2] KA: That’s right. It does. One of the greatest type designers of our time was Frederic Goudy and he designed over a hundred type fonts and I have a book here. I’m sorry, it’s radio. You can’t see it, but it’s a vellum book that was printed at the Village Press, which was Frederic Goudy’s personal press. Since he’s my guy and I really like him — —

 

[0:37:19.8] KM: Yeah. That’s much cleaners.

 

[0:37:21.2] KA: He designed most of the typefaces that we use today.

 

[0:37:25.7] KM: How did he put a picture in there?

 

[0:37:27.6] KA: Well, because this was printed much, much later. This was printed in 1901, and so that’s actually a half tongue, but he also has woodcut ornaments here. Everything that’s old is new again, and all the internet fonts or copies of all the metal fonts and all the metal fonts are copies of older metal fonts, so everybody rips everybody off. They always have.

 

When people come to my shop and they want — They show me a font and it’s an internet font, I’ll say I don’t have that, but I have what I believe it was ripped off of, and that’s this font over here and I’ll take them to the type cabinet and show them the font that’s closest to that. That’s really fun.

 

[0:38:10.1] KM: You’ll take them to the case, the upper case or the lower case.

 

[0:38:11.8] KA: Yeah. Exactly. I’m a huge type nerd and trying to figure out what fonts are when they come into the shop because they don’t always have a tag saying what they were, so you have to research and figure out what it is and where it came from. That’s a whole another rabbit hole of figuring out where your type came from.

 

[0:38:29.1] KM: Do you make any money?

 

[0:38:30.4] KA: I make money off my books and I make enough money off my printing to cover the overhead.

 

[0:38:37.6] KM: It’s a really hobby though, isn’t it?

 

[0:38:39.4] KA: No. It’s a business. It is, and I’m working really harder to make more money at it, but it’s a difficult way to make a lot of money. If you’re really going to make money, and people do, you got to have bigger machinery than I have that makes multiples that you can crank out. My biggest run is 150. I don’t have — There’s a press called a Heidelberg Windmill that really is like a little airplane. It’s so complicated. A lot of people who sell commercially can set that thing and print 5,000. I don’t have one of those. It’s more than a hobby. It’s less than just a huge moneymaker, but it’s a lot of joy, a whole lot of joy. 

 

Between my printing, my bookselling and my appraising, it is a business. I sort of have lots of different wily ways  I can make money and I enjoy all of them and it’s mostly — What they have in common is everything I do takes a lot of research and concentration and I’m able to fall into whatever it is I’m researching and really get a bang out of it. Sometimes I have a hard time coming out and being social, but —

 

[0:40:00.1] KM: You’re listening to Up In Your Business with me, Kerry McCoy. My guest today is Kate Asker, owner-operator of the very cool Yella Dog Press Company in Little Rock, Arkansas, and she also has a successful online reseller under the name — Well, I don’t even know what name you sell under. 

 

[0:40:13.5] KA: Yella Dog Press.

 

[0:40:14.2] KM: You do sell under the Yella Dog Press. The past hour we have talked — We’re in the last 10 minutes of the show, and for the past hour we’ve talked about working as an appraiser and getting your license. We’ve talked about the success of being an online reseller a little bit. Is there something that you can tell our listeners? Is there something that you didn’t expect when opened up your eBay account and Etsy account? Was there something that you would advise people to do or not to do? Are you still on eBay and Etsy at the same time?

 

[0:40:46.9] KA: Okay. Those are all good questions. I think the most important thing is to diversify and adapt. If something is working for you, keep doing it. If it’s not working for you, quit doing it. For a long time I sold books on American Book Exchange, Alibris, Amazon, in addition to eBay and any place else I could. I’ve tried the antique malls, that didn’t work. That’s not where people buy books.

 

Eventually, I quit selling on ABE and Alibris, American Book Exchange. I did very well on those for a long time, but when I realized that it was getting harder and harder to make a buck on those, I went back to eBay, which I really liked because people complain about it, because they take a chunk, but where else am I going to find a buyer in China for my book.

 

[0:41:34.7] KM: What about Etsy?

 

[0:41:35.3] KA: Etsy, I tried. Etsy, I’ve not had a whole lot of success with. Other people figured that out, and it’s just figuring it out. I’m selling posters, not books. I was on Etsy. I don’t have anything up right now. Every once in a while I’ll put something up.

 

[0:41:48.6] KM: What about Amazon?

 

[0:41:49.3] KA: Amazon, I’m not selling on right now.

 

[0:41:52.2] KM: Amazon has gotten so hard to sell on.

 

[0:41:54.2] KA: Yeah. It really has.

 

[0:41:56.0] KM: We’ve been talking about getting off Amazon. Flag & Banner has been talking about getting of Amazon right now.

 

[0:41:59.7] KA: There’s so much competition. It the beginning, I did very well on all three of those book venues. What happened was, with books, is that 20 years ago I’ve got the book and it doesn’t look like anybody else has it. The way the internet has developed, anybody who has that can now put it online. You don’t have to be a specialist. You don’t have to be book dealer. You can be Bob in your uncle’s library and realize that’s worth something and sell it.

 

The true availability of things has come to light. It’s like a lot of other collectibles; glass, and figurines. Somebody’s got to want it, and on eBay too, people have got to want it really if you’re going to get a lot for it. You have to find something you like doing enough that it’s not going to drive you nuts if you spend a lot of time doing it and aren’t successful just right away. I had pretty immediate success on eBay selling books, so that was good, and I was able to really dive into it. I love researching them and writing the descriptions and all that kind of stuff. 

 

[0:43:08.3] KM: What’s your most interesting thing you ever found or sold, you either bought or sold?

 

[0:43:15.3] KA: I’ll tell you an interesting thing I found. I love to look at the classifieds in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. I just love to. I like to look at them and see what people are selling. I think it’s fascinating. I scoured them for years for printing equipment. Every morning, that was just part of my routine, is anybody selling printing equipment.

 

I saw one day where it said selling printing equipment and it had a number. It was an Arkansas number. I didn’t know where it was. I called and the man said — I asked him if he had any printing equipment. He said, “Well, I’ve sold it all.” He said, “I’ve sold all my offset equipment.” I said, “Actually, I’m looking for letterpress equipment. I’m looking for handset type.” He said, “Well, you know. I think I might have some of that.” He said, “Why don’t you come on over?” I said, “Where are you?” He was in Brinkley.

 

I grabbed a friend who had a truck and I said, “Do you want to go on an adventure?” We drove to Brinkley and it turned out the man’s grandfather had started the Brinkley Argus Newspaper in 1878 and when they quit using their metal type somebody shoved it in a backroom and there it was, still sitting there, and he sold it to me. It’s beautiful. It has a history. I have on all those cabinets, “This type came from the Brinkley Argus,” and I use it and it sat for 50 years untouched in somebody’s backroom. Sometimes you got to pick up the phone and call and ask. That’s also one of the great things I learned when I was trading securities. I was so terrified to pick up the phone. The person I was working for stood over me and said, “Pick up the phone. Pick up the phone. Pick up the phone and handle it when the voice comes on the other end.”

 

I learned too fearlessly cold call is what I used to do. We didn’t do too much of that, but I would have to call other people. Now I just pick up the phone sometimes and find out what’s out there.

 

[0:45:10.9] KM: I think that’s one of the things I teach — Tim, how many times have I said that to you?

 

[0:45:13.7] TB: A few times.

 

[0:45:15.0] KM: Pick up the phone. Pick up the phone. Call them. Call them.

 

[0:45:18.2] KA: Yeah, there might have been a few expletives in there, pick up the phone.

 

[0:45:22.6] KM: At the break we talked about Ben Franklin and we were like — I know that Ben Franklin was an original pamphleteer and I know that pamphleteers have been thought of much like blogging today.

 

[0:45:34.4] KA: They had something to say and they said it.

 

[0:45:36.4] KM: They did.

 

[0:45:36.7] KA: Ben Franklin was a printer. He started out as a printer’s devil. A printer’s devil is someone who is a small child usually who’s running errands in the print shop and putting coal in the fire and sweeping and eventually they get to set type and learn how to be a printer. He started out as a printer and he was many, many things, but we admire him because he did a whole lot for printing.

 

[0:46:00.8] KM: Tim said something about he’s the only person on a bill that — On currency that wasn’t a —

 

[0:46:05.9] TB: President. That’s right.

 

[0:46:07.0] KM: After I left we looked up what a printer’s devil is, and a devil is  another word for apprentice.

 

[0:46:12.6] KA: Right, apprentice. There’re a lot of different devils. It’s not just a printer’s devil. There are other professions that had them, but it was a way for a small child to get their start in a trade a long time ago.

 

[0:46:25.5] KM: You know, it does seem like we have put together rules to protect our young, labor laws to protect our young and so many times they don’t get to go and become apprentices or work in an industry.

