Cheapskate Press? Glad you asked

           Black Mountain, April 28, 2016 (CP) I don’t usually begin a column with a dateline, but I was about to a few weeks ago, and it was pointed out to me that no one in the world besides me knows what (CP) meant. For those of you who’ve read a newspaper or two in your lifetimes, you’ll know that the initials in parenthesis in a dateline identify the newsgathering organization responsible for the story. You know — like (AP)? In the case of this journalistic masterpiece, (CP) identifies Cheapskate Press.

           I wish I could say that Cheapskate Press has the kind of long and glorious history that the Associated Press does, but it doesn’t. I came up with the name when I assembled two dozen old essays I’d found in my file cabinet into a small booklet and took them to the print shop to have a few copies Xeroxed. I wanted to include the name of a publisher in the front matter for that booklet, but the publisher was me and I didn’t really want to put “Published by me.”

           And thus “Cheapskate Press” was born — not as a newsgathering organization, but as a small but noble publisher that no one would ever hear of, an imprint for the struggling literary artists in my neighborhood. I would comb the village (Greenwich) for authentic Ginsberg wannabes, give them a place of their own to howl.

           If you’re wondering about the “cheapskate” part, you have to remember that being on a tight budget for a good portion of a lifetime trains one to be frugal, and that trying to find ways to save money works its way into your DNA. Besides, I believe had Xerox existed in the 1770s, Thomas Paine would have had Common Sense run off on a copy machine, and I wanted to have something in common with Paine.

           As the years went by, Cheapskate Press was getting tired of having nothing to do, so it was expanded to include a news gathering division. Those who knew me thought this didn’t make much sense since (CP)’s proprietor (me) didn’t care much for gathering news (too much like work). For that reason, the new division never actually gathered much news, although there was some good wool-gathering going on.

           By early 2016, Cheapskate Press rose from the ashes as a very real figment of my imagination, and I began to entertain my options for pressing the Press into service. Of course I had to rule out news-gathering because I wasn’t any less averse to work than I’d been years ago. Plus I was old. An incubator of literary masterpieces was also out because I no longer owned an Underwood typewriter, and as everyone knows one cannot write a masterpiece on anything but a manual typewriter.

           Which leaves only this biweekly quasi-masterpiece.

           And then a warning sounded in my head: “How many times can you write a column about writing a column?” it asked.

           Killjoy.