Paper & Carriage

Released this last fall in an edition of 500 with original silk screened covers by Dan MacAdam of Crosshair. This issue includes writing from Alexai Galaviz-Budziszewski, Peter Orner, Kathleen Kelley, Sam Schwartz, Elissa Bogos, centefold by Scott Patrick Wiener and the first installment of Lilli Carre's graphic serial comic, "HUMS."

An Excerpt from Schwartz's "Nothing Fancy"
_{photo courtesy of Elissa Bogos}

The window at the corner of 18th and Jackson says “Angelo Lanci & Sons” in letters of chipped gold. Behind the glass is the store, a plain white counter with a white scale and a cardboard solicitation for the March of Dimes. There is a roll of a butcher paper and a bell attached to the counter with a string and two strips of duct tape. As the sun begins to rise, Regina Lanci picks up a warm loaf of bread, brushes specks of excess flour off the bottom, and places it in a wooden rack beside four dozen other elliptical loaves that stand on end like columns of soldiers. She sets aside a loaf from the back of oven for Mrs. Russo’s husband, who likes his bread hard. The store lights up as the sun burns through the hazy sky. A steady-looking Regina waits for her first customer, framed by a blued-out picture of the last pope, the U.S. flag, and the bread with its whorls of brown and blonde.

Upstairs Raymond Lanci, the baker, sleeps in the same room where he was born. He is Regina’s husband, Angelo’s youngest son. Now seventy-three years old, he is one of the last men to bake the old bread the old way. At two o’clock in the morning he rose to mix his dough, form each piece of bread by hand, and feed them with a peel onto the tiled floor of the oven his grandfather built eighty-six years ago. When we first met, Lanci said he was beginning to cut back. “I do five days a week now, instead of six. I stopped doing my own deliveries. And we do one dough now instead of two, no more whole wheat on Wednesdays and Fridays.”

This pace might be ordinary for a Korean grocer or a Chinese dry cleaner or Lanci’s own father, an immigrant looking to establish a financial toehold in his chosen country. But the Lancis are plenty established, with three adult sons. Larry sells real estate. Robert runs his own bakery in South Jersey. Steven works for a Philadelphia ravioli company. There are six grandchildren, two great-grandchildren and a third on the way. His sons tell him to quit. Ray keeps baking. “People are always asking me, why are always laughing? Why are you smiling? I say, because I enjoy my work. I’ve done this my whole life. This is what I know. I enjoy my customers—talking to ‘em, growing up with ‘em. I was never looking to make a lot of money here. All I want is a living.””  

Ray sits at the kitchen table pouring milk into a mug of coffee. The burning coal wafts in from downstairs. The air smells like firecrackers. It is seven in the morning. His heavily-lidded eyes are neither awake nor asleep. The skin that hangs like bunting from the eaves of his brow makes him look expressionless, stoic. Regina serves us coffee and buttered bread.  

“Here you go,” she says, patting Ray on the shoulder. “The hospital said he couldn’t eat bread because of the gluten. He couldn’t eat his own bread!” Ray has diabetes. He follows the rules halfway, scraping out the bread’s glutenous insides and dipping the crust in his milky coffee.  

“Alright, babe?” she asks.

“Mmm hmm,” Ray answers. “That’s good stuff, Ma.”

“A lot of things we do just come natural, ‘cause we been doing for eighty years. I do the bread. Regina minds the store. It keeps her out of trouble.” He chuckled to himself.

“Fifty years we been married. And I still got her. Thank God for her. She’s like my second hand man.”

I ask what makes his bread special. Ray says it’s the crust.

“The younger generation wants it softer. The older generation wants it harder. The problem is that the older generation is dying off.” Why not change? “You need the crust. You slice it down and the next day, you want another slice? Take that first slice off, and the bread inside is just what it was yesterday.”

“The crust protects what’s inside,” Regina explains.


Like many in South Philadelphia, Ray speaks often and fondly of the past, a time when family, neighborhood and nation enjoyed a prosperous unity of purpose. Doors were left unlocked. Laws were obeyed. Any man who wanted work could find it. “Them days,” is what he calls this time. “In them days the father was king. You never tried to dethrone him.”  

“His father said ‘You gotta keep the bread the way it is. Don’t change a thing.’”

“In the boom days we made a soft bread and sold it with the original. Then the milk guy wants a milk counter and my father says no. Why? It doesn’t matter. My father says no, and I obey my father.”

“You don’t talk Ray into nothing,” says Regina, proud and resigned.