The Last Distro in Olympia

• Chapter 1 Toner and Rain
• Chapter 2 The Scent of Warm Paper
• Chapter 3 Fourth Avenue Subterranean
• Chapter 4 Half-Legal Stash
• Chapter 5 Postage Due
• Chapter 6 The Long-Arm Stapler
• Chapter 7 Dial-Up Static
• Chapter 8 Letters from Moss-Country
• Chapter 9 Landlord's Final Notice
• Chapter 10 Cut and Paste Politics
• Chapter 11 Night Shifts at Kinko’s
• Chapter 12 Dot-Com Ghosts
• Chapter 13 The Midnight Collating Circle
• Chapter 14 Black-and-White Riot
• Chapter 15 Dead Letter Office
• Chapter 16 A Box from Aberdeen
• Chapter 17 HTML Dreams
• Chapter 18 Silk-Screened Scars
• Chapter 19 Smudged Fingertips
• Chapter 20 Water Damage
• Chapter 21 The Autumn Rain Festival
• Chapter 22 SASE Blues
• Chapter 23 Cassette Tapes and Cardstock
• Chapter 24 The Battle of Capitol Way
• Chapter 25 Flat-Bed Haul
• Chapter 26 Proof of Print

The drum unit inside the Canon NP-6030 sounded like a dying washing machine, a rhythmic metallic clonk that shuddered through the floorboards of the storefront every four seconds. Arthur Finch didn’t need to look up from the cutting mat to know the machine had drifted again. The margin on the left side of the page was creeping toward the gutter by two millimeters with every ten passes, slowly executing the text of an anonymous treatise on urban squirrel foraging.

He brought the heavy steel handle of the guillotine cutter down with a dry, satisfying thunk. Twenty-four sheets of twenty-pound bond parted cleanly, leaving behind a sliver of paper dust that settled into the wrinkles of his knuckles. Arthur was twenty-eight, but his hands looked forty-five—permanently cross-hatched with faint gray lines of embedded carbon, calloused along the outer edge of the index finger from bone folders, and carrying the distinctive vinegar smell that never quite washed out after ten hours around hot fuser oil.

Outside the display window, downtown Olympia was the color of a wet slate shingle. It was early October of 1999, which meant the rain had settled into its permanent winter posture: not a storm, exactly, but a dense, atmospheric drizzle that blurred the neon sign of the Spar across the street and turned the asphalt of 4th Avenue into a dull black mirror. The glass of the shop’s front window wept interior condensation, the moisture gathering at the bottom frame where a rolled-up flannel shirt absorbed the seepage before it could puddle onto the stacks of Dreadful World issue seven.

The shop was officially named Dead Tree Distribution, though most people who mailed cash wrapped in scrap paper to P.O. Box 412 simply addressed their envelopes to "The Distro." It occupied a long, narrow slot between a cobbler whose business was slowly being strangled by cheap imports and a dark, cavernous vintage shop where three racks of corduroy jackets had hung undisturbed since the grunge gold rush of 1992.

"Arthur," Maeve called out from the back corner, where three wire laundry baskets overflowed with uncataloged mail. "Did you tell the kid from Port Townsend we’d trade forty copies of his vegan pie guide for fifty copies of the interview with the shipyard welder?"

"I told him we’d take twenty," Arthur shouted over the clonk-whirr of the copier. "Nobody in Thurston County needs forty guides on how to make a crust out of crushed walnuts and apple butter. We still have nine copies of the salt-rising bread manifesto under the packing bench from May."

Maeve emerged from behind the tower of milk crates, a Manila envelope clamped between her teeth. She had a streak of blue ballpoint ink running from the corner of her left eye down to her jawline, the result of her habit of tucking pens behind an ear that was already crowded with four silver hoops. She spat the envelope into her palm.

"Too late. He sent forty-five. And he didn't include cardboard stiffeners, so the top six have postal tire marks across the cover art. Also, there's seventy-three cents postage due."

Arthur let out a breath that tasted like lukewarm drip coffee from the thrift-store ceramic mug sitting on the edge of the light table. "Put them in the dollar bin near the register. Mark them down as shop-soiled. If anyone asks, tell them the tire marks are a deliberate critique of car culture."