 

[0:46:39.0] KA: Which is not a bad thing. They need to be kids. I know where you’re going with this, and that is that working with your hands and learning skills builds confidence. I don’t care if you’re 10 or 70, learning a new skill and exceling at it.

 

[0:46:57.5] KM: And getting out of your comfort zone.

 

[0:46:58.7] KA: Yeah, which is what this radio show has been for me for sure.

 

[0:47:01.8] KM: And for me too.

 

[0:47:03.8] KA: Yeah. You do a good job. 

 

[0:47:04.5] KM: Oh, you’re nice. Thanks. We’d talked about what motivates you.

 

[0:47:09.9] KA: What motivates me is history. I look at a book and I wonder who held it before me, especially a book that’s from 1500, 1513, like this one right here. I wonder who held this book and why did it survive?

 

[0:47:26.5] KM: Have you heard people say things that are is a smell inside of a book that gets you high?

 

[0:47:30.4] KA: No. That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

 

[0:47:32.9] KM: That’s what I heard. Look, Tim is shaking his head. He’s heard that too.

 

[0:47:36.0] KA: That is a fallacy. That is the craziest thing I have ever heard in my life.

 

[0:47:41.9] KM: Ugh! You’ve ruined it for me.

 

[0:47:43.5] KA: That is the biggest urban myth I hate to debunk, but no.

 

[0:47:49.5] KM: All right. It’s time first to say goodbye. Thank you so much, Kate.

 

[0:47:52.2] KA: Thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun, and you said it will go by fast. It did go by fast. I was very worried.

 

[0:47:57.2] KM: Even though it’s hot in here, isn’t it?

 

[0:47:58.8] KA: It’s alright. I don’t mind it.

 

[0:48:01.0] KM: Thank you. Nope, you’re not leaving yet. I have a present for you. I bet you don’t have this in your print shop.

 

[0:48:06.6] KA: No, I don’t.

 

[0:48:07.7] KM: For our listeners, it’s a U.S. Flag and —

 

[0:48:10.8] KA: And an Arkansas Flag.

 

[0:48:12.5] KM: Little desk set. You can put it on your shelve over there.

 

[0:48:14.7] KA: I will put that on. Thank you so much. I’ll cherish this. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. 

 

[0:48:18.4] KM: You’re welcome. Tim, who’s our guest next week?

 

[0:48:20.7] TB: Next week it’s going to be Rhett Tucker of Moses Tucker Real Estate.

 

[0:48:24.3] KM: Ain’t that going to be interesting?

 

[0:48:25.2] KA: Oh, that will be fun. 

 

[0:48:26.5] KM: I want to find out how he’s managed to get everybody to come back downtown and build all those houses, and he’s been at it for 30 years, him and Jimmy Moses.

 

Alright, to my listeners, if you have a great entrepreneurial story you would like to share, I would love to hear from you. Send a brief bio and your contact info to questions@upyourbusiness.org and someone will be in touch.

 

Finally, to our listeners, thank you for spending time with me. If you think this program has been about you, you’re right, and it’s also been for me. Thank you for letting me fulfill my destiny. My hope today is that you’ve heard or learned something that’s been inspiring or enlightening and that it, whatever it is, will help you up your business, your independence or your life. I’m Kerry McCoy and I’ll see you next time on Up in Your Business. Until then, be brave and keep it up.

 

[END OF INTERVIEW]

 

[0:49:15.4] TB: You’ve been listening to Up in Your Business with Kerry McCoy. Want to hear today’s program again or want someone else to benefit from it? Jot this down. Next week a podcast will be available at flagandbanner.com. Click the tab labeled “Radio Show”, there you’ll find today’s segments with links to resources you heard discussed on this program. Kerry’s goal: to help you live the American Dream.

 

[END]

 

Replay - edited content:

EPISODE 66

 

[INTRODUCTION]

 

[0:00:08.0] TB: Welcome to Up in Your Business with Kerry McCoy. Be sure to stay tuned till the end of the show to hear how you can get a copy of this program and other helpful documents.

 

Now, it's time for Kerry McCoy to get all up in your business.

 

[INTERVIEW]

 

[0:00:20.8] KM: Thank you, Tim. Like Tim said, I’m Kerry McCoy and it’s time for me to get up in your business. Today’s show is going to be different. We’re going to play a rerun of an August show, and before we do that I want to introduce you to the people at the table. We have my cohost and coworker at Flag and Banner, Tim. Say hello, Tim.

 

[0:00:40.4] TB: Hello, Tim.

 

[0:00:41.5] KM: And running the board and taking your calls is our technician, Jessie. Thank you, Jessie.

 

[0:00:45.5] J: No problem.

 

[0:00:46.3] KM: We were supposed to have another guest. He had a family commitment, because it’s Christmas, and that stuff happens. So it gave us a great opportunity to go back and play one of my favorites. I had so many favorites. It was really hard to pick out which one we were going to play, but I decided to play Kate Askew from the Yella Dog Press. It’s an offset printing company and she is what I like to call — What was that word she used, ethereal collector?

 

[0:01:16.7] TB: I like it. Yeah.

 

[0:01:17.8] KM: It’s not ethereal? Is it ethereal?

 

[0:01:19.3] TB: Ethereal?

 

[0:01:20.0] KM: No. Ethereal is when you —

 

[0:01:22.7] J: Ephemeral.

 

[0:01:25.6] KM: You know, I had a problem with that when I interviewed her in August. Ephemeral. Thank you, Jessie. She tell some great stories. She reads from a book that she collected in the 1800s. Before we do that, I’m going to tell our long time listeners and our new listeners who we are. If you’re just tuning in for the first time or if you have listened for a long time, this show happened back in September of 2016. I was leaving church and I pulled in on a Sunday to Moxie Mercantile in downtown Little Rock on Main Street. I don’t know why they were open on Sunday, but they were, and I just pulled in there because they’ve got funny cards that have a lot of cussing on them, and I went in there and started looking through some of their cards and the owner found out who I was and that I owned Arkansas Flag & Banner and she started asking me business questions. So we talked for 30 minutes. She want to know all about marketing on the internet and how I advertised, and when I left there I got back in the car and I thought, “Oh! I forgot to tell her this, and I forgot to tell her that.” Well, I had her card, I thought I’ll call her and tell her.

 

Then it dawned on me that that week I’d had three people either one called me, one emailed me and then I ran into her and we talked face to face. Three different people who asked me business advice on a lot of vertical subjects about business, and I thought, “Oh my gosh! I’m 62 years old. Maybe this is what I’m supposed to do. Start paying my knowledge forward.” I’ve been in business 40 years. I did a startup with $400. I’ve been through business back when it was mail order — Back when I started door-to-door and then I went to mail order and then I did catalog sales, and then I did internet sales, and now we’re drifting, which is live chatting. That’s the new way to sell, live chatting online.

 

[0:03:23.6] TB: That’s true.

 

[0:03:24.2] KM: I thought, “Maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do.” I am a really weird spiritual person. Anybody that knows me knows I’m kind of superstitious and I got this kind of — When I started thinking about it, I got this kind of body rush, like I just smoked a big doobie and it kind of started at my feet and it kind of just went all the way up this body rush that went all the way up to the top of my head. Whenever I get something like that that give me goose bumps, I think, “Oh! That’s spiritual. That’s right. that’s what I’m supposed to do,” and I knew that I was supposed to do it.

 

This is Sunday. Monday, I get to work. I’m still wound up about it. I started telling everybody about it. I call KUAR, which who does NPR Little Rock.

 

[0:04:02.3] TB: That’s right. The Little Rock —

 

[0:04:04.3] KM: NPR school. UALR, University of Arkansas at Little Rock. I called them up and I was telling the director there, the program director there and he said, “That’s a really good idea,” but this is really not a place for somebody to start. You have no business, no experience. You don’t know anything about communications and radio. You don’t start here, unless you go to school I guess at UALR, maybe you do.”

 

[0:04:29.5] TB: Maybe, yeah.

 

[0:04:31.0] KM: He said, “You need to call KABF, the voice of the people. It’s a public service radio station. Call John Cain over there and pitch it to him.” I did, I called John Cain who’s been often an acquaintance of mine for years, and I told him and he said, “Well, that is really a good idea.” He said, “But we are a completely volunteer radio station and you have got to bring your own technician, because we have nobody here to run the board. You got to do everything for yourself. Let me know if you can figure that out.”

 

I hang out the phone and I went in Tim. Yes. Tim said, “Well Kerry, I do a radio show every Wednesday night on KABF. This underground —“ What do you play on Wednesday night?

 

[0:05:17.9] TB: We don’t have a genre specific line up. We play all the genres. It’s just music that we love. It’s a very, very wide — We like to say think of it like a mix tape that you can hear every Wednesday that’s going to be completely different song to song.

