NORWAY – A Main Street printing and graphic design shop moonlights as one of the hottest Maine musical venues around when the work week ends.

“In the daytime it looks like regular office space. You can come in and use the Internet and meet friends and have a cup of coffee. But at night it just transforms itself,” said Anne Mallory, owner of Creative Media at 290 Main St. where Tucker’s Music Pub is located.

Tucker’s Pub has fast become a musical sensation for its ability to attract Maine’s musical talent ranging from Jewell Clark to Heather Pierson and The Intergalactic Yurt Band. On Friday evening beginning at 8 p.m., the room is open to all musicians who simply want to drop in for an acoustical jam night. Saturday the hottest jazz, blues and other local musical talent play the room. There is no cover charge. Mallory and her husband, Al, pay to bring the bands into Tuckers.

“We’re doing it because we love the music. It’s about the music,” Mallory said. Bands from Portland are now looking to play in the unique space, she said.

“So many local musicians in the area are just great,” she said of the growing number who want to play at Tuckers’ each Saturday.

Mallory said she and her husband started an open mic night about four years ago but decided to open a pub on Saturday night where people could have a glass of wine or beer while listening to Maine musicians instead of having to travel into Portland.

The idea grew out of a need to find space for local talent to play.

“Music is an important thing in Norway,” Mallory said. When her husband and other musicians wanted space to play along Main Street they found good space without apartments above was hard to find.

“To find good space in Norway without apartments upstairs is really tough,” said Mallory. “This space is just perfect. The acoustics is wonderful.”

The two-story brick Queen Anne commercial building, with its distinctive half round windows, was built as Cyrus Tucker’s Harness Shop in 1894 several months after the great fire of 1894 wiped out the original 1867 wooden Tuckers Harness Shop and much of the west side of Main Street.

“Creative Media/Tucker’s Pub is only the fourth business operated in this building since 1894. Tucker Harness Shop, V.H. Ashton Company, and Grassroots Graphics being the three predecessors,” said Benjamin Tucker III, the great-great-great-nephew of Cyrus in a history he wrote about the building. The harness shop was and is, to date, the longest continuously owned business on Main Street in Norway, operating from 1867 to 1960, he said.

The door to the unique musical venue opens Fridays and Saturdays at 7 p.m. with the music starting at 8 p.m. with a cash-only bar.

“It’s like coming into our living room,” Mallory said. “Here you come listen to music and, oh by the way, you can have a beer or glass of wine.”

[email protected]