"They're already stamped with 'U.S. Postal Service—Received in Damaged Condition,'" she said, holding one up to the yellow light of the overhead fluorescent tube. "It actually kind of works with his typography. Very industrial."

"Don't encourage him. If you praise the tire marks, he'll start throwing the next batch under the wheels of the Bremerton ferry on purpose."

Arthur wiped his fingers on his canvas apron and stepped away from the cutter. The front door jingled—a tiny brass bell Arthur had salvaged from a defunct dry cleaner’s on State Street—and a blast of cool, cedar-tinged air swept into the shop, accompanied by the wet squeak of Doc Martens on linoleum.

A tall girl in an oversized olive-drab surplus jacket stood on the mat, shedding water like a golden retriever. She had an army-surplus canvas messenger bag slung across her chest, the strap held together with large nickel-plated safety pins. Her wet bangs clung to her forehead in dark, jagged triangles.

"You the guy who takes the personal narratives?" she asked without saying hello. Her eyes darted around the shop, taking in the floor-to-ceiling rows of two-by-four shelving, the thousands of staple-bound booklets filed spine-up in cardboard magazine holders, and the faint, blueish haze of ozone hanging near the ceiling.

"Depends on the narrative," Arthur said. "If it's twenty pages of handwritten journal entries about your boyfriend's band breaking up in a basement in Centralia, we're at capacity. If it's about something else, I'm listening."

She didn't look offended. In fact, her jaw tightened with something like relief. She reached into the canvas bag and pulled out a plastic grocery sack from the Yard Birds discount store, carefully knotted at the top to protect the contents from the deluge. She set it on the glass counter, right on top of a display of three-quarter-inch pin-back buttons reading SMASH THE MONOPOLY OF THE AIRWAVES and XEROX IS A VERB, NOT A COMPANY.

"It’s about working the graveyard shift at the apple processing plant in Yakima," she said, her voice dropping an octave, slipping into the flat, unhurried cadence of someone from east of the Cascades. "Thirty-two pages. Half-legal. Cardstock cover, two staples in the saddle, folded with an actual bone tool, not the edge of a lighter. I ran five hundred at the library in Ellensburg before they noticed I wasn't using their coin-op card."

Arthur untied the grocery sack with deliberate care. He pulled out one copy and weighed it in his hand. The paper was cheap seventy-pound canary yellow stock, but it had grain to it. He flipped it open. The layout was clean: typewriter font—an old Smith-Corona with a slightly misaligned lowercase 'e'—with high-contrast photostats of processing machinery cut and pasted into the margins using rubber cement. You could still see the faint rectangular shadows around the edges of the clipped photographs where the copy machine had picked up the thickness of the paper scraps. It was honest work.

"What's your cut?" Arthur asked.

"Sixty-forty," she said. "Cover price is two bucks. You take eighty cents, give me a dollar-twenty."

"Standard is fifty-fifty for consignment," Arthur countered, leaning his forearms on the counter. "I have to cover the envelopes, the brown craft paper for bundles, the rubber bands, and the five gallons of floor cleaner we go through every month trying to keep the mold from eating the back issues. Plus, I list you in the paper catalog. That’s five thousand copies mailed out between Eugene and Vancouver every quarter."

"Fifty-five forty-five," she said, not blinking. "And you put it on the front table next to the new issue of Dishwasher."

Arthur looked down at the canary yellow cover. The title was set in bold, hand-letraset capitals: HYDRAULIC HEART: THREE SEASONS IN THE WASHER PITS. Beneath it was a high-contrast image of a conveyor belt choked with bruised McIntosh apples.

"Deal," Arthur said. "How many you got in the bag?"

"Fifty."

"Give me thirty. Keep the other twenty in your pack and walk them down to Rainy Day Records. Tell the guy behind the counter with the muttonchops that Arthur sent you, and don't let him offer you store credit for import seven-inches. He’ll try."

She gave a quick, singular nod, reached across the counter to shake his hand with a grip like a lumberjack, and took her bag back. "I'm Brenda," she said.

"Arthur. That's Maeve back there swearing at the mail."

Maeve looked up from her crate, brandishing an empty cardboard tube. "Nice margin on the apples," she called out. "Good negative space."