 

[0:05:32.6] J: That’s right. It’s called phonomania.

 

[0:05:35.2] TB: That’s right.

 

[0:05:35.4] KM: What’s that mean?

 

[0:05:36.3] TB: Phonomania is like the love of sound.

 

[0:05:39.1] KM: Oh! Okay, I like it. Yeah, play on words. Tim goes, “Well, I can run the board at KABF. I’m already there every Wednesday night.” I was like, “Okay. More spiritual synchronicity.” Then, I tell my girlfriend, Madison Monroe, who I’ve known forever and who also works at Arkansas Flag & Banner, and she just out of the blue says, “It needs to be called Up in Your Business with Kerry McCoy,” and it was so good and so funny that I thought, “Okay. This is meant to be.”

 

So I called back John and I tell him I’ve got it all lined up. We’ve named the show, and the premise of the show is going to be about helping small business people grow their businesses, giving advice to small business people, because it’s the school of hard knocks for most of us. So I kind of nagged him and he finally come up with a day and we started in September and he gave us Fridays at 2:00 and the rest is history.

 

Tim, do you remember who our first guest was?

 

[0:06:35.4] TB: RJ Martino from iProv.

 

[0:06:38.1] KM: That’s right. He owns an internet marketing company and he came on, and my hands were shaking the first time, and it’s really been 67 interviews ago. I think this is our 60 — Let me look. No, 66. This is our 66^th interview today, so that’s a year and a half.

 

[0:06:55.9] TB: Yup.

 

[0:06:57.7] KM: We started off with this premise of helping businesses, and then we quickly realized that we were repeating ourselves, because business rules are the same over and over and over and over, and so it kind of started morphing into a biography about interesting people and how they became successful. Some of the lessons we’ve learned that we were repeating for business people are successful people work hard. There is really no secret sauce. Every person we’ve interviewed has been like work hard, work hard, work hard, and work hard, and you can’t do it all. You got to learn to delegate and to train, and this was something I did not realized, but all successful people are good teachers. They can train. They can lift people up. They can pay it forward. They can raise you up. I didn’t realize that till we started this show, that all successful people have the ability to teach others and communicate well, and of course everyday said the same thing, treat your employees fairly. The one I always preach about is don’t undersell yourself. Know what your profit margin is, because so many people make it for a dollar, sell it for $2. They don’t realize that they spent a whole another dollar trying to get it to the people and they actually are making no money. You got to really know your profit margin.

 

My favorite one that all small business owners make is when sales fall off — See if you all can guess this. What’s the first thing people save money by doing? They quit advertising.

 

[0:08:26.6] TB: Right. The worst thing you could do.

 

[0:08:28.4] KM: I did it. Everybody does it, and then your sales fall off more, so you have to advertise especially when they sell something.

 

In the beginning we talked about success plans for small business owners, which is we really only have three; sell the business, liquidate the business, pass the business on. We’ve had a patent lawyer on, loan officer on, teach you how to borrow money. We’ve had small business development technology center on to talk about how they can train people. We’ve had food truck business owners.

 

Oh! Look, I’ve talked too long. We’re going to have to jump in to the show with Kate Askew from the Yella Dog press. This is her intro.

 

My guest today is Kate Anderson Askew, sole owner and operator of the Yella Dog Press in Little Rock, Arkansas. Kate has always been a ferocious reader evidenced by the library in her home and her avid love of books and the printed word. For many years she’s worked for estate sellers as their book, paper and epher — I’m going to see if I can get that word —

 

[0:09:22.6] KA: Ephemera.

 

[0:09:23.3] KM: Thank you. I have been practicing —

 

[0:09:24.4] KA: Ephemeral. Ephemera.

 

[0:09:26.2] KM: — And is ephemeral specialist, which is a new word that I just learned while doing your research. In 2002 she started her own business of buying and selling rare printed materials via the internet. When Kate spotted in the classified section of the newspaper an antique printing press complete with handset types available for sale she purchased it and took her love of the printed word to another level.

 

In 2008 Kate officially opened the Yella Dog Printing Press. This is not your atypical printing company. Her method of printing doesn’t include an inkjet, laser or even an offset printing machine, instead she handsets each individual letter number or character on to her 1903 Chandler & Price Platen Press or her Vandercook 4 Press. Inks up the platen and literally cranks out original one of a kind limited edition prints on posters, cards or other paper goods.

 

In addition, Kate is a licensed art book appraiser, and you said you let your auctioneer license lapse.

 

[0:10:32.2] KA: I did. You can’t do everything.

 

[0:10:33.8] KM: I know, right? So I’m talking that one out. She does that under her business, which is her LLC Kate Askew Auctions & Appraisals. I guess you’ve dropped the auctions.

 

[0:10:42.3] KA: I’ve changed that. Yeah.

 

[0:10:43.8] KM: What is it now?

 

[0:10:44.4] KA: It’s just Kate Anderson Askew LLC, and that encompasses Arkansas Bookseller, Yella Dog Press and appraisals, my appraisal business.

 

[0:10:53.1] KM: Oh! You put it all under an umbrella.

 

[0:10:55.8] KA: Yes.

 

[0:10:56.5] KM: That’s what it’s like when you’re married to a lawyer.

 

[0:10:57.8] KA: That’s right.

 

[0:10:58.3] KM: He can do stuff like that for you.

 

[0:10:59.5] KA: Yeah, exactly.

 

[0:11:00.0] KM: I think you can do that online now.

 

[0:11:02.0] KA: Yeah, it’s not that hard.

 

[0:11:03.0] KM: Yeah. We’ll talk about that in a minute. It’s a pleasure to welcome to the table the most interesting, and you’ll like this, enduringly eccentric, Kate Askew.

 

[0:11:11.0] KA: Oh, that’s so sweet. Thank you.

 

[0:11:12.5] KM: You’re welcome. This is not your usual MO.

 

[0:11:15.3] KA: No. It’s not.

 

[0:11:15.5] KM: You like to be behind the book or printing press.

 

[0:11:17.9] KA: Well, or one on one. It makes me really nervous.

 

[0:11:21.4] KM: I’ve known you for a long time and I think we need to disclose which we already disclosed on our Facebook Live episode before the show. 

 

[0:11:26.4] KA: We’re cousins.

 

[0:11:27.2] KM: By marriage.

 

[0:11:27.8] KA: By marriage, but we claim each other outright.

 

[0:11:29.9] KM: That’s right. I’ve never met anybody like you.

 

[0:11:34.3] KA: I’ve never met anybody like you. You’ve been a huge influence on my life. You were the first person who looked at me and said, “Girl, you are a afraid to make a dollar and you need to stop that.”

 

[0:11:44.4] KM: That’s so true about you.

 

[0:11:45.9] KA: I know, but you told me that — I don’t know, 25 years ago you were like, “Girl, this is how you’re going to make some money and I’m going to help you.”

 

[0:11:52.6] KM: And you still don’t care.

 

[0:11:53.7] KA: It’s not that I don’t care. It’s just sometimes it gets in the way of doing my work.

 

[0:11:58.3] KM: You are motivated by passion.

 

[0:12:01.0] KA: Motivated by passion but also motivated by covering the rent on my shop. That does come into play.

 

[0:12:08.4] KM: Neither one of those — That’s so funny you should say that, because I was thinking about that when I was making up your questions today, which it looks like we’re not going to follow it all, my questions, which is great.

 

[0:12:18.4] KA: Maybe we’ll get to them.

 

[0:12:19.1] KM: I don’t know. I was thinking about that this morning. I thought you follow your passion. You work towards what is self-interesting and motivating to you and I, on the other hand, was motivated in my young life to have to work for money because I had to make rent and I had to — I didn’t really have a payroll but I had to make rent and pay for myself.

 

Not that either one of them are wrong, but they’re great motivators to help you find your dream and seek what you want to do. I love that both of our past have led us into places that are fulfilling and —

 

[0:12:57.2] KA: And things that we love.

 

[0:12:58.2] KM: And things we love.

 

[0:12:58.8] KA: I fell into a book buying and selling as a need to not have to be in a cubicle, because I knew I’d stayed home for a while with my kids and I wanted to get back into the working world. I didn’t want to be in a cubicle. I started buying and selling things on eBay and I realized that that was a really great way to be on your pajamas and make some money. I started out — This was 1998, I think.

 

[0:13:29.7] KM: You were the first successful eBay seller that I ever knew.

 

[0:13:33.0] KA: Oh, that you knew. Okay. Yeah, but not — I was late to the game in ’98. Anyway, I started buying and selling things and what I realized I was good at buying and selling were books. I grew up in a bookish household, a very booking household. My dad is a book collector. He’s never been a dealer, but he’s a lifelong book collector so I had a great love of books, great love of reading. Was an English major and Vanderbilt.

