Editor's Note Dreaming of a Colder Place

by Bob Neubauer

Philadelphia is just plain hot in the summer—a sticky, muggy heat that creeps inside your clothes and plasters them against your skin, making you fidget uncomfortably as you walk down Broad Street, yearning for a decent patch of shade.

Needless to say, I'm less than eager to venture outside for lunch.

So as I brooded in my fifth floor office one recent August day, eating my ham sandwich and gazing with pity at the pedestrians below, trudging through the 100-degree heat, I couldn't help dreaming of places I'd rather be.

Cold places.

Places far north of here.

Places in...Alaska.

That got me wondering, "Where is the coolest in-plant in the country?" My first thought was Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost town in the U.S.A. Ahhh, I thought. Wouldn't it be great to be in Barrow right now? A quick check of weather.com revealed that it was a blissful 41 degrees in that town. I simply had to find an in-plant in Barrow and chat with the manager.

But, alas, after checking IPG's circulation database I could find no readers there—nor in Nome, Kotzebue or Coldfoot. So I settled for Fairbanks. I called Philip Heine, manager of the Fairbanks North Star Borough school district's two-person in-plant, quite possibly the most northern in-plant in the country (though the University of Alaska-Fairbanks may have something to say about that).

"How's the weather up there?" I asked.

"It's been a cool summer," he replied, stirring my jealously to life. But it was a rainy one too, he continued—a good thing because the rain doused the forest fires burning just outside of town. In summer, he said, Fairbanks gets only a few weeks of temperatures in the 80s, and once every few years it hits the 90s. But on the flip side, he added, the first frost of the year usually strikes in August, wiping out all the gardens just before the weather warms up again. And over the years it has snowed there every month but July, he said. That day it was a pleasant 63 degrees in Fairbanks—with no snow in the forecast.

"And how does the climate up there impact your in-plant," I asked, struggling to legitimize my call. Turns out it's pretty dry in Fairbanks—so dry that static electricity builds up on the paper, causing problems on the press and collators. In the winter, Heine said, the shop runs humidifiers. When he opens boxes of paper shipped from the lower 48, he added, the moisture in the sheets makes them curl instantly. Any tricks to avoid this problem? Yeah, don't open the paper till you need it, he laughed.

Heine just installed an 11x17˝ Hamada perfector and a Horizon bookletmaker to help produce the handbooks, graduation programs and yearbooks his shop churns out. I wondered if the chilly winters made trouble for him in the shop. He said not in that shop, but in a former job, where the print shop had no room to store paper, the reams used to be kept outside. In the winter he'd have to dig through the snow to find them.

There's one good thing about paper when it's been chilled to 30 or 40 below, Heine said: It cuts real nice. The blades slice through it crisply and effortlessly.

Now that's one thing I never would have known, had I not been sitting here, on a sweltering August day, dreaming of a colder place.