Make Me Feel Like Magic

Naptha. Say it softly, say it slowly, and be careful not to spit when you cross from the "p" to the "th." Say it and imagine you're rolling the word between your fingertips like dried glue.

The Oxford American Dictionary wouldn't know it, but it's a kerosene-like chemical that we use to clean hand rollers.

For me, naptha evokes the world of The Golden Compass, an alternate universe with thicker roots to its 19th century, in which polyester is called "coal-silk" and rooms are lit with naptha lamps. Naptha was in fact used in lamps in our 19th century, or at least a brief Google search tells me so. I had never heard of naptha before reading the aforementioned book, so in my mind naptha rests as the fuel for soft light that occasionally flickers, even as I work with it occasionally for a different use.

For the rest of our ink removal needs, we use Scrub-A-Dub: Letterpress Solvent from Boxcar Press. It's 81% Aromatic Naptha,* which I suppose explains why it stinks of slightly sweetened gasoline. Some sort of ether makes up 12% more, of interest to me only because it evokes Einstein and the outdated, even romantic, idea that something exists between atoms, between everything, conducting light, holding us together.

That 12% soothes the naptha somehow so we can use it on the press rollers without damaging them. Real naptha, unadulterated naptha is the only thing for the hand rollers, those finicky things.

Even though I know there's a difference, every time I stand at the Vanderbilt 4, a Scrub-A-Dub-soaked rag in my gloved hands, I end up dreaming of low, moody lights and Victorian furniture as I wipe the silver of the rollers back into being.



*Scrub-A-Dub contains 75% of one kind of Aromatic Naptha and 6% of another. The difference is in serial numbers that follow, and as I am not a chemist, I have clumped the two kinds together for the purposes of this post.