This week at the shop: a new copier rolled in, bringing that burnt-ozone heartbeat back to the floor. I’ve been building endpapers for The Spy, stacking them like patient files. Next week the tempo shifts—needle, thread, and the slow work of sewing blocks into books.

A knife fight with the Konica Minolta + Fiery—timeouts, hiccups, and settings that felt like they were translated from a cursed manual. Still, after enough test sheets to wallpaper a small room, the queues finally behaved and the press sang. By week’s end, every page was printed—hot, clean, and stacked—proof that stubbornness is a finishing tool.

Why the 7th Floor? In intelligence parlance, the parlance of what I imagine might be the audience for some of the books and objects made here, it refers to the Seventh Floor of the Original Headquarters Building at the Central Intelligence in Langley, Virginia.