 

[0:13:56.5] KM: I was going to ask you —

 

[0:06:55.4] KA: Yeah. Studied all kinds of literature and spend a lot of time in the rare book stacks at Vanderbilt. When I realized I was good at buying and selling books I thought, “Well, that makes sense. That’s what I know,” so I’ve decided to stick with what I knew and exclusively began buying and selling books.

 

[0:14:16.2] KM: I wondered if your degree in college played in to your career, and it actually did.

 

[0:14:21.0] KA: Yeah. It did.

 

[0:14:22.1] KM: Because not everybody can say that.

 

[0:14:23.4] KA: I kind of segued a little bit, because when I first got out of college I remember I had a degree in English literature and I minored in philosophy, in psychology I think. I can’t really remember. I had some kind of minor. I think it was those two. Jess, who’s my husband now, we’ve been married 30 years, he was finishing up —

 

[0:14:42.3] KM: Congratulations.

 

[0:14:42.8 KA: Thank you. He was finishing up law school in San Francisco and we had just kind of started going out and he said, “Look, we might have something here, but i don’t do long distance. So why don’t you grab a couple of girlfriends from college, move out to San Francisco and let’s see if we can make a go of this.” I thought, “Well, okay.”

 

I got three of my friends to move to San Francisco with me and —

 

[0:15:06.5] KM: How fun is that?

 

[0:15:07.0] KA: Yeah, it was really fun, but I didn’t have a job. My parents were too keen on me going out to San Francisco because they said, “We don’t know anybody there.” I said, “Now, you will.” They said, “Well, you’re going to have to get a job before you go because it’s not like we’re going to fund this adventure.”

 

When I had been visiting Jess I had met one person and I called that person because he said he was starting a business. I couldn’t really remember what it was and I called him up and said, “I’m looking for a job. Do you have one for me?” He said, “Sure. I’m starting a securities business and I’ll put you on the OTC trading desk as my assistant.”

 

[0:15:42.1] KM: What’s OTC stand for?

 

[0:15:43.5] KA: I didn’t know either, but it’s over the counter stocks. I didn’t have a finance degree. I didn’t have any kind of business background, whatsoever. I said yes. Told him when I’d be in San Francisco, and I went to the bookstore and bought a book called Understanding OTC Trading, and I read it on the way out to San Francisco. I got there and he said I had to pass my series 7, which is a standardized test for securities traders. I got up the book and I studied it and I passed that test.

 

The moral of the story is people always said, “What are you going to do with that English degree? Ha! Ha! Ha! What are you going to do?”

 

[0:16:24.7] KM: Study for your series 7 test.

 

[0:16:26.2] KA: What I tell people is with a liberal arts degree, if you can read, write and follow instructions you can do anything.

 

[0:16:33.4] KM: What a great point.

 

[0:16:34.8] KA: What trading securities taught me was, first of all, I can do anything, because I flew by the seat of my pants. Also, it taught me how to buy low and sell high and you can leave some money on the table. It doesn’t matter. If you sold it for more than you bought it, you’re good. Don’t sweat it. Just keep going. Buy something else and sell it.

 

[0:16:55.4] KM: Are you still doing that? Are you a day trader?

 

[0:16:57.7] KA: No. I’m not. No. I do it sort of with books though.

 

[0:17:01.9] KM: Oh yeah.

 

[0:17:02.9] KA: Yeah. I’m really good at going in just like traders sometimes do, just get a feel, “I think that’s a good buy.” I can go in and look at a library and kind of look at it and go, “Yeah, I can money off of that.” That’s kind of how I’ve done it.

 

[0:17:15.5] KM: You never know what stepping stone is going to lead you to your destiny.

 

[0:17:19.2] KA: That’s right. Early in my book buying career, I came across a huge collection of medical books that I went to a sale and it was way out on Geyer Springs and Chico. I thought, “They aren’t going to be any books there. I don’t know. It’s a sale. There aren’t any other sales today. I’m going to go,” because that’s where I was getting my books were at estate sales in the beginning.

 

I went out to this estate sale not knowing anything and open these warehouse doors and there were 12,000 books in there. They’re all medical books. I bought 300 books. I put them in my Mini Cooper. I drove home, unloaded them. I went back the next day, I bought 300 books. Went home, unloaded them and that night I just couldn’t sleep and I turned to Jess and I said, “I got to have those books. I got to have all of them.” I bought all of them. I bought 12,000 books.

 

[0:18:09.7] KM: 12,000 books.

 

[0:18:11.0] KA: Yes, and it took 10 years to sell them all. After I bought all these medical books, it turned out the guy who had owned them had been a neurosurgeon. I had to throw myself into medicine, and one of the biggest compliments I got was somebody email me and said, “I want to buy this book.” It was like a $600 book. It was a really nice book.” He said, “But I also want to know where you got your background on neurosurgery.” I just wrote back and said, “Look. I got a background on whatever will make me a dollar today, and today it’s neurosurgery.” That’s how the securities background, I think, buying and selling played into book buying and selling.

 

[0:18:51.1] KM: Your literature and your degree in English taught you how to read everything and comprehend.

 

[0:18:55.3] KA: Also just being comfortable with books and comfortable with other languages. All you have to do is know a little bit of a language to figure out what you got.

 

[0:19:03.2] KM: Get the vocabulary.

 

[0:19:04.1] KA: That’s right. If the book is in Latin, I know a little bit of Latin. I can figure it out. Now, I can get on Google Translate and figure out anything.

 

[0:19:14.1] KM: Really?

 

[0:19:15.1] KA: Yeah. If it’s in French, or Latin, or Italian, I can figure it out.

 

[0:19:22.8] KM: You’re listening to Up In Your Business with me, Kerry McCoy. My guest today is Kate Askew, owner-operator of the very cool Yella Dog Press Company in Little Rock, Arkansas, which we’re going to talk about in the next break. She’s the founder of the Kate Askew — You changed your name. I’ve got to change it. Kate Askew Appraisers.

 

[0:19:40.5] KA: Yeah. It’s just Appraisal and Consulting. I do estate consulting and appraisals.

 

[0:19:47.3] KM: Okay, which where she uses her expertise and experience as she gives value to the written word, books and art. Really, you said any personal property besides a house.

 

[0:19:56.4] KA: Any personal property. Yeah, besides a house.

 

[0:19:59.2] KM: You are also a very successful online reseller of said items that I just mentioned, which I didn’t realized came from — You got your savvy in that from being in —

 

[0:20:09.9] KA: Securities trading. Also, first of all I’m extremely ADD, and so —

 

[0:20:14.5] KM: You are? I would never have thought that.

 

[0:20:16.6] KA: Yeah. My husband calls it the bird squirrel problem. It’s like, “There’s a bird. Oh! There’s a squirrel.” It’s like stick with one thing. Anyway, having different things to do; printing, book selling, appraising and, also, I’d like to be with people. I worked in the estate sell business for a long time with Roy Dudley who’s still a really good friend of mine, and I was his book and paper specialist, and consulted with some other estate sell dealers too, but Roy’s business is so incredibly fascinating that I totally fell into it. When you’re doing that, that’s all you want to do. I wanted to be able to do my books and printings. Now, I consult with him every once in a while, but I don’t work with him fulltime.

 

[0:20:55.2] KM: In the first part of the show we talked about how you went up to San Francisco and got your series 7 license and was a day trader or —

 

[0:21:05.1] KA: No. Not a day trader. Just over the counter and listed stocks trader. Then I moved to Little Rock — 

 

[0:21:10.4] KM: Got married.

 

[0:21:11.3] KA: Got married.

 

[0:21:12.2] KM: And work for Stevens.

 

[0:21:13.2] KA: Worked at Stevens for a while. This was ancient history. This was so long ago.

 

[0:21:17.4] KM: Just so the people will follow the train here. Then you quit that job and raised children, your girls, for a couple of years. 

 

[0:21:23.7] KA: Yes, I did. I had two small children and my husband, Jess, was beginning his law career, and we just couldn’t do it all. Something had to give and it was my job and I went home to stay with the children and I loved it.

 

[0:21:39.5] KM: Then you decided to go back and help Roy Dudley first or you got interested in eBay trading books online first?

 

[0:21:47.2] KA: First, I got interested in trading books on eBay first and I was buying a lot of books from Roy and he said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I buy and sell books.” He said, “Well, I need a book specialist.” That’s when I started working with him and did books, paper and ephemeral items. Ephemeral items are anything that should have been thrown away. If you have your Harvard Yale football ticket stub from 1921, that would have been something that should have been thrown away and it’s not. That would be a piece of ephemera.

 

[0:22:16.2] KM: Posters.

 

[0:22:16.1] KA: Posters that would have been — Let’s say it’s a poster that would have been pasted to a barn wall, advertising like Barnstormers or something like that. That’s ephemeral.

 

[0:22:26.9] KM: Do you do the research online? How do you figure out what the value is of stuff?

