Poor Richard's Almanack was a yearly almanac published by Benjamin Franklin, the American inventor, statesman, publisher and printer who adopted the pseudonym of "Poor Richard" for this purpose. Poor Richard's Almanack was printed continually from 1732 to 1758. It was a best seller for a pamphlet published in the American colonies. Even with much competition print runs of 10,000 per year were claimed.
Ben Franklin, achieved much of his financial success with Poor Richard's Almanack. His almanac was very popular in colonial America, with people reading it for the calendar, seasonal weather forecasts, poems, sayings, astronomical and astrological information it contained. Franklin also included the occasional mathematical exercise, and the Almanack from 1750 features contained an early example of demographics. It is chiefly remembered, however, for being a repository of Franklin's aphorisms and proverbs, many of which live on in American English. These maxims typically counsel thrift and courtesy, with a dash of cynicism.
One of Ben Franklin sayings from the almanac is often quoted even today, "Early to bed and early to rise Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise." However it should be noted that this quote, like many used in the almanac were not original. Versions of this proverb have been around for much longer. The exact version was first published in 1639 in the book Parœmiologia Anglo-Latina or 'Proverbs English, and Latin'.
The Connecticut Courant began as a weekly on October 29, 1764 and was started by Thomas Green. The word "courant" was a popular name for English-language newspapers, borrowed from the Dutch. The daily Hartford Courant traces its existence back to the weekly, thereby claiming the title "America's oldest continuously published newspaper" and adopting as its slogan, "Older than the nation." (A reborn The New Hampshire Gazette, which started publication in 1756, but disappeared and reappeared, trademarked the title of oldest paper in the nation. The Gazette is a bi-weekly, while the Courant has not missed a week since its inception.
The Courant was purchased in 1979 by Times Mirror, the Los Angeles Times' parent company. The first years of out-of-town ownership were described by a former Courant reporter in a book titled Spiked: How Chain Management Corrupted America's Oldest Newspaper. One criticism was that the new owners were more interested in awards, and less interested in traditional Courant devotion to exhaustive coverage of local news.
The Courant won a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for inquiring into problems with the Hubble Space Telescope (a Connecticut company was involved in the construction), and it won a 1999 Pulitzer Prize in the Breaking News category for coverage of a 1998 murder-suicide that took five lives at Connecticut Lottery headquarters.
We live in Arizona and love Arizona, but few people know what the word Arizona means. Even the experts disagree on its origin. In printing it is important to know the right words and the meaning. Many words like state and city names, we never give a moments thought to their origin or meaning. Knowing the correct meaning of a word allows us to know that we are saying in print what we meant to say. This makes sure we won't be misunderstood in our communications.
The word Arizona comes from one of the following (its origin is not certain): the Aztec Indian word "arizuma," that means "silver-bearing," from the Tohono O'odham Indian word "Aleh-zone" which means "small spring," from the Papago arizonac, meaning little spring or few springs or the Pima Indian word "Ali shonak" which also means "small spring". Although there are other possibilities, so this origin should not be taken as a certainty.
Many believe the name Arizonat comes from the Spanish arida (dry) + zona (area). This is certainly not the ultimate origin, although it is likely that this Spanish combination influenced the form and adoption of the word in both Spanish and English.
Custom Carbonless, two part 8½ X 11 forms. Black ink one sided, 500 sets $80.00 from customer supplied art.
At MI Printing we can take care of all of your carbonless needs far beyond just carbonless forms. These can be used for employment applications, order forms, job tickets, invoices, estimates or proposals. Need to know more about all the uses for carbonless forms please give us a call at 623.582.1302. If needed, backside printing is available for an additional charge.
Sales tax, if necessary, not included. Please let us know what type of padding you expect for your forms. For best results a PDF file is required for the customer supplied artwork.
"OK" is one of the most frequently used and recognized words in the world.
It is also one of the oddest expressions ever invented. But this oddity may in large measure account for its popularity.
It's odd-looking. It's a word that looks and sounds like an abbreviation, an acronym.