Brenda almost smiled, turned her collar up against the draft, and pushed through the door back into the grey afternoon. The brass bell clinked twice, high and sharp, before the door settled back against its weather-stripping with a dull thud.

Arthur looked at the stack of thirty canary yellow zines sitting on the counter. The smell of fresh toner was still distinct on them—that sharp, electric, iron-filings tang that never truly vanished until the paper had spent five years in someone’s unheated attic. He picked one up and set it squarely in the middle of the cedar table reserved for new arrivals, right between an eight-page minizine about bicycle repair written by an anarchist collective in Missoula and a glossy, silk-screened quarterly on late-night public access television from Portland.

"We shouldn't have taken thirty," Maeve said, coming over to lean against the register. She was holding a blue three-part receipt book. "Our postal bill from Tuesday was eighty-six dollars. The bulk mail permit is up for renewal on the fifteenth, and Miller’s going to come in here with his clipboard by five o'clock to collect the balance on the back room."

"Miller can wait until five o'clock," Arthur said, though the back of his neck tightened at the mention of the landlord's name. "We had four mail orders from Chicago come in yesterday. All cash."

"Cash in the mail isn't money until it clears the envelope without being stolen by some clerk in Spokane," she pointed out. "And one of those orders was from that guy who sends three five-dollar bills wrapped in tin foil to keep the government from scanning them with satellites. Last time, two of the bills were covered in mustard."

"The mustard came off with a razor blade," Arthur said mildly. "Money's money. We have six crates of the new Burn Collector coming down on the Greyhound bus tomorrow morning. That'll move. We'll clear two hundred by Saturday."

Maeve didn't answer right away. She walked to the window and wiped a clear oval in the condensation with the sleeve of her thermal shirt. She looked out at the street, where an old Volvo 240 wagon was idling at the curb, its rusted tailpipe coughing white plumes of vapor into the wet air.

"Did you see the store that opened up by the theater?" she asked, her voice quieter now. "Next to the bakery?"

"The one with the blue sign?"

"Yeah. Cyber-something. CyberCaff. Six computers sitting on grey laminate desks. You pay four dollars for fifteen minutes of access. You drink coffee out of paper cups while you sit in swivel chairs and look at bulletin boards."

Arthur snorted, returning to the guillotine cutter. "Let them pay four dollars. Who wants to read a twenty-page interview on a television screen that buzzes like a neon transformer? It hurts your eyes after five minutes. You can't put a website in your back pocket. You can't take a computer into the bathroom at the taco place."

"I went in there yesterday," she said, still looking out the glass.

The rhythm of Arthur's cutter paused for half a second, then resumed. Thunk.

"Why?"

"Just to see. A guy from Seattle was showing the counter person how to use a scanner. A flatbed scanner. It takes a piece of paper, reads it with a little strip of light, and turns it into a picture you can send to a machine in Germany in three seconds. He said in two years, nobody’s going to wait four weeks for a distro catalog to arrive in the mail with an SASE."

"SASEs built this town," Arthur said, his tone dry as bone. "Self-addressed stamped envelopes are the only reason the Olympia main branch hasn't laid off half their sorting staff. A website doesn't smell like ink. It doesn't have an address you can visit when you're hitchhiking through the state. You can't trade a webpage for a box of dried apricots and a seven-inch record."

"I'm not saying it's better, Arthur. I'm saying it's four dollars for fifteen minutes, and the place had nine kids from the college sitting in there at three on a Wednesday."

Arthur gathered the trimmed sheets of the squirrel treatise and stacked them neatly, tapping their edges against the hard surface of the table to square them up. He reached for the long-arm stapler, an industrial steel beast bolted directly into three inches of reclaimed Douglas fir.

"The college kids will get tired of it when their fingers cramp from the plastic keys," he muttered.

He slid the first set of pages under the stapler’s head, lined up the center fold with his fingernail, and brought his palm down on the broad rubber cap. The staple drove through the paper with a heavy, solid clack, its steel prongs curling tight against the underside of the spine. He shifted the booklet four inches, pressed again, and the zine was born—stiff, flat, and legible, ready to survive being dropped in a puddle or stuffed into the bottom of a pack for a cross-country train ride.