 

[0:22:32.9] KA: I do online research and I’ve got a good base knowledge, but I can also — I used to not have the internet obviously, so you just have to fly by the seat of your pants. With the internet, now you can really pretty much pinpoint what you have and that’s really fun. It’s just really fun. I get into the thrill of the hunt and the history of things. I love Arkansas history. I have a lot of really cool historical Arkansas things. I know this is radio, but I brought — William Woodruff was the printer to the territory in Arkansas. He was the first printer in Arkansas and he started the Arkansas Gazette in 1819 and it’s still the oldest paper west of the Mississippi, the Democrat absorbed it, so it’s still the same, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

 

I love anything that William Woodruff printed, but his things are pretty rare. Arkansas was a territory when he was printing, but I do have two books I brought —

 

[0:23:33.4] KM: In plastic, to take care of them.

 

[0:23:34.5] KA: Well, I have them in their little sleeve just because they’re fragile. One is the 1825 Acts of the Territory, and one is the 1834 and it says, “Little Rock. Printed by William E. Woodruff, printer to the territory,” and I think that’s really cool. 

 

[0:23:51.7] KM: How much do you think those books worth?

 

[0:23:53.6] KA: You know, I really don’t know. These were actually gifts of a friend who knows I love William Woodruff so I’m not sure of the value. I’ve never looked it up.

 

[0:24:01.4] KM: Because you’re not selling them.

 

[0:24:02.2] KA: Because I’m not selling them.

 

[0:24:05.5] KM: Before we went on the radio, we were doing Facebook Live and you showed on Facebook that little tiny, tiny book.

 

[0:24:14.3] KA: My tiniest book. Yes, the young people and the old at my house like to see my tiniest book, which is probably about —

 

[0:24:22.1] KM: One inch by one inch.

 

[0:24:22.7] KA: One inch by one inch, and it’s actually a modern book. It was printed in 1989, but it was letter pressed printed handset. To get to where the printing is, after buying and selling books for about — I don’t even know, several years, I began to be obsessed with how books are made. How the printing is done. What kind of paper it is. How the binding was made. I decided I was going to teach myself how to set handset type, which his ridiculous. That’s like saying I want to teach myself how to fly an airplane. You can’t do it by yourself, but I didn’t know that.

 

As you said in your intro, I was searching the classifieds and I found a platen press, a huge platen press which is one of those flywheel presses and type that I bought from a man in Hot Springs and I bought it for $200.

 

[0:25:18.2] KM: Oh, wow!

 

[0:25:19.8] KA: And the movers broke it. They were delivering it to me and it fell on its flywheel. It crushed the flywheel. It broke the driveshaft and I had a broken printing press in my garage. I called around to find out who could fix this press and everybody said to me, “You need to talk to John Horn.” I knew John. I had met him at the Art Center but I actually didn’t know he’s a printer, so I called him up and I said, “I broke a printing press.” He said, “Did you buy that one in Hot Springs?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “I was going to go get that. I couldn’t imagine who else bought it, but let me come look at it.” He came to look at it. It turns out it was an extremely rare press. There’s only one other one known in existence and it can’t be fixed, but through the broken printing press I met John Horn. He said, “Do you want to learn how to set type?” I said, “Yes, I do.” He said, “Well, come on out and I’ll teach you.”

 

[0:26:13.5] KM: Oh, wow!

 

[0:26:14.5] KA: And so he did. That’s how I learned how to handset type was from someone who was willing to take the time to teach me.

 

[0:26:20.9] KM: If your movers hadn’t broken it, you might not have met him. You probably would have though.

 

[0:26:24.8] KA: I don’t know. That press still sits out at John’s.

 

[0:26:27.9] KM: That’s not the one that’s in your shop?

 

[0:26:29.8] KA: We couldn’t fix the one that I broke.

 

[0:26:31.5] KM: He could never fix that.

 

[0:26:33.1] KA: These are huge pieces of cast iron and you’d have to be — It’s a huge drive shaft that would have to be cast.

 

[0:26:38.7] KM: Yeah, I think that that guy should have paid you from moving it.

 

[0:26:41.6] KA: Well, it was Christmas. What are you going to do? People make mistakes. It was done. It was spilled milk. That’s how I came to printing. Then there were other people who were learning to print out of John’s and I’ve got together with [inaudible 0:26:58.1], another printer, and we pulled our resources and opened a little shop.

 

[0:27:05.0] KM: This other printer was an apprentice of John’s also, right?

 

[0:27:07.9] KA: Yes. Another John Horn apprentice, yes.

 

[0:27:11.5] KM: Together you made a coop.

 

[0:27:14.0] KA: We made a coop and we have a third person in our coop too and the three of us pulled all of our equipment. It’s really hard to find this stuff. It’s hard to find the wood type. It’s hard to find the metal type. I scoured the U.S. all over, up and down I40 for 10 years buying wood type and metal type and have a really nice collection now.

 

[0:27:36.9] KM: It’s hard to find type?

 

[0:27:38.7] KA: It’s really hard to find it. Especially now, it’s really changed. In the past 15 years ago, if I found it, I could afford it. In the past 6 to 8 years, there’s been a huge resurgence in the interest in letter press printing and a lot of people say it’s a balanced thing. The women who started Twitter knows how to handset type. It’s sort of the more technological we are the more people want to go back to the basics. 

 

[0:28:04.4] KM: What did you say? The women who started —

 

[0:28:06.8] KA: Twitter. Handsets type.

 

[0:28:09.0] KM: Is that why she does 42 characters?

 

[0:28:11.1] KA: No. I have no idea. All I know is that she handsets type or I read that. You can’t believe everything you read on the internet or Twitter. No. I just think that the more technological we get the more people want to get back to the basics. In the past 6 to 8 years all the universities are offering book arts programs and they’re buying up all these equipment. Stuff that people used to say, “Get it out of here,” is now really expensive. It’s good that I’ve got things when I got them because the price, I couldn’t get it now. I couldn’t afford it.

 

[0:28:42.6] KM: Yeah. Those printing presses that are in your place are so heavy they have to be on a slab.

 

[0:28:50.3] KA: On a palette. You got to have special equipment to move it. Obviously, I learned the hard way. It’s just really specialized moving. I’ll tell you, the way a lot of people print, because there are a lot of people who are able to have a Chandler and Price Platen Press like have in the garage is if you are a — While a young person with your computer skills, then you can design whatever you want on an in-design program, send off and have a plastic plate made and you can put that on your press and print with that, so you don’t have to have wood type and metal type. So most of the letter press printing you see is done off a polymer plate.

 

[0:29:28.7] KM: What’s polymer made?

 

[0:29:29.3] KA: It’s a plastic plate that people send off for.

 

[0:29:33.0] KM: But that’s not what yours is.

 

[0:29:34.2] KA: That’s not what I do. I do a little bit of polymer, I will say. My teacher calls is heresy, but I do a little bit of polymer plate things because people want things that I can’t do. In that case, I’ll do polymer plate. 99.99% of what I do is handset letter by letter, justified by hand on my Chandler and Price or my Vandercook.

 

[0:29:57.4] KM: You were at your place the other day and I drove by and I saw your car there because you’re not always there, and I had my grandkids with me.

 

[0:30:04.8] KA: They were so adorable and they were so interested in what I was doing.

 

[0:30:07.7] KM: My grandson was so interested in what you were doing.

 

[0:30:10.5] KA: It’s visually exciting and it’s big equipment that moves fast and it makes something.

 

[0:30:16.9] KM: Tell our listeners how you do it exactly. You go to your drawers — 

 

[0:30:22.6] KA: I have cabinets full of type and —

 

[0:30:25.0] KM: You have to be careful when you open the drawers because there’s so heavy.

 

[0:30:27.8] KA: That’s right. They’re called cases. Actually, that’s where upper case and lower case comes from, because the bigger letters were above the smaller letters. So that’s where upper case and lower case comes from because those drawers you pull out are really called cases.

 

[0:30:44.4] KM: That lower case is the heavier case, and the upper case is the smaller?

 

[0:30:47.9] KA: No. Upper cases are the bigger letters. Upper case and lower case is, at some point, how it was situated in the cabinet. 

 

[0:30:53.1] KM: Okay.

 

[0:30:57.1] KA: You have to decide what font you’re going to use and then you have to have that font. Any newspaper, anybody who printed anything, you were only as good as how many fonts of type you had. That’s how you would decide what you’re going to print, is by what you have. If you were lucky enough to have lots of different types, then you had a lot of choices, but you’re limited by what you actually physically have, which you’re not if you’re on a computer program. In a computer, you can have whatever you want. We’re lucky in our shop because we have a really nice collection of wood type and metal type that we use.

 

[0:31:29.3] KM: Is there an advantage for wood or metal?

 

[0:31:31.5] KA: Well, it had to go to metal because it was so heavy. Once the led got a certain height, the bigger the font, it’s just too heavy to cast with led.

