Staples Printing Quotes

They were growing up in the golden age of comic books. Comic strips, or “funnies,” had begun appearing in the pages of newspapers in the 1890s. But comic books date only to the 1930s. They’d been more or less invented by Maxwell Charles Gaines (everyone called him Charlie), a former elementary school principal who was working as a salesman for the Eastern Color Printing Company, in Waterbury, Connecticut, when he got the idea that the pages of funnies that appeared in the Sunday papers could be printed cheaply, stapled together, and sold as magazines, or “comic books.” In 1933, Gaines started selling the first comic book on newsstands; it was called Funnies on Parade.

I wanted love the size of a fist. Something I could hold, something hot and knuckled and alive. What I wanted was my freckled cheeks printed on cheap paper, stapled at the ears, the flyers torn from telephone poles and the scales of palm trees, a sliver of my face left flapping in the wind. I wanted to be the diametric opposite of who I was; am. To get gone. I wanted limbs dangling from the lip of a trash compactor, found by a lone jogger who would cry at the sight of my ankles, my beaten blue knees with their warm fuzz of kiddie hair. Did I want to die? Not really, no. I wanted the beauty of the doomed. Missing girls are never forgotten, I thought, so long as they don’t show up dead. So long as they stay missing.

It’s only the second week of school, and Mrs. Fisher has already noticed that my handwriting is not neat. By not neat, I mean it looks like a dying chicken dragged a pencil across the page because it was stapled to his leg. And that’s when I print. You should see my cursive.

When I didn’t answer he continued. “Yeah, and they are going to miss Max at Staples too. Who the hell is going to run all those print jobs? I can hear the reams of copying paper weeping now.

Great. If nothing else, those two should make for an excellent reboot of The Odd Couple franchise.” “The what now?” Dionne sighed. “The Odd Couple,” she repeated. “It was a film? And a TV show, come to think of it.” She shook her head. “You really do make me feel old.” “Sorry,” said Zoya. “Hey, Dionne? What was it like in the good old days, when the internet ran off steam and the only way you could send an email was to print it out and staple it to a pigeon?