Printing Educational Materials
We started typesetting books and doing layout and design for education in the early 1970s for one publisher: Sky Oaks Productions, Inc. They publish books, games, booklets, cassettes, and DVDs for teachers and schools around the world, all focused on right brain language acquisition - the far and away best method for teaching language ever devised.

Their method is called Total Physical Response, or TPR, and it was originated by Dr. James J. Asher, professor emeritus of
San Jose State University. If you Google "Total Physical Response", you will get over 100,000 responses, and if you Google Books, you will get close to 500 hits; very popular indeed!

In any case, Jim Asher needed a typesetter and booklet printer, and we needed that "one great customer". Which is how we stayed in this business over the years, learned a whole lot about teachers and schools, and developed methods for producing high quality teaching materials at a low enough cost that Dr. Asher could sell his materials all over the world to people who were all on a "teacher's salary". Make sense?

Program Booklets for High School Plays
So, we were already printing all kinds of booklets for Dr. Asher when we got a request about ten years ago from Diana Pleasant, the music director and chairwoman of the drama department at Los Gatos High School—to help her create and print playbills, or program booklets, for the school's semi-annual performances.

Diana had access to Pagemaker through the district's license, and we helped her create the two things she really needed: an eight page black and white booklet with full color covers, and inexpensive full color posters for promotion. Today we work in InDesign and print her program booklets and posters on digital presses instead of offset, but the concept is the same, and Diana is happy because she conserves her budget by doing the layout and design work herself. Our most recent print run for Los Gatos High School included 2,000 twelve page program booklets and 200 posters for their performance of Bye Bye Birdie.

Graduated from Schools to Shakespeare and Jazz
At about the same time that all this was going on, we started printing booklets and posters for other clients, such as the Theatre Festival Ensemble, which puts on Shakespeare in the Park during the summer, and Jazz on the Plazz, run by Teri Hope of the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting Company, for the free jazz performances held in Wednesday evenings July through September.