LaserWriter II

July 15, 2021
Dispatches from Mac world. In the 1990s, before the Genius Bar, even before Apple stores, there was Tekserve, a repair shop for Mac computers and printers, the brainchild of David Lerner and Dick Demenus, who had started their tech careers in the 1980s and found they loved fixing Macs. Illustrator, memoirist, and graphic designer Shopsin makes her fiction debut with a delightfully wry tale set at Tekserve and featuring David, Dick, their motley crew, and the newly hired Claire, a 19-year-old with no technological experience whatsoever. Nevertheless, Claire feels instantly at home at Tekserve, drawn as she is "to the type of anarchy that believed in small communities and held the promise of a just society. Everyone had said, 'life is not fair, ' but maybe it could be." That sentiment could have been Tekserve's motto; instead, its employee handbook advised, "If you are ever in doubt, do the right thing." Claire is first assigned to intake, where she processes the anxious, needy customers who find at Tekserve "a space that was as if Santa's workshop had made love to a Rube Goldberg machine, complete with mutated elves." The staff benefits from sumptuous Wednesday lunch buffets and Thursday breakfasts, health care coverage, and unexpected raises. With no qualifications, Claire is promoted to printer technician and, at the repair bench, encounters the formidable LaserWriter II, "one of the most solid printers Apple ever made." Learning to repair its rare design flaw, Claire decides she "has found her calling. One that draws on her full mind and body. A noble calling that helps people make poetry and do their taxes." Illustrated with Shopsin's whimsical chapter icons and punctuated with animated--and admittedly silly--conversations between parts of computers and printers, the novel bounces through the history of digital technology, the fey atmosphere of geekdom, and Claire's shrewd, serene observations. Fresh and charmingly quirky.

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Starred review from August 16, 2021
Illustrator, cook, and memoirist Shopsin (Arbitrary Stupid Goal) mixes the stories of a scrappy Mac repair shop’s employees with a history of digital technology in her unconventional and captivating debut novel. Shopsin follows 19-year-old Claire as she begins a new job at TekServe in mid-1990s New York City. Here, Claire finds an eccentric but compassionate family of co-workers and a newfound passion for the intricacies of printer repair. She’s trained by Joel, a Berklee College of Music grad who begged for a job there after his music internship ended. Shopsin cleverly evokes the era with a mix of historical and fictionalized references, as Claire’s interest in punk music and social justice prompts her to volunteer for Food Not Bombs at Big Squat on Avenue B, a stand-in for C-Squat, where the members of a band named Hookworm 68 all live. Shopsin also delves into TekServe’s origins as a tape player manufacturer; the emergence and extinction of Apple’s laser printer; and includes snappy origin stories of figures such as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, all punctuated by pixelated illustrations evoking the aesthetics of MacPaint (Claire recalls being “mesmerized by the marching ants of the marquee” when she used the program as a child). This singular project brilliantly captures the spirit of individuality, innovation, and change. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners.

September 15, 2021
Writer and illustrator Shopsin, who paid homage to the Greenwich Village of her youth in Arbitrary Stupid Goal (2017), memorializes another side of bygone Manhattan in this first novel. Most recently an under-the-radar college student with a fake Columbia University ID, quiet 19-year-old Claire gets a job at Tekserve, an anti-establishment establishment where desperate folks count on having their printers and Macintosh computers wrenched from death's grip, and at fair prices to boot. In brief, hop-skipping passages, Claire describes her dearly eccentric Tekserve colleagues and environs, including a beloved leopard bush fish named Lisa that killed her tankmates and ruins a $10,000 printer with her enthusiastic splashing. As Claire moves up the ranks to fixing printers, she also invents funny, philosophical conversations among the mechanical pieces she repairs, and notices the planned obsolescence of newer products. Claire's stint at Tekserve (where Shopsin herself once worked and the history of which she conjures faithfully in this work of fiction) sometime in the nineties makes for a charming, perceptive, refreshingly original coming-of-age story, accompanied by Shopsin's digital illustrations.

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