Sure, The Beatles could fly non-stop from Miami Beach to the U.S.S.R., but to get to Albany I have to transfer in Atlanta. Harrumph!

At any rate, next week is the 34th annual Graphics of the Americas show, which I had previewed for WhatTheyThink last week. The print buyer’s boot camp, the myriad educational sessions, the Brand Protection Conference, the Gala, the South Beach party...there is certainly enough to keep one occupied.

I am especially looking forward to the keynote address by Pulitzer-winning humorist Dave Barry. I picked up his most recent book, Dave Barry’s History of the Millennium (So Far), and the bulk of it comprises a humorous history of the present millennium (well, 2000–2007), he begins with a quick recap of the previous millennium. Some jokes are so simple and obvious they’re just beautiful (“the Italian traveler Marco Polo...stayed in China for seventeen years before returning to Venice with two thousand little packets of soy sauce”) but Barry does discuss Gutenberg and the invention of the printing press:

The Dark Ages finally ended when a printer named Johannes Gutenberg had a brilliant idea. In those days, printing was a laborious process because the type was not movable. A typical letter, such as B, was four feet high and weighed as much as six thousand pounds. So, to print a book, you had to carry the blank paper around and press it against the letter you needed, one letter at a time; this was slow and tedious, and the printers tended to take shortcuts, as we see by the 1412 edition of the Old Testament, reprinted in its entirety here:

“In the beginning, etc.”

One day, Gutenberg had an idea: Instead of moving the paper to the type, why not move the type to the paper? So he tried it, and on a historic day in 1455 three of his assistants were crushed while attempting to lift the letter W. So then Gutenberg had the idea of using small type, and within days he printed the first modern mass-produced book, Codpieces of Passion, by Danielle Steele.

Anyway.

I will be covering the show for WhatTheyThink proper, and check back here for occasional attempts at “liveblogging.” I will also attempt live microblogging via my new Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/rromano.