Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, April 23, 1994                   TAG: 9404240006
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By DIANE STRUZZI STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: SPOTTSWOOD                                LENGTH: Medium

ONE MAN'S PASSION FOR PRINTING GOES ON THE AUCTION BLOCK TODAY

For more than a quarter-century, printing presses were part of his life. He had ink in his blood, they say.

He died in November, at the age of 42, among the collectibles he kept at his mountaintop home in Rockbridge County. The cause: a viral heart infection that was undetectable.

The relics he gathered tell the story of a man's love for his hobby and a man's love for his family. He left behind his wife, Penelope, their two sons - Robert and Cary - and a very large, red barn in Spottswood, Augusta County.

Nestled among the grassy knolls of Virginia 620, the barn is where Bob stashed his finds: about 25 printing presses, from tabletops to linotypes; type cabinets, large and small; and 1,657 cases of type.

"He brought it here and deposited it and never got a chance to organize it because his death was so untimely," Penelope said.

She was left to do the organizing, along with Bob's fellow printing aficionados. For the last three months, the small group hauled the leaden treasures around the barn, readying the place for today's 10 a.m. auction and summit of the Letterpress Printers, a nationwide association.

Robert Ferguson Jr., 14, is head auctioneer - confident about haggling over the prices. It isn't that different from reading out loud in his English class, he said.

"But this is hard for me because I moved all this stuff in here and now I've got to move it out," he said.

Penelope didn't share her husband's love of ink. He liked printing; she liked needlework. But she did understand her husband's penchant for the lost art. He always wanted to start a print shop of his own and run a printing-press museum, she said.

By trade, Ferguson was a student, and had recently completed his Ph.D. in systems engineering at the University of Virginia. But his true love could be found in the clinkity-clank of a working press. Five years ago, he bought the remnants of a Clifton Forge print shop for about $1,000. And things just grew from there.

"The smell of the ink and the sound of the press, it gets up a rhythm," said friend and printing colleague Dustin "Dusty" Reyer. When a press is working "it smells like a mixture of oil, cinnamon and cloves. A printer just feels like they're working at something that somebody needs."

Reyer should know; he's been a printer for 51 years - much of that time spent in Orange, Va. He started when he was in eighth grade and hasn't had the urge to quit yet, he said. At 65, he can still be found behind his presses in Madison County, his ink-stained hands working the machines.

"You've heard of some people who spend all their money on booze, the lottery or horses, but [Ferguson] spent his money on this stuff," he said. "It's just a hobby bunch of people."

The bunch started to arrive Friday morning. They came from near and far.

Gene Bailey traveled 800 miles from El Paso, Ill., to the Virginia barn, just to pick up some casts for his personal linotype. Reared at his family's weekly paper, Bailey works at a university press during the day and runs his own print shop at night. Late Friday, he could be found cataloguing each cast he wanted to purchase.

From Baltimore, came Candace and Frank Naegele. Candace was there to collect. Frank was there to carry the collection. And for several hundred dollars, Candace got what she came for: a tabletop Kelsey printing press.

"It's like she's possessed," Frank said, good-naturedly, of his wife's hobby. "More and more the house is being taken up with this junk. I just want to see the results of this."

Penelope can commiserate. Her husband's hobby filled their basement, then the garage, until he finally bought the barn two years ago. Fascinated by the method of handsetting type, Ferguson hit the road for St. Louis, Philadelphia and throughout Virginia, often with his family in tow. The rule: Never take the interstate; always take the road less traveled. He'd take the back roads, stop at the post office and ask where the old print shops were, she said.

"Then he'd call me from the road and say, 'I'll be a day late,'" Penelope added. "And he'd come home pulling a trailer."

"You either love it or you hate it," said Robert Jr., who accompanied his father on many of the trips. The excursions that took them up and down the Eastern Seaboard often included stops at amusement parks and taking in a baseball game or two. But in the end, there was always a new relic for Bob's collection.

She's not sorry to see his collection go. She's kept what means the most to her - an elaborate typeface that her husband collected especially for her.