A cool article over at the Baltimore City Paper:
Times are tough for a poster company that has been changing with the times and trends since the Great Depression, through circuses and vaudeville and R&B tours, all the way to hip-hop, and the Ciceros are beginning to look to their past to preserve Globe for the future. Last year, they started marketing reproductions of some of their most popular work, such as posters from the great R&B shows of the 1950s and ’60s, trying to turn a profit on posters from the company’s golden era.
Globe currently takes up every inch of a cinder-block warehouse building a few blocks off the commercial strip of Eastern Avenue in Highlandtown. It’s still very much a going concern, from the front counter where Frank and Bob rush to answer the phone to the cavernous and unheated back room, where employees feed corrugated plastic blanks into the rollers of a huge screen-printing press. But alongside the current operation, in drawers and cabinets and sometimes in piles, they have preserved the tools of their trade going back to Globe’s beginning: thousands and thousands of blocks of type, in different fonts and sizes, in metal, wood, rubber, and linoleum–some never touched by printer’s ink.