"How many more of those do you have?" Maeve asked, turning around from the window.

"Eighty," Arthur said. "Then forty of the zine about tree sitting in the Willamette, then we have to bag the catalog proofs."

She sighed, a sound of resignation mixed with the quiet, stubborn rhythm of their daily life, and walked back to the packing table. She picked up a wooden roll of brown gummed paper tape and dipped a sponge into a ceramic bowl of water.

"Fine," she said, her fingers moving with the mechanical grace of someone who had sealed ten thousand parcels before turning twenty-five. "Give me the tape. But when Miller comes in here, you're the one talking to him. I’m not spending twenty minutes listening to him explain the depreciation of floor wax again."

"Deal," Arthur said, sliding another set of pages into the throat of the stapler.

Outside, the rain gathered strength, drumming a steady, hollow tattoo against the high aluminum awning above the entryway, drowning out the distant hiss of traffic from the freeway bridge, leaving nothing in the room but the metallic clonk of the copier, the dry report of the steel staples, and the quiet, stubborn scrape of paper moving from hand to hand.

The front radiator near the button display had a habit of thermal expansion that sounded like someone hitting a copper pipe with a brass hammer every twenty minutes. When it knocked, Arthur usually took it as a signal to check the fuser temperature on the Canon. The machine ran hot when left idling, radiating a heavy, toasted-grain smell that mingled with the damp wool of their coats drying on the pipe rack in the corner. Warm paper had its own distinct odor depending on the manufacturer: Union Camp sheet-fed stock tasted vaguely of pine tar when the steam came off it, while the cheap imported offset paper from Tacoma smelled like chlorine and sour broth.

Maeve was crouched on a milk crate behind the counter, filling small glassine envelopes with tiny square patches of cloth. Each patch had been screen-printed with a crude silhouette of an electric tower struck by lightning.

"If Miller comes in here smelling like stale cigars and hair tonic, don't mention the roof leak over the foreign distro rack," she said without looking up from her work. "He'll just tell us we're running too much humidity through the place with the kettle."

"The kettle's been off since noon," Arthur said, smoothing down the edges of a fresh stack of sixty-pound legal stock. "And the leak isn't from humidity. It's from the downspout out back being choked with fir needles. I told him three weeks ago that if he didn't clean the gutters, the water was going to find the electrical conduit above the furnace."

"He doesn't care about the conduit, Arthur. He cares about the building being rezoned for a espresso bar with granite counters. He told the dry cleaner that by the turn of the century, half these storefronts are going to be dot-com administrative offices or boutique candle shops."

"It's already ninety-nine," Arthur said, sliding his ruler across a sheet of black cardstock. "The century's over in two months. I don't see any granite counters coming down Fourth Avenue."

The front bell gave a single, hesitant double-jingle. It wasn't the landlord. Miller never knocked or jingled gently; he rattled the brass latch like an inspector serving an eviction notice.

Instead, a teenager with a wide brimmed corduroy hat and a surplus jacket three sizes too large stepped through the door, clutching an armful of padded mailers against his stomach like a football. Rain dripped off the frayed cuffs of his jeans onto the linoleum, forming tiny dark beads that refused to soak into the wax.

"Distro?" he asked, his voice cracking slightly on the second syllable.

"Depends," Maeve said, leaning over the counter. "You buying, trades, or dropping off?"

"Dropping off," the kid said. He set the padded mailers down with extreme care, as if they contained glass slides rather than newsprint. "It's issue three of Subterranean Dialect. The printer in Chehalis finally finished the run. Five hundred copies."

Arthur walked over, dusting paper crumbs off his canvas apron. He picked up one of the fresh zines. The ink was so fresh it slightly tacky against his thumb. The smell hit him instantly—pure, pungent petroleum solvent and warm newsprint, the hot smell of a web press running at three thousand impressions an hour.

"Web press?" Arthur asked, thumbing through the twenty-four pages. "Who funded this?"

"My granddad gave me his old riding mower to sell," the kid said, wiping his nose with the back of his sleeve. "Got three hundred bucks for it at the swap meet in Tenino. Put every cent into the deposit for the press time. Chehalis Web Offset did it on their end-of-run newsprint remnants."

