I grew up in a printing shop. Offset printing. The kind with negatives and silver plates, big rollers and immense steel paper cutters. Lots of noise, a fair bit of mess, and tons of paper. While I spent hours and hours developing my creative capabilities with leftover paper, I never developed a respect for its value. For me paper was always a freely available commodity.
My kids spent their early years in the same printing shop, learning the same lessons as I did with the exception of learning to set type or the wonderful joy of finger-painting with ink while your father is meeting with customers (a particular joy I only experienced once, abruptly truncated by an angry father discovering his daughter up to her elbows in gobs and gobs of petroleum-based ink and with a fair amount ground into her new pants as well).
One of the corporate logos that is as commonplace to my children and me as the Sony logo on the TV set is to nearly every American, is International Paper.
Recently I discovered that International Paper offers freely available printable posters to educate children about tree identification, function of the various parts of trees, and how to read the rings on a tree.
These are wonderful posters, offering yet another opportunity for me to plaster parts of my home with the International Paper logo.