 

[0:31:45.4] KM: So you had to go to wood.

 

[0:31:46.2] KA: You had to go to wood.

 

[0:31:46.9] KM: Okay. Then you take those and you took my grandson’s name and you spelled out his name then you inked — 

 

[0:31:54.6] KA: Then you have to put ink on the press —

 

[0:31:56.4] KM: Or just the platen.

 

[0:31:58.3] KA: Aha. In this case he was using the Vandercook, so it’s a little different. You just put the ink on the rollers and you put the letters on the bed of the press then you put the paper in and you roll the paper over it and everything has to be typed high, .918 is type high. 

 

[0:32:19.6] KM: What does that mean?

 

[0:32:20.9] KA: Just .918 of an inch. Everything on the bed has to be the same height so it hits the paper at the same time and that height is .918. If you’re a polymer plate printer you have a special bed on your press with that bed and the piece of plastic, it’s .918. It’s type high.

 

[0:32:43.5] KM: This is a lot to learn. No wonder you had to have John come teach you how to do it all.

 

[0:32:46.5] KA: Yeah, exactly.

 

[0:32:47.4] KM: It looked really easy when you did it, but that’s because you did it all for us and then you inked up the —

 

[0:32:51.0] KA: Most things look easy till you realize how you have to do it. That’s the truth.

 

[0:32:55.7] KM: What I loved about it is everyone that we printed was just slightly different. It was kind of like screen printing. I kept thinking about Andy Warhol while we were doing it, because I thought everyone of these is just slightly different.

 

[0:33:05.6] KA: There is kind of a letter press look, because most of the wood type and metal type people find has been beat up, because it was used. It wasn’t a work of art then. It was work. It was utilitarian. You couldn’t print a poster or a billboard or a newspaper unless you had that type, unless you had that font of type.

 

[0:33:25.2] KM: You’re listening to Up In Your Business with me, Kerry McCoy. My guest today is Kate Askew, owner-operator of the very cool Yella Dog Press Company in Little Rock, Arkansas, and she’s a successful online reseller of books, and what’s that word? 

 

[0:33:40.5] KA: Ephemera.

 

[0:33:41.3] KM: Ephemera. A new word for you there.

 

Before the break we talked about Roy Dudley Estate Sales and how you loved working for him, which was really cool.

 

[0:33:49.8] KA: Really fun.

 

[0:33:50.7] KM: But you’re not doing that anymore.

 

[0:33:52.2] KA: I do.

 

[0:33:52.9] KM: A little bit.

 

[0:33:53.1] KA: Every once in a while I still consult with Roy, but I used to work with him fulltime and I don’t do that anymore or just because I wasn’t able to get my own printing and bookwork done because his work is so fascinating.

 

[0:34:04.8] KM: It really is. To work as an appraiser, do you need to be licensed?

 

[0:34:10.7] KA: Yes. I am licensed with the Certified Appraisers Guild of America. Actually, Roy and a friend of ours, Melissa Goulden and I all three went together and got our certification several years ago. It was really, really fun.

 

[0:34:24.6] KM: Roy is an appraiser too.

 

[0:34:25.9] KA: Yes.

 

[0:34:26.5] KM: For books or for different things?

 

[0:34:28.3] KA: Just like me, personal property. Roy has three certified appraisers on staff and we had the best time going to get our certification, and that’s when I decided to get my auctioneers licensed too. You can only do so much, and I like to go and try things and go down a rabbit hole. I was not a good auctioneer. I was terrible at it.

 

[0:34:51.8] KM: I would be terrified to do that.

 

[0:34:53.5] KA: I thought I’m a fast talker, I’m going to be able to do that. It didn’t work. That’s okay, because if you don’t try thing then you don’t know if you’re going to like it.

 

[0:35:02.1] KM: Hear that listeners?

 

[0:35:03.1] KA: You got to try things and you got to fail.

 

[0:35:05.4] KM: Can’t have that fear of failure hold you back.

 

[0:35:07.1] KA: A lot of what brought me to printing was just the love of the printed word. Also, I write poetry and it’s a way for me to showcase my own poetry. My husband calls it loud poetry because I do it on big posters.

 

[0:35:25.6] KM: And you lose some pretty loud words.

 

[0:35:28.7] KA: Yeah. You use big words. Sometimes four-letter words. 

 

[0:35:32.3] KM: I’m trying how to say that, curse words.

 

[0:35:35.5] KA: Not always.

 

[0:35:36.8] KM: No. This one doesn’t have a bad word in it.

 

[0:35:39.1] KA: This is one of the first posters I ever made of my own poetry and it says if it is a soul crashing, blood rushing, heart poppin’, jaw droppin’, head acin’, breath taken, plant tossing, ocean crossing, life bettin’, no regretin’ kind of thing, it just might be love.

 

[0:35:56.4] KM: Oh, that’s awesome.

 

[0:35:57.9] KA: Sometimes you just got to take a chance and go to a city that you’ve never been too and take a job in a field you don’t know anything about and you just don’t know where it’s going to lead you.

 

[0:36:06.5] KM: That is just beautiful. For everybody that wasn’t listening at the beginning, that’s how she did met her husband.

 

[0:36:12.0 KA: The other thing is if I love the history of Arkansas, and so that takes me back to William Woodruff who was the first printer in Arkansas, a printer to the territory in 1819. If you’ll let me, I was going to read a little bit from a letter that was written about his print shop. 

 

[0:36:29.7] KM: Absolutely.

 

[0:36:31.0] KA: This is a letter that actually my teacher found and set to tide, but it’s one of my favorite things about —

 

[0:36:37.8] KM: What do you mean your teacher?

 

[0:36:39.1] KA: John Horn. My printing teacher, John Horn. It’s a letter from Hiram Whittington in April of 1827 to his brother. He had just gotten to Arkansas because William Woodruff hired him to be a printer and he was coming from Boston. This was 1819. This kid was coming from Boston to Little Rock.

 

[0:36:58.7] KM: On a horse.

 

[0:37:00.2] KA: He came by steamed boat and canoe and foot. He talks about how hard it was to get here. He writes, “In the afternoon of Sunday on the 6^th day of December, we arrived in Little Rock. Little Rock is situated on the south bank of the Arkansas. Contains about 60 buildings, 6 brick, 8 frame, the balance log cabins. The best building in the place is the printers. It is built of brick and is as good as any office in Boston.”

 

“Little Rock Academy is a log hut and the state house is a little low wooden building about 10 feet by 16. The town has been settled about eight years and has improved very slow. The trees are not cut down in the town yet, instead in the streets — Of street we walk in cow trails from one house to another. The town and, I believe, the whole territory is inhabited by the drags of Kentucky, Georgia and Louisiana, but principally from the former, and a more drunken, good for nothing set of fellows never got together.”

 

“The secretary of the territory and the judges at the Supreme Court drink whiskey out of the same cup with the lowest born and rolled together in the same gutter. There have been more than a dozen murders committed here, but the murder was always acquitted. The greatest drunkards fill the most responsible offices.”

 

Then he goes on to say —

 

[0:38:17.7] KM: Oh my gosh! That’s priceless.

 

[0:38:18.8] KA: It’s hysterical. Then he goes on to say, “Of the female part of the community I have not much to say as there are five grown girls in the township and they are all as ugly as sin and mean as the devil. It’s a famous place for parties. I have been to three since I had been here where they have a violin and dance all night and as there are not girls to form a sec, all the old women danced and lie in bed the next day. The men get drunk and generally have a fight before they get home. Last Sunday I saw two fringe ladies walking out each with a young coon in their arms. They are used instead of lapdogs.”

 

Then one more thing he said and then I’ll quit reading.

 

[0:38:51.8] KM: No! Don’t stop! Keep going.

 

[0:38:53.6] KA: One more thing he said to his brother, he was talking about the food they were eating and he said, “The Indians sometimes bring deer and buffalo meat to town and try to sell it, but the folks are such intolerance that they seldom purchase any. They think there is nothing like a dead hog.”

 

[0:39:06.7] KM: Oh! Now we root for the dead hog. Let’s go Razor Backs!

 

[0:39:10.6] KA: Everybody here still loves a dead hog.

 

[0:39:13.6] KM: Yes, we do.

 

[0:39:14.6] KA: I think that’s really fun to see Little Rock through the eyes of an outsider in 1823.

 

[0:39:23.9] KM: That ought to make everybody want to start collecting old books.

 

[0:39:26.7] KA: Well, in old documents and go back and look at old documents, you just never know what’s going to turn up in your hands.

 

[0:39:35.2] KM: I don’t even know what to say after that. That was priceless. Thank you for sharing that.

 

[0:39:38.7] KA: You’re welcome. It’s really fun.