"Newsprint yellows in six months if it catches any daylight," Arthur said, though his eyes were already scanning the page margins. The registration was surprisingly tight for a cheap regional press run. The photo collages—grainy halftones of abandoned timber mills and local punk shows—were crisp, the blacks rich and oily. "And it bleeds if you use a highlighter."

"Nobody highlights a zine about night-shift security guards," the kid said defensive. "It's meant to be read on a bus and thrown away, or passed around until the staples fall out."

"Fair point," Maeve said, reaching into the till to pull out their consignment ledger. "What's the cover price?"

"A dollar-fifty. Or a two-cent stamp and three crisp dollars for two issues if they order by mail."

"Keep it simple," Arthur said. "Dollar-fifty cover. We take thirty copies on consignment. If twenty sell by Thanksgiving, we'll order fifty more and put a cover feature in the holiday mailer."

"You really do a holiday mailer?" the kid asked, his eyes wide. "My cousin in Spokane said you guys had a list of two thousand names."

"Twenty-eight hundred," Maeve corrected him with a hint of pride, penning his name into the thick ledger bound in green binder's cloth. "And forty international subscribers in places like Melbourne and Leeds. But if you want to be in the holiday list, you have to furnish us with three hundred flat order forms by Tuesday. Standard half-page, black ink on white or bright paper. No neon pink. It messes up our collating sorter."

The kid nodded rapidly, looking at the floor-to-ceiling rows of zines like a kid looking at a rack of comic books in 1955. "I can do that. I've got a mimeograph in my dad's garage. I can crank out three hundred forms in an hour."

"Mimeograph ink smudges when we bundle it with the catalog," Arthur warned. "Xerox or offset only. Use the coin-op machine at the county library if you have to. It's four cents a page if you buy the copy card from the desk clerk."

After the kid left, his boots making a wet slush-slush sound down the sidewalk toward the record store, Arthur carried the thirty copies of Subterranean Dialect over to the sorting bench. He laid them out flat to let the press ink cure. Fresh web-offset ink was notoriously unstable in high humidity; if left stacked too tightly in an unheated room, the oil-based pigment would migrate from the front cover of one issue to the back cover of the next, leaving a ghost image of backwards text across the artwork.

"He's got good alignment on his columns," Maeve remarked, walking over to examine the center spread. "He used a grid. Most of these kids just slap text down at twenty-degree angles and call it expressionism."

"Expressionism doesn't fit fifty words to an inch," Arthur said, picking up his bone folder—a smooth, pale sliver of real cattle bone he’d bought at a bookbinding supply shop in Portland five years ago. "If people wanted to read diagonal chicken scratches, they'd buy modern art catalogs. Zines are for reading under a thirty-watt bulb in a room with bad heat. The typography needs to stand up."

He brought the flat side of the bone folder down along the spine of a fresh stack of catalog pages he was preparing for the evening mail run. The tool made a sharp, dry zip against the paper, flattening the fold until the crease was thin and hard as an edge of tin.

The rear door—the one that opened into the damp alley behind Fourth Avenue where the dumpsters lived—rattled against its frame. Three heavy, slow thuds followed.

"Speaking of bad heat," Maeve murmured, stepping back toward the counter.

Arthur laid the bone folder down squarely on his cutting grid and walked to the back door. He unlatched the heavy iron slide bolt and pulled the heavy fir door inward.

Miller stood on the cracked concrete step, wrapped in a heavy tan trench coat that had seen better decades. He held a wet canvas umbrella in one hand and a thick leather-bound ring ledger under his arm. Rain dripped off the point of his umbrella onto his scuffed oxfords.

"Finch," Miller said, stepping inside without waiting for an invitation. He pulled his hat off, revealing a sparse fringe of grey hair plastered against a reddish scalp. He immediately sniffed the air, his nose twitching like an old terrier sniffing a badger hole. "Smells like chemical solvents in here. You running industrial chemicals through those copy machines?"

"It's newsprint ink," Arthur said, shutting the alley door against the blast of cold air. "Fresh off the press from Chehalis."

