Poster Sale

This poster was made by silk screener extraordinaire Ian Cozzens. It was made as part of the HBML Rent Club, which was a subscription poster series I organized in 2006. At the time I was running a junk shop / mystery zone in Worcester MA called HBML, and I realized that there were plenty of people who wanted to support the store but were unable to visit in person as frequently as they would like. So I started this poster series, commissioning a different artist every month to make a poster that commemorates the store somehow. These were sold by subscription, so you'd subscribe for 3 months and get 3 different posters in the mail. And if we got enough people signed up then we knew we had 3 months of rent paid for in advance. Of course we hit a few snags but this pretty much worked out and overall I have to say, this was a great idea. I threw a lot of ideas into this space and they weren't all "regular good", but this one was, a classic good idea, cool and refreshing. This was 3 years before Kickstarter FYI; 7 years before Patreon.

While all the posters were wonderful, this Ian Cozzens one is like the primo example of the set, it's bonkers. If I remember correctly there's 16 colors printed with 8 screens. Usually with silk screening you print one color at a time, on a screen made for just that one color. but if you put two globs of ink in different colors you can print a gradient, fading from one color to the other. See how the green is darker in the top section of the poster and gets lighter toward the middle, or how the red in the sunburst goes from ketchup red down to a dusty coral. Then the lighter color in the sunburst fades as it goes across, horizontally, from apricot to carrot to band aid pink. This printing technique is known as a "rainbow roll".

The toys in the top left were drawn from custom toys we made instore, and the posters in the top right are simplifications of a few posters we had hanging on the wall for sale. Intense detail! The building is pictured in the bottom right. Signed by the artist!

I have 20 copies of this and I put them up already in the storefront. If you'd like one, go check it out, the storefront is outside the castle on the right side (stage left). I also added a few other posters I had in storage. All orders will ship out ASAP via Priority mail.

links/misc

• link to the storefront: [link]
• I started making a website that would be a place for my HBML documentation, and that would be a start to me trying to process or reflect on this weird huge project, 15 years later. Well I didn't finish this first step as such but the website's up anyway and you can look at it. At some point the annotations just stop... Well anyway it's a starting point of a starting point of a wrap-up, and it's here for now: [link]. Does anyone have a thing they do to wrap up a huge project like this? Some kind of ceremony of reflection or fond adieux?

• Ian's website is here: [link]. Looks like it hasn't been updated in a bit but that's no crime.
• Old pal and notable sci fi author Leonard Richardson (who worked at HBML briefly) has a new story up on Clarkesworld, it's an aliens and humans story about how your parents drive you crazy. [link]

Archives of previous posts is here, in the coat room: [coatroom]

To sign up to get these posts in your email for free, click here: [substack]

To write me a nice message, use the contacts page: [link]

To leave a little donation to help in the maintance of this castle, OR to simply hear the sound of a large bell, which is good luck, visit the temple area: [link]

As always, if you're bugging out or need a respite from endlessly scrolling the feed, you are welcome to hang out in the castle as long as you want. :)

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