 

[0:39:40.9] KM: I don’t even know where to go from that. I guess we’ll go back to — This is going to be boring after that. I guess we’ll go — Oh, tell us what that other book is that you have there. You said is written by —

 

[0:39:49.2] KA: Oh, Geoffrey Chaucer. It was written by Chaucer. It was printed in 1561 and it’s actually a fragment. It’s not the whole book.

 

[0:39:58.2] KM: Tell who Chaucer is.

 

[0:39:59.8] KA: Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, and he is one of our most famous writers of all time and he wrote stories and really good ones and I found this fragment.

 

[0:40:13.8] KM: Why do you call that a fragment? It looks like a full book.

 

[0:40:16.0] KA: It’s not a full book. It’s part of a book.

 

[0:33:43.1] KM: It’s bound.

 

[0:40:19.1] KA: It is bound and about 300 years ago somebody bound it, but they took out — It was the book that had The Canterbury Tales in it and this story called The Romance of the Rose.

 

[0:40:30.6] KM: How old is the book?

 

[0:40:32.0] KA: It’s 1561. It was printed in 1561.

 

[0:40:34.3] KM: But it was bound 300 years ago, which is what makes —

 

[0:40:36.3] KA: It was rebound. It was printed in 1561 and about 300 years ago I guess somebody wanted The Canterbury Tales out of it and not the rest of it. This is the rest of it, but I can tell from the vellum binding, vellum being sheepskin, and the age of it about when it was bound. I’ll buy a fragment. I don’t care it’s not the whole book. It’s so cool.

 

[0:40:55.2] KM: It’s beautiful. Look at that font. What is that?

 

[0:40:58.0] KA: It’s black letter. When printing started, it’s arbitrary date of 1450 that they say that Gutenberg invented movable type.

 

[0:41:08.8] KM: Yes. We need to talk about that in a minute.

 

[0:41:10.2] KA: Right. The first fonts of type were designed after letters that the monks scribed. Everything before movable type was copied.

 

[0:41:23.4] KM: Movable type oddly enough was 14 A.D., right?

 

[0:34:52.0] KA: No. 1450.

 

[0:41:28.7] KM: A.D.

 

[0:41:29.2 KA: Yeah.

 

[0:41:31.2] KM: Who would have thought movable type was that old?

 

[0:41:33.0] KA: No. 1450, just 500 years ago.

 

[0:41:36.7] KM: Oh, I see. That still seems like a longtime ago. I would have thought it was in the 1800s.

 

[0:41:41.2] KA: No. 1450 is before the 1800s.

 

[0:41:43.3] KM: I know, but I would have thought that movable type started in the 1800s.

 

[0:41:47.4] KA: No. 1450. Although the Chinese had versions of movable type long before that. Just not cast in metal the way Gutenberg did it. Gutenberg figured out how to cast it in metal and how to have multiple letters that you could move. He printed a bible. It’s one of the most famous printed items. You can go to Germany and see it in the museum, Gutenberg Museum.

 

[0:42:06.2] KM: I was just surprised to hear that —

 

[0:35:34.8] KA: 1450?

 

[0:42:10.1] KM: Yeah. That seems like a really long time ago. I didn’t realize that.

 

[0:42:12.4] KA: It was a long time ago.

 

[0:42:13.5] KM: I know.

 

[0:42:16.2] KA: Before movable type, everything was handwritten and monks wrote it and not many people were literate and it was hard to get these things. You had to be a person of means to even have a book and to be literate. When movable type came along, all the sudden things could be reproduced cheaply and easily and people were able to learn to read and information was able to get to people. It was a huge revolution.

 

[0:42:47.1] KM: It was like the internet.

 

[0:42:48.3] KA: Exactly. What the internet did for our age. Right.

 

[0:42:53.6] KM: Information age. Another information age.

 

[0:42:56.6] KA: Right. That’s how that all got started. This font in this particular book is copied. It’s a black letter font. It’s copied from the type of writing the monks would do in the monasteries.

 

[0:43:12.4] KM: Oh, I see what you’re saying. They replicated what a handwritten —

 

[0:43:16.1] KA: Yes. Exactly. Then later, people realized —

 

[0:43:18.5] KM: Look how tiny it is.

 

[0:43:19.6] KA: Later, people realized that that was kind of hard to read and so other fonts were developed, designed.

 

[0:43:27.5] KM: Because this has a lot of seraphs on it.

 

[0:43:29.3] KA: That’s right. It does. One of the greatest type designers of our time was Frederic Goudy and he designed over a hundred type fonts and I have a book here. I’m sorry, it’s radio. You can’t see it, but it’s a vellum book that was printed at the Village Press, which was Frederic Goudy’s personal press. Since he’s my guy and I really like him — —

 

[0:43:54.2] KM: Yeah. That’s much cleaners.

 

[0:43:56.2] KA: He designed most of the typefaces that we use today.

 

[0:44:01.0] KM: How did he put a picture in there?

 

[0:44:02.5] KA: Well, because this was printed much, much later. This was printed in 1901, and so that’s actually a half tongue, but he also has woodcut ornaments here. Everything that’s old is new again, and all the internet fonts or copies of all the metal fonts and all the metal fonts are copies of older metal fonts, so everybody rips everybody off. They always have.

 

When people come to my shop and they want — They show me a font and it’s an internet font, I’ll say I don’t have that, but I have what I believe it was ripped off of, and that’s this font over here and I’ll take them to the type cabinet and show them the font that’s closest to that. That’s really fun.

 

[0:44:44.8] KM: You’ll take them to the case, the upper case or the lower case.

 

[0:44:46.1] KA: Yeah. Exactly. I’m a huge type nerd and trying to figure out what fonts are when they come into the shop because they don’t always have a tag saying what they were, so you have to research and figure out what it is and where it came from. That’s a whole another rabbit hole of figuring out where your type came from.

 

[0:45:04.0] KM: Do you make any money?

 

[0:45:05.9] KA: I make money off my books and I make enough money off my printing to cover the overhead.

 

[0:45:12.5] KM: It’s a really hobby though, isn’t it?

 

[0:45:14.1] KA: No. It’s a business. It is, and I’m working really harder to make more money at it, but it’s a difficult way to make a lot of money. If you’re really going to make money, and people do, you got to have bigger machinery than I have that makes multiples that you can crank out. My biggest run is 150. I don’t have — There’s a press called a Heidelberg Windmill that really is like a little airplane. It’s so complicated. A lot of people who sell commercially can set that thing and print 5,000. I don’t have one of those. It’s more than a hobby. It’s less than just a huge moneymaker, but it’s a lot of joy, a whole lot of joy. 

 

Between my printing, my bookselling and my appraising, it is a business. I sort of have lots of different wily ways  I can make money and I enjoy all of them and it’s mostly — What they have in common is everything I do takes a lot of research and concentration and I’m able to fall into whatever it is I’m researching and really get a bang out of it. Sometimes I have a hard time coming out and being social, but —

 

[0:46:34.5] KM: You’re listening to Up In Your Business with me, Kerry McCoy. My guest today is Kate Asker, owner-operator of the very cool Yella Dog Press Company in Little Rock, Arkansas, and she also has a successful online reseller under the name — Well, I don’t even know what name you sell under. 

 

[0:46:48.4] KA: Yella Dog Press.

 

[0:46:49.4 KM: You do sell under the Yella Dog Press. The past hour we have talked — We’re in the last 10 minutes of the show, and for the past hour we’ve talked about working as an appraiser and getting your license. We’ve talked about the success of being an online reseller a little bit. Is there something that you can tell our listeners? Is there something that you didn’t expect when opened up your eBay account and Etsy account? Was there something that you would advise people to do or not to do? Are you still on eBay and Etsy at the same time?

 

[0:47:22.0] KA: Okay. Those are all good questions. I think the most important thing is to diversify and adapt. If something is working for you, keep doing it. If it’s not working for you, quit doing it. For a long time I sold books on American Book Exchange, Alibris, Amazon, in addition to eBay and any place else I could. I’ve tried the antique malls, that didn’t work. That’s not where people buy books.

 

Eventually, I quit selling on ABE and Alibris, American Book Exchange. I did very well on those for a long time, but when I realized that it was getting harder and harder to make a buck on those, I went back to eBay, which I really liked because people complain about it, because they take a chunk, but where else am I going to find a buyer in China for my book.

 

[0:48:08.9] KM: What about Etsy?

 

[0:48:10.5] KA: Etsy, I tried. Etsy, I’ve not had a whole lot of success with. Other people figured that out, and it’s just figuring it out. I’m selling posters, not books. I was on Etsy. I don’t have anything up right now. Every once in a while I’ll put something up.

 

[0:48:23.2] KM: What about Amazon?

 

[0:48:24.6] KA: Amazon, I’m not selling on right now.

 

[0:48:26.8] KM: Amazon has gotten so hard to sell on.

 

[0:48:29.0] KA: Yeah. It really has.

