Mollie Edgar!

This is the second time we’ve had a long-distance volunteer of the month!

Mollie Edgar lives in Chicago, but she’s been volunteering for us for about three years now. She designed our most beautiful book, Suddenly My Heart Stopped for Just a Small Portion of Time, as well as Vacansopapurosophobia, and has been a design consultant/problem solver on every subsequent publication. Furthermore, whenever Amy sends her an email that looks like this: “Hi Mollie, I’m in inDesign and I can’t figure out how to make that dohickey shrink and then attach to the other guy,” she responds with “Hello! Just click apple-D, control-shift, return!” (That was a dramatization. We have no idea what hitting those shortcuts will do, but hopefully you get the point we’re trying to make.)

But Mollie has made a contribution to 826michigan that’s even bigger than that: she’s the designer for the Liberty Street Robot Supply & Repair. If we had a dollar for every time we’ve heard someone say, “The store logo is gorgeous! Who did it?,” we’d have at least fifty bucks in our pocket. Not only did she design a great store logo, she designed logos for all of our product lines, and she designed labels for each product. She drew an amazingly hilarious portrait of Isaac Asimov. She also designed our jaw-droppingly-sweet windows, including the exploding robot (Splodebot). People keep coming in and gushing about how wonderful the store looks. That, my friends, is all Mollie Edgar.

She went above and beyond being the designer, though. She worked with us on developing the overall store concept. She sent us pictures of cool window displays and videos of robot-related SNL clips. She scrounged around in antique stores and junkyards. She drove a carload of junk across state lines. She sent us files at four or five in the morning, and then went to her “actual” job all day. She slept all of four hours in the sixty hours before the store opening.

Quite simply, Mollie Edgar is the best. We’ve been overwhelmed with the success of the store, and the positive response we’ve gotten from everyone who’s come in, and we owe that, in great part, to Mollie Edgar. Thank you, Mollie, for creating and designing and recreating and arguing and envisioning and everything else you’ve done for us. We love you and your curly hair. A lot. AND we just ordered a bunch of new products, so pull out your laptop and prepare not to sleep again this week!