Typesetting and paste-up, 1970 style

In the 1980s, I ran a monthly 24 page punk rock music magazine using this technology. By 1984, after I sold the business, desktop publishing was already pushing out "cold type". "Cold type" -- or phototypesetting -- was what we called the Compugraphic and Linotype machines that used photosensitive paper to image columns of type. As opposed to "hot type" -- the Linotype, Ludlow, and Monotype machines that poured molten lead into molds.

There was something seriously fun about the mechanics of publishing with cold type. It was a very satisfying physical process, involving all the senses: the smell of photoprocessing chemicals, the warmth of the wax machine, the glow of the light table, our art director humming while wearing his Walkman cassette player. And all the tools: xacto knives, rulers, sheets of rub-on borders and alignment crosshairs. Good layout required an aesthetic sense alloyed with a keen eye, mental concentration and fine motor skills. Maybe not so different from Photoshop now but there was an embodied, kinesthetic and sensual aspect that's gone missing.

We thought the combination of the $4000 128K Mac and $6000 Apple Laser Printer was an incredible and liberating technology. Now we barely remember that "desktop publishing" was an innovation. And now I realize I miss the physicality of cold type.

Of course, there were those who decried all that was lost in the transition from hot type to cold type. Famously, it was a desire to recreate the aesthetic qualities of hot type that spurred Donald Knuth to create TEX, the digital typesetting program.

The local small town county newspaper used a similar process up until about 4 years ago. They had long since tossed the paper tape equipment, and bought a couple of Macs around 1990 with a laser printer. The column strips were set in MS Word, printed on standard paper, then cut and pasted onto large markup boards using the same wax machine shown in those pictures. The boards were then carried 12 miles down to the next town where there was a press (similar to the Goss Community shown in the pics) and the paper was printed every Wednesday morning.

Now, they have Adobe InDesign, and they can produce a full color front and back page. The PDF is transmitted via the internet to a larger press plant a hundred miles away, and the papers are ready for pickup 18 hours later.

A serious improvement. Best looking local county paper in the area.

The missing photo COLON a journalist in a phone box COMMA reading to a copy taker.

Looking at how much has changed in 30 years in desktop publishing, imagine what laborious aspects of web development will be automated over the next 30 years.

While some people may say that arranging the layouts of paper publications by hand can allow for some more personal styles, the time saved from software yields a generally superior end product, making it a no-brainer. I too look forward to being freed from the shackles of hand coding CSS. WYSIWYG, you have some catching up to do!

I did pasteup as a part-time job during high school at a rather behind-the-times paper in the mid 1990s. It was actually a lot of fun -- e.g. flowing a story from one column to another by loosely folding it into thirds then slicing it up.

Less fun was that they also did not have an insert machine, which meant I got rounded up after a printing to manually stuff a bunch of advertising into section C, then put section C into B, then that into A. Ugh.

There were better ways to set type even back then, like the Selectric Composer http://ibmcomposer.org/ (1966). But yeah, things have improved quite