 

[0:48:30.8] KM: We’ve been talking about getting off Amazon. Flag & Banner has been talking about getting of Amazon right now.

 

[0:48:35.0] KA: There’s so much competition. It the beginning, I did very well on all three of those book venues. What happened was, with books, is that 20 years ago I’ve got the book and it doesn’t look like anybody else has it. The way the internet has developed, anybody who has that can now put it online. You don’t have to be a specialist. You don’t have to be book dealer. You can be Bob in your uncle’s library and realize that’s worth something and sell it.

 

The true availability of things has come to light. It’s like a lot of other collectibles; glass, and figurines. Somebody’s got to want it, and on eBay too, people have got to want it really if you’re going to get a lot for it. You have to find something you like doing enough that it’s not going to drive you nuts if you spend a lot of time doing it and aren’t successful just right away. I had pretty immediate success on eBay selling books, so that was good, and I was able to really dive into it. I love researching them and writing the descriptions and all that kind of stuff. 

 

[0:49:44.7] KM: What’s your most interesting thing you ever found or sold, you either bought or sold?

 

[0:49:50.0] KA: I’ll tell you an interesting thing I found. I love to look at the classifieds in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. I just love to. I like to look at them and see what people are selling. I think it’s fascinating. I scoured them for years for printing equipment. Every morning, that was just part of my routine, is anybody selling printing equipment.

 

I saw one day where it said selling printing equipment and it had a number. It was an Arkansas number. I didn’t know where it was. I called and the man said — I asked him if he had any printing equipment. He said, “Well, I’ve sold it all.” He said, “I’ve sold all my offset equipment.” I said, “Actually, I’m looking for letterpress equipment. I’m looking for handset type.” He said, “Well, you know. I think I might have some of that.” He said, “Why don’t you come on over?” I said, “Where are you?” He was in Brinkley.

 

I grabbed a friend who had a truck and I said, “Do you want to go on an adventure?” We drove to Brinkley and it turned out the man’s grandfather had started the Brinkley Argus Newspaper in 1878 and when they quit using their metal type somebody shoved it in a backroom and there it was, still sitting there, and he sold it to me. It’s beautiful. It has a history. I have on all those cabinets, “This type came from the Brinkley Argus,” and I use it and it sat for 50 years untouched in somebody’s backroom. Sometimes you got to pick up the phone and call and ask. That’s also one of the great things I learned when I was trading securities. I was so terrified to pick up the phone. The person I was working for stood over me and said, “Pick up the phone. Pick up the phone. Pick up the phone and handle it when the voice comes on the other end.”

 

I learned too fearlessly cold call is what I used to do. We didn’t do too much of that, but I would have to call other people. Now I just pick up the phone sometimes and find out what’s out there.

 

[0:51:45.4] KM: I think that’s one of the things I teach — Tim, how many times have I said that to you?

 

[0:51:48.8] TB: A few times.

 

[0:51:50.2] KM: Pick up the phone. Pick up the phone. Call them. Call them.

 

[0:51:52.9] KA: Yeah, there might have been a few expletives in there, pick up the phone.

 

[0:51:57.6] KM: At the break we talked about Ben Franklin and we were like — I know that Ben Franklin was an original pamphleteer and I know that pamphleteers have been thought of much like blogging today.

 

[0:52:09.3] KA: They had something to say and they said it.

 

[0:52:11.0] KM: They did.

 

[0:52:12.2] KA: Ben Franklin was a printer. He started out as a printer’s devil. A printer’s devil is someone who is a small child usually who’s running errands in the print shop and putting coal in the fire and sweeping and eventually they get to set type and learn how to be a printer. He started out as a printer and he was many, many things, but we admire him because he did a whole lot for printing.

 

[0:52:35.7] KM: Tim said something about he’s the only person on a bill that — On currency that wasn’t a —

 

[0:52:40.8] TB: President. That’s right.

 

[0:52:42.9] KM: After I left we looked up what a printer’s devil is, and a devil is  another word for apprentice.

 

[0:52:47.2] KA: Right, apprentice. There’re a lot of different devils. It’s not just a printer’s devil. There are other professions that had them, but it was a way for a small child to get their start in a trade a long time ago.

 

[0:52:59.2] KM: You know, it does seem like we have put together rules to protect our young, labor laws to protect our young and so many times they don’t get to go and become apprentices or work in an industry.

 

[0:53:12.8] KA: Which is not a bad thing. They need to be kids. I know where you’re going with this, and that is that working with your hands and learning skills builds confidence. I don’t care if you’re 10 or 70, learning a new skill and exceling at it.

 

[0:53:31.5] KM: And getting out of your comfort zone.

 

[0:53:33.2] KA: Yeah, which is what this radio show has been for me for sure.

 

[0:47:01.8] KM: And for me too.

 

[0:53:37.8] KA: Yeah. You do a good job. 

 

[0:53:39.6] KM: Oh, you’re nice. Thanks. We’d talked about what motivates you.

 

[0:53:44.9] KA: What motivates me is history. I look at a book and I wonder who held it before me, especially a book that’s from 1500, 1513, like this one right here. I wonder who held this book and why did it survive?

 

[0:54:00.8] KM: Have you heard people say things that are is a smell inside of a book that gets you high?

 

[0:54:05.5] KA: No. That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

 

[0:54:07.6] KM: That’s what I heard. Look, Tim is shaking his head. He’s heard that too.

 

[0:54:11.0] KA: That is a fallacy. That is the craziest thing I have ever heard in my life.

 

[0:54:16.6] KM: Ugh! You’ve ruined it for me.

 

[0:54:18.7] KA: That is the biggest urban myth I hate to debunk, but no.

 

[0:54:23.7] KM: All right. It’s time first to say goodbye. Thank you so much, Kate.

 

[0:54:27.2 KA: Thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun, and you said it will go by fast. It did go by fast. I was very worried.

 

[0:54:32.2] KM: Even though it’s hot in here, isn’t it?

 

[0:54:34.0] KA: It’s alright. I don’t mind it. Thank you.

 

[0:54:37.1] KM: Nope, you’re not leaving yet. I have a present for you. I bet you don’t have this in your print shop.

 

[0:54:41.1] KA: No, I don’t.

 

[0:54:43.1] KM: For our listeners, it’s a U.S. Flag and —

 

[0 0:54:46.3] KA: And an Arkansas Flag.

 

[0:54:47.2] KM: Little desk set. You can put it on your shelve over there.

 

[0:54:49.1] KA: I will put that on. Thank you so much. I’ll cherish this. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. 

 

[0:54:53.1] KM: You’re welcome.

 

[0:54:54.2] TB:  All right.

 

[0:54:56.3] KM: That was good.

 

[0:54:57.3] TB: That was really good. What a good episode. Kate is such an interesting person.

 

[0:55:00.9] KM: I know. I learned stuff through that also, and I’m sorry you can’t get high on a book. I’ll just going to start reading.

 

[0:55:08.0] TB: As someone who has a passion for publishing, I still want to believe that urban legend.

 

[0:55:12.4] KM: I know. She debunked it. I guess that’s it for us. If you want to get a copy of this show or listen to it again or share it, it’s on Flag and Banner. Right, Tim? At flagandbanner.com.

 

[0:55:22.3] TB: Flagandbanner.com. That’s right.

 

[0:55:24.4] KM: You can also listen to it on —

 

[0:55:26.0] TB: Souncloud, iTunes, YouTube.

 

[0:55:28.7] KM: That’s right. To our listeners, if you’ve got a great entrepreneur or a story that you would like to share, I’d love to hear from you and get you on the radio with me and Tim. Send a brief bio and your contact info to questions@upyourbuiness.org and someone will be in touch. Thank you for spending time with me. If you think this program has been about you, you’re right, but it’s also been for me as you probably heard at the beginning of this hour. Thank you for letting me fulfill my destiny. My hope today is that you’ve heard or learned something that’s been inspiring or enlightening and that it, what it is, will help you up your business, your independence or your life. I’m Kerry McCoy and I’ll see you next time one Up in Your Business. Until then, be brave and keep it up.

 

[END OF INTERVIEW]

 

[0:56:16.2] TB: You’ve been listening to Up in Your Business with Kerry McCoy. If you’d like to hear this program again, next week go to flagandbanner.com, click on the tab labeled radio show and there you’ll find podcasts with links to resources you’ve heard discussed on today’s show. Kerry’s goal, to help you live the American dream.

 

[END]

 

 

 

 

[END OF INTERVIEW]

 

[0:53:40.30] TB: You’ve been listening to Up in Your Business with Kerry McCoy. Want to hear today’s program again or want someone else to benefit from it? Jot this down. Within 48 hours the podcast will be available at flagandbanner.com. Click the tab labeled “Radio Show”, there you’ll find today’s segments with links to resources you heard discussed on this program. Kerry’s goal: to help you live the American Dream.

 

[END]