Buy last year's poster

      I love posters. They catch your attention. They freeze a moment — an event, a time, an era. They are art, or can be. Posters are the predecessor of newspapers, which began as handbills stuck on walls, and — encouraging to those of us who linger in the inky professions — they not only remain, but thrive in the electronic age.  I designed this poster, and had it produced, hand set using antique type, at the Hatch Show Print letterpress shop in Nashville, Tennesee, which usually makes posters for circuses and country music acts. The edition is limited to only 100 copies, and no more can be made. 
     If you would like one, send a check for $21—$15 for the poster, plus $6 shipping and handling—to me, Neil Steinberg, at 2000 Center Ave., Northbrook, IL, 60062. If you're in a different country, send an international money order and add and extra $5 — $26 total — for the international postage. Make sure to include your name and address. While I would never suggest that the poster's scarcity will make it valuable someday, well, stranger things have happened. When I'm dead and the things are selling on eBay for a thousand dollars a pop, you'll wish you had bought one now. And if they're never worth more than $15, or one buck, or nothing—my hunch—it'll be something you'll enjoy looking at for quite some time, and remind you which blog you should consult on a daily basis.

Atlas Stationers, 227 W. Lake Street, is a Chicago treasure -- a family-owned
office supply shop that specializes in service and also has off-beat gift items.

For a dozen years I've been patronizing Crestfield Cleaners, 1344 Meadow, in the leafy
suburban paradise of Northbrook.