We generally spell it OK - the spelling okay is relatively recent, and still relatively rare - and we pronounce it not "ock" but by sounding the names of the letters O and K.
So both in speech and in writing OK stands out clearly, easily distinguished from other words, and yet it uses simple sounds that are familiar to a multitude of languages.
Almost every language has an O vowel, a K consonant, and an A vowel. So OK is a very distinctive combination of very familiar elements. And that's one reason it's so successful. OK stands apart.
Ordinarily a word so odd, so distinctive from others, wouldn't be allowed in a language to begin with. As a general rule, a language allows new words only when they resemble familiar ones.
On 23 March 1839, OK was introduced to the world on the second page of the Boston Morning Post, in the midst of a long paragraph, as "o.k. (meaning all correct)".
But in the 20th Century OK moved from margin to mainstream, gradually becoming a staple of nearly everyone's conversation, no longer looked on as illiterate or slang.
Its true origin was gradually forgotten. OK used such familiar sounds that speakers of other languages, hearing it, could rethink it as an expression or abbreviation in their own language.
OK allows us to view a situation in simplest terms, just OK or not.
When someone falls down, the question is not "how well are you feeling?" but the more basic "are you OK?". And any lingering stigma associated with OK is long since gone.
Washington's Birthday is a United States federal holiday (Government Holiday information) celebrated on the third Monday of February in honor of George Washington, the first President of the United States. It is also commonly known as Presidents Day (sometimes spelled Presidents' Day or President's Day). As Washington's Birthday or Presidents Day, it is also the official name of a concurrent state holiday celebrated on the same day in a number of states.
Titled Washington's Birthday, a federal holiday honoring George Washington was originally implemented by an Act of Congress in 1880 for government offices in the District of Columbia and expanded in 1885 to include all federal offices. As the first federal holiday to honor an American citizen, the holiday was celebrated on Washington's actual birthday, February 22. On January 1, 1971, the federal holiday was shifted to the third Monday in February by the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. This date places it between February 15 and 21, which makes the name "Washington's Birthday" in some sense a misnomer, since it never lands on Washington's actual birthday, February 22.
An early draft of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act would have renamed the holiday to "Presidents' Day" to honor the birthdays of both Washington and Lincoln, which would explain why the chosen date falls between the two, but this proposal failed in committee and the bill as voted on and signed into law on 28 June 1968, kept the name Washington's Birthday.
By the mid-1980s, with a push from advertisers, the term "Presidents' Day" began its public appearance. Although Lincoln's birthday, February 12, was never a federal holiday, approximately a dozen state governments have officially renamed their Washington's Birthday observances as "Presidents' Day", "Washington and Lincoln Day", or other such designations. However, "Presidents' Day" is not always an all-inclusive term.
There is a great article on Fox News that gives good reasons why we should celebrate Presidents' Day for something more than three days off or a trip to the mall. To read this article click on "Presidents Day: A Time to Remember the Greats".
Daytona International Speedway is the home of "The Great American Race" the Daytona 500 sometimes called the super bowl of motorsports. The Daytona 500 is the biggest, richest and most prestigious race in America and annually kicks off the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series.
1959 was the very first Daytona 500 on the brand new 2.5 mile superspeedway. Lee Petty and Johnny Beauchamp were battling for the win off of turn 4 on the last lap with the lapped car of Joe Weatherly in the mix. The three of them crossed the line side-by-side-by-side, Beauchamp on the bottom, Petty in the middle and Weatherly on top. Beauchamp celebrated in victory lane but three days later Petty was declared the winner when newsreel footage showed that Petty beat Beauchamp to the line.
The Daytona 500 is regarded as the most important and prestigious race on the NASCAR calendar, carrying by far the largest purse. Championship points awarded are equal to that of any other Sprint Cup race. Since 1995, U.S. television ratings for the Daytona 500 have been the highest for any auto race of the year, surpassing the traditional leader, the Indianapolis 500 held in May.