"It's a fire hazard is what it is," Miller said, shuffling toward the main floor with short, heavy steps. He looked up at the ceiling, where two copper pipes ran parallel to the old pressed-tin panels. "I got the city inspector coming by next Thursday for the structural assessment on the block. He sees twenty thousand pounds of loose paper stacked six feet deep on old floor joists, he's gonna raise the insurance rider. You know what an insurance rider costs on a wooden structure built in 1908?"

"The floor joists are six-by-twelve rough-sawn fir, Mr. Miller," Maeve said from the counter, her voice dropping into a flat, polished register that Arthur knew meant she was three seconds from throwing a heavy stapler at his head. "They held three tons of cobbler's leather for thirty years before we moved in."

"Leather doesn't burn like paper, young lady," Miller snapped, turning his small, round spectacles toward her. "Paper burns at four hundred and fifty degrees. I read a book about it. Or saw a show."

"451," Arthur said softly. "Ray Bradbury."

"Whoever it was, he was right," Miller barked. He set his leather ledger on the edge of the light table, right on top of a draft layout for an interview with a radical librarian from Eugene. "Rent went up five percent on the first. You're four days late on the October differential, plus the thirty dollars for the water bill."

"The water bill is supposed to be split with the vintage shop," Arthur said, crossing his arms over his canvas apron. "And their back sink has been running continuously since August. You can hear it hum through the wall."

"Their lease is triple-net," Miller said, tapping his thick index finger against his ledger. "They pay their share. You pay yours. Four hundred and fifteen dollars total, Finch. Cash or cashier's check. No third-party postal money orders wrapped in greasy foil."

"We have sixty dollars in cash and three hundred in valid U.S. Postal Service money orders right here," Maeve said, sliding a neat stack of green-and-yellow paper slips across the glass. "They're as good as gold. Better than gold—they're backed by the Federal Government."

Miller picked up the stack of money orders and leafed through them with a moistened thumb. He looked at each one suspiciously, holding them up against the overhead fluorescent tube to check for watermarks.

"Twenty dollars from Idaho... fifteen from Boise... eight dollars from some place called Humptulips," Miller grumbled. "It takes me twenty minutes at the bank counter just to endorse these damn things. The teller looks at me like I'm running a horse-racing wire."

"Money's money," Arthur repeated, his hand resting on the smooth wood of the work table. "It clears. We've never missed a month in four years."

Miller pocketed the slips, pulled an old fountain pen from his breast pocket, and scribbled a line in his ledger. He didn't offer a paper receipt; he never did unless pressed.

"Times are changing, Finch," Miller said, capping the pen with a dull metallic click. "The guy who owns the block across from the lake just leased three thousand square feet to a firm out of Bellevue. They build software for credit card validation. Paid two years up front in stock options and certified funds. No paper money orders. No boxes of old booklets. Just twenty lines of fiber-optic cable coming out of the pavement."

"Software doesn't keep the rain out of your shoes," Arthur said.

"It pays six dollars a square foot," Miller snapped back, adjusting his collar. "You're paying ninety cents. Think about that next time you're taking in thirty bundles of newsprint from Chehalis. Next year, the whole street's gonna be wired. The city's putting in new light poles with banner banners for the downtown revitalization project. They don't want grey paper fliers stapled to the phone poles anymore. They're hiring crews with pressure washers to scrape 'em off."

He took his umbrella, gave Arthur a long, sour look that suggested he considered every sheet of twenty-pound bond in the building a personal insult to his ledger balance, and marched out the front door. The brass bell gave its sharp, cheerful jingle as he pushed into the drizzle, completely out of sync with his mood.

Arthur stood silent for a long moment after the door closed. The smell of his damp wool coat seemed heavier now, mixed with the faint tang of Miller's hair tonic lingering near the front glass.

"He's full of it," Maeve said, coming around the counter. She picked up the bone folder he’d set down and turned it over in her hands. "The city can't afford pressure washers for every telephone pole between here and the port. It takes three men two hours just to scrape one pole outside the Spar."

"He's not full of it about the rent," Arthur said. "Ninety cents a square foot was high two years ago. Now it's baseline."

"We can sell more back issues," she said, though her voice lacked conviction. "We have forty boxes of Pagan Bus Driver in the cellar. We could bundle them into five-issue packs for four dollars."