On Sunday February 20th, 2011 a sold out crowd of approximately 185,000 will attend the race in person.
The winner of the Daytona 500 is presented with the Harley J. Earl Trophy in Victory Lane, and the winning car is displayed, in race-winning condition, for one year at Daytona 500 Experience, a museum and gallery adjacent to Daytona International Speedway.
The Subway Fresh Fit 500 Sprint Cup Race, the second race of the series, is scheduled for February 27, 2011 at Phoenix International Raceway located in the Phoenix Metroplex West Valley community of Avondale. PIR hosts a second Sprint Cup Race on November 13, 2011. This race is the next to the last race in the Chase.
Being located in the Phoenix Metropolitan area of Arizona we are proud of the state's wide and varied history.
Everyone has heard of the Shoot Out at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone Arizona.
But did you know that in the Tombstone Epitaph building, the oldest continuously published newspaper in Arizona, The Tombstone Epitaph, is still being printed.
There are many Western printing history exhibits in their front office that are free to the public.
For 128 years, The Tombstone Epitaph® has chronicled the people, events and places of the Old West. Each monthly issue delivers rich stories and illustrations about lawmen and outlaws, soldiers and Indians, settlers and towns, inventions and intrigues, frontier cookery, western humor and western travels.
So when visiting in Tombstone AZ remember there are more things to see and do than just the Gunfight and Bird Cage Theater.
You can visit the The Tombstone Epitaph website to see the many ways you can learn more about the historic Arizona city of Tombstone.
Here at MI Printing your satisfaction is the one goal we apply to each and every printing job we do. Many companies talk about customer service. Here we take that many steps farther. We are very mindful that what our customers want is printing solutions. We feel that great customer services is the hallmark that leads to customer satisfaction.
You want your printing job;
• On Time
• With Superb Quality
• At A Fair Price
Meeting those guidelines for each and every order leads to our Customers being Satisfied!
Quality brochures and flyers are among the most used advertising media that can help draw more prospective customers to your business. It our job to make sure you are satisfied with those advertising materials. We are proud to produce printed materials that you are proud to distribute.
We can help bring your companies' image into your companies' printed materials used in communication and advertising.
Call Paula at 623.582.1302 to discuss how we can show you our Customer Satisfaction model for your printing needs.
Many companies have a small service in-house to do their everyday printing. That works for some companies. The recent business slump has led to cutbacks of in-house staff and services.
As the business climate heats up the company may need to ramp up their printing flow again. Here at MI Printing we understand your printing needs and would love to work with you to help bridge this printing gap.
When you look at the cost of training and supporting an employee means that it becomes a real stretch to be competitive with a professional printer being your source for all of your different printing needs.
We can help you ramp up your printing needs and at fair and cost effective price structure. Our turn-around times are well known for meeting our customers’ schedules. We can show how short, medium and long runs can be meshed to your front end and output through our professional printing service.
Keep in mind our MI Printing services can include pick-up and then the delivery of your finished printed materials.
Please take time to give us a call 623.582.1302 and then we can talk about how our services can turn into your business solutions.
On February 14, 1912 Arizona became the 48th state and last of the contiguous states. President William Howard Taft signs a proclamation declaring Arizona to be the 48th State of the Union, culminating a two-year process that began with the convening of a Constitutional Convention in 1910; an unsuccessful bid for statehood in 1911 because President Taft objected to a clause in the Arizona Constitution that allowed recall of judges; a vote by Arizonans in December 1911 to delete the recall of judges; and the election of initial executive officers, including George W.P. Hunt as the first governor and Sidney P. Osborn as the first Secretary of State. The state adopts the motto Detat Deus or “God Enriches,” and shortly after the statehood proclamation, voters restore the recall of judges to the constitution, and women are granted the right to vote.
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer at 10:15 Monday morning Februar 14, 2011 kicked off the year-long countdown to the state's 100th birthday at the Centennial Expo on the Senate lawn at the state Capitol. The kickoff to the 52 weeks of celebration leading up to the 100th anniversary of statehood will be from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. Monday. The state's official mascot, the Copper Chopper, will make an appearance among the 60 booths and main stage for entertainment.