"Nobody wants four issues of Pagan Bus Driver," Arthur said gently. "Issue two had the article about the transmission repair, but three through seven were mostly bad poetry about the I-5 corridor."

He walked back to the Canon printer, opened the top cover, and peered into the glass platen. A faint film of grey toner dust had accumulated around the margins of the mirror. He pulled a yellow lint-free cloth from his apron pocket and began wiping the glass in small, circular motions, cleaning away the ghosts of a hundred pasted-up pages—scraps of typewritten manifesto, half-tone photographs of freight trains, hand-drawn maps of secret camping spots in the Olympic foothills.

"We need a big run," Arthur said, watching the yellow cloth turn grey. "Something that moves five hundred copies in a week. Not thirty here and twenty there."

"Like what?" Maeve asked. "The Seattle WTO conference is coming up in November. Everybody's talking about it. The kids from the collective on Adams Street are printing up a thousand copies of that legal rights handbook."

Arthur paused, his hand stationary on the glass. "Who's printing it?"

"They were gonna take it to Kinko's on Capitol Way," she said. "They said Kinko's has the high-speed Xerox DocuTech that does three thousand pages an hour with double-sided automatic folding."

"Kinko's charges five cents a side for short runs," Arthur said, his voice dropping into a low, competitive register. "And their staple heads are set for light paper. They double-fold twenty-pound stock and the spine looks like a crushed soda can. The staples pop out as soon as you open the booklet flat."

"Arthur..."

"We can do it for three and a half cents," Arthur said, turning around. "We have two rolls of seventy-pound tan cardstock for the covers left over from the forestry catalog. We use the long-arm stapler with the heavy wire. The spines will be flat enough to stack twenty high without leaning."

"It's eighty pages, Arthur," Maeve said, leaning back against the light table. "Eighty pages double-sided is twenty sheets per book. A thousand copies is twenty thousand sheets. Forty thousand impressions on that Canon machine. It'll throw its drive belt halfway through the run."

"The belt's new," Arthur lied. He’d replaced the primary tensioner with a notched fan belt from an '81 Dodge Colt three months ago, but it had held through four hundred copies of the Missoula bicycle repair guide without slipping more than a sixteenth of an inch. "We run it at night. Ten thousand pages an hour if we keep the fuser clean and don't let the paper tray dry out."

Maeve looked at him for a long time, the fluorescent light bouncing off her wire-rimmed earrings. Outside, the rain was coming down harder now, a steady, thick drumbeat against the display window that blurred the yellow tail-lights of the four o'clock bus crawling up Fourth Avenue.

"If we blow the drum unit," she said carefully, "we don't have three hundred dollars for a replacement from the supply house in Tacoma. We'd be doing catalog collating by hand with glue sticks."

"The drum's got fifty thousand impressions left in it," Arthur said, though he hadn't checked the meter count on the side panel since mid-summer. "I'll walk down to the Adams Street house after we close. I'll tell them three and a half cents a side, plus we bundle three hundred copies into our regional mail-order list for free."

Maeve let out a long, slow breath that smelled of cinnamon tea. She walked back to her milk crate, picked up her glassine envelopes, and slid three small cloth patches inside one before sealing the flap with a thumb-press.

"Tell them three cents if they bring their own paper," she said without looking up. "And tell them they have to help collate. My fingers are still numb from the Missoula project."

Arthur didn't answer. He turned back to the Canon, closed the top glass lid with a soft rubber thump, and flipped the main power toggle on the side panel.

The machine came to life with its familiar, shuddering groan—the heavy cooling fan spinning up first with a dry whistle, followed by the deep, internal thrum of the heating element coming up to temperature. Deep inside the steel belly of the machine, the halogen exposure lamp flickered, cast a bar of bright, brilliant white light across the darkened glass, and then settled into a steady, warm glow.

Arthur stood there for a moment with his palm rested flat against the metal top plate, feeling the heat rise through the sheet steel into his cold fingers. The smell of warm toner began to fill the small space between the counter and the shelving racks, sharp and dry and full of promise, pushing the smell of the damp alley and Miller's stale hair tonic back out toward the street. He picked up his bone folder, aligned the next stack of paper against his thumb, and waited for the light to green.