Matt and Paula of MI Printing would like to wish Arizona and its citizens a Very Happy 99th Birthday
Nowadays printing 1000 copies of a flier is as easy as printing one. Desktop Publishing brought document creation and printing to our desktops only a couple of decades ago, a lifetime ago for to some people but a drop in the bucket compared to the history of printing and publishing. Today, volume printing can be as simple as typing in a number in a print dialog box, but beware it is not as cheap as you might think.
For a 1000 copy 8½ X 11 flier double sided done on your friendly ink-jet printer could run close to $700 with paper and ink.
Taken to your local professional printer you would get much better quality, a better paper look and feel, a less fragile surface and a cost that would save you at least several hundred dollars and a lot of time. If it requires folding for mailing it would come back from your printer folded.
Another big plus is you receive the expertise from the staff of your printer with each and every order.
Once a documment is through the dektop publishing part of production (prepress), the number of copies needed determines whether it is done in-house or by a professional printer. The cost of ink-jet is far too expensive for anthing more than just a few copies. Even a color laser printer is too expensive if more than a 100 copies are needed.
The first thing a printer will do is make the piece camera ready. The term camera-ready was first used in the photo offset printing process, where the final layout of a document was attached to a "mechanical" or "paste up." Then, a stat camera was used to photograph the mechanical, and the final offset printing plates were created from the camera's negatives.
In this system, a final paste-up that needed no further changes or additions was ready to be photographed by the process camera and subsequently printed. This final document was called camera-ready.
In recent years, the use of paste-ups have been replaced by desktop publishing software, which allows users to create entire document layouts on the computer. In the meantime, many printers now use technology to take these digital files and create printing plates from them without use of a camera and negative. Despite this, the term camera-ready continues to be used to signify that a document is ready to be made into a printing plate. In this new digital-to-plate system, a digital file is usually considered camera-ready if it meets certain conditions.
Theres something about receiving a document with a company letterhead inscribed in it. You can feel the importance and significance of any document with the help of letterheads and the quality of the paper. In fact, correct letterhead printing adds greatly to the image and credibility of a company.
Letterheads are standards for businesses and companies. Letterhead printing is crucial because it contributes to the image of professionalism and reliability that a company projects. The image of a company can be picked up from the documents that they produce and use in communications with the public.
The letterhead therefore speaks of a company's formality and credibility. Letterheads in fact, have the power to affect a response from the recipients whether its favorable or not. Depending on the look, appearance and quality, your letterhead can greatly influence the way your recipients think about you and your company's message.
Contact Matt or Paula at MI Printing for help with your professional quality letterhead. 623-582-1302
Behind-the-scenes technologies developed by Adobe Systems set the foundation for professional desktop publishing applications. The HP LaserJet was the world's first desktop laser printer was introduced in 1984. The LaserWriter and LaserWriter Plus printers included high quality, scalable Adobe PostScript-fonts built into their ROM memory. The LaserWriter's PostScript capability allowed publication designers to proof files on a local printer then print the same file at DTP service bureaus using optical resolution 600+ ppi PostScript-printers such as those from Linotronic. Later, the Macintosh II was released which was much more suitable for desktop publishing because of its greater expandability, support for large color multi-monitor displays, and its SCSI storage interface which allowed fast, high-capacity hard drives to be attached to the system.
Although Macintosh-based systems would continue to dominate the market, in 1986, the GEM-based Ventura Publisher was introduced for MS-DOS computers. While PageMaker's pasteboard metaphor closely simulated the process of creating layouts manually, Ventura Publisher automated the layout process through its use of tags/style sheets and automatically generated indices and other body matter. This made it suitable for manuals and other long-format documents. Desktop publishing moved into the home market in 1986 with Professional Page for the Amiga, Publishing Partner (now PageStream) for the Atari ST, GST's Timeworks Publisher on the PC and Atari ST and Calamus for the Atari TT030. Even for 8-bit computers like the Apple II and Commodore 64 software was published: Home Publisher, The Newsroom and geoPublish.
During its early years, desktop publishing acquired a bad reputation as a result of untrained users who created poorly-organized ransom note effect layouts — similar criticism would be levied again against early Web publishers a decade later. However, some were able to realize truly professional results.
Once considered a primary skill, increased accessibility to more user-friendly DTP software has made DTP a secondary skill to art direction, graphic design, multimedia development, marketing communications, administrative careers and advanced high school literacy in thriving economies. DTP skill levels range from what may be learned in a few hours (e.g. learning how to put clip art in a word processor) to what requires a college education and years of experience (e.g. advertising agency positions). The discipline of DTP skills range from technical skills such as prepress production and programming to creative skills such as communication design and graphic image development.
Desktop publishing began in 1985 with the introduction of MacPublisher, the first WYSIWYG layout program, which ran on the original 128K Macintosh computer. The DTP market exploded in 1985 with the introduction in January of the Apple LaserWriter printer, and later in July with the introduction of PageMaker software from Aldus which rapidly became the DTP industry standard software.
Before the advent of desktop publishing, the only option available to most persons for producing typed (as opposed to handwritten) documents was a typewriter, which offered only a handful of typefaces (usually fixed-width) and one or two font sizes. Indeed, one popular desktop publishing book was actually titled The Mac is not a typewriter. The ability to create WYSIWYG page layouts on screen and then print pages containing text and graphical elements at crisp 300 dpi resolution was revolutionary for both the typesetting industry and the personal computer industry. Newspapers and other print publications made the move to DTP-based programs from older layout systems like Atex and other such programs in the early 1980s.
The term "desktop publishing" is attributed to Aldus Corporation founder Paul Brainerd, who sought a marketing catch-phrase to describe the small size and relative affordability of this suite of products in contrast to the expensive commercial phototypesetting equipment of the day.
By the standards of today, early desktop publishing was a primitive affair. Users of the PageMaker-LaserWriter-Macintosh 512K system endured frequent software crashes, cramped display on the Mac's tiny 512 x 342 1-bit monochrome screen, the inability to control letter spacing, kerning (the addition or removal of space between individual characters in a piece of typeset text to improve its appearance or alter its fit) and other typographic features, and discrepancies between the screen display and printed output. However, it was a revolutionary combination at the time, and was received with considerable acclaim.
This is Super Bowl weekend. The game is between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Green Bay Packers playing at the new Cowboys Stadium in Arlington Texas, the most talked about stadium in the world.
Superbowl weekend is the largest party weekend in the United States for sport fans and party participants alike. 250,000 people are making there way to Dallas for the largest party get together in the country. There will be small parties all over the country.
Paula and I hope you have a super weekend whether you are planning to attend a party, relax in front of the television or attend one of the many other events happening the weekend.
Matt
The next generation of phototypesetting machines to emerge were those that generated characters on a Cathode ray tube. Typical of the type were the Alphanumeric APS2 (1963), IBM 2680 (1967), I.I.I. VideoComp (1973), Linotron 202 (1978), and Autologic APS5 (1980). These machines were the mainstay of phototypesetting for much of the 1970s and 1980s. Such machines could be 'driven online' by a computer front-end system or take their data from magnetic tape. Type fonts were stored digitally on conventional magnetic disk drives.
Computers excel at automatically typesetting documents. Character-by-character computer-aided phototypesetting was in turn rapidly rendered obsolete in the 1980s by fully digital systems employing a raster image processor to render an entire page to a single high-resolution digital image, now known as imagesetting.
The first commercially successful laser imagesetter, able to make use of a raster image processor was the Monotype Lasercomp. ECRM, Compugraphic (later purchased by Agfa) and others rapidly followed suit with machines of their own.
Early minicomputer-based typesetting software introduced in the 1970s and early 1980s such as Datalogics Pager, Penta, Miles 33, Xyvision, Troff from Bell Labs, and IBM's Script product with CRT terminals, were better able to drive these electro-mechanical devices, and used text markup languages to describe type and other page formatting information. The descendants of these text markup languages include SGML, XML and HTML.
The minicomputer systems output columns of text on film for paste-up and eventually produced entire pages and signatures of 4, 8, 16 or more pages using imposition software on devices such as the Israeli-made Scitex Dolev. The data stream used by these systems to drive page layout on printers and imagesetters led to the development of printer control languages such as Adobe Systems PostScript and Hewlett-Packard's HP PCL.
Before the 1980s, practically all typesetting for publishers and advertisers was performed by specialist typesetting companies. These companies performed keyboarding, editing and production of paper or film output, and formed a large component of the graphic arts industry. In the United States these companies were located in rural Pennsylvania, New England or the Midwest where labor was cheap, and paper produced nearby, but still within a few hours' travel time of the major publishing centers.
We are all familiar with the old saying “You Never Get A Second Chance To Make A First Impression”. A professional printed menu is a perfect example of a restaurant putting its best foot forward right up front.
Your restaurant’s menu not only communicates your price structure, it helps describe both visually and using the written word, your wonderful food. As printers, we have access to paper stocks that reproduce photographs with greater clarity and more vibrant colors. Using offset presses we can print color photographs on any color paper stock.
Having your menus printed with us, allows us to offer you your menu on larger and custom sized pages. We can also offer you many different paper and card stock weights. Our paper stocks even include different texture and surfaces.
Using different coating or lamination, we can help you protect and extend the life of your menus.
Don’t forget a quality and colorful take-out menu to remind your customers about your food and special offerings like delivery. Make sure you have sufficient supply for your customers to take home several for work and passing out to their friends and family.
Here at MI Printing, Paula and I invite you to give us a call at 623-582-1302 and talk with us about fulfilling your menu needs.
Matt
The first mechanical phototypesetters involved the adaptation of existing typesetters by replacing the metal matrices with matrices carrying the image of the letters and replacing the caster with a photographic unit. The industrial application of this idea resulted in the Fotosetter in 1947, a phototypesetter. The first revolutionary application of this notion was the Lumitype, invented as the Lithomat in 1949 by two Frenchmen, René Higonnet and Louis Moyroud. Executed by phototypesetting, The Marvelous World of Insects was done on their machine in 1953. The first model had an attached keyboard. Later models with a separate keyboard printed more than 28,000 characters per hour. A third generation of phototypesetters appeared in the 1960s, in which all mechanical moving parts were eliminated by omitting the use of light and therefore omitting the moving optical device responsible for operating in its field.
Phototypesetting machines projected characters onto film for offset printing. This "cold type" technology could be used in office environments where "hot metal" machines (the Mergenthaler Linotype, the Harris Intertype and the Monotype) could not. The use of phototypesetting grew rapidly in the 1960s when software was developed to convert marked up copy, usually typed on paper tape, to the codes that controlled the phototypesetters. The Photon Corporation in Cambridge, Mass. developed equipment based on the Lumitype of Higgonet and Moyraud. Mergenthaler produced the Linofilm using a different design and Monotype produced Monophoto. Other companies followed with products that included Alphatype and Varityper.
To provide much greater speeds, the Photon Corporation produced the ZIP 200 machine for the MEDLARS project of the National Library of Medicine and Mergenthaler produced the Linotron. The ZIP 200 could produce text at 600 characters per second using high speed flashes behind plates with images of the characters to be printed. Each character had a separate xenon flash constantly ready to fire. A separate system of optics positioned the image on the page.
An enormous advancement was made by the mid 1960s with the development of equipment that projected the characters onto CRT screens. Alphanumeric Corporation produced the APS series. Rudolph Hell developed the Digiset machine in Germany. The RCA Graphic Systems Division manufactured this in the U.S. as the Videocomp, later marketed by Information International Inc. Software for mechanical hyphenation was a major component of electronic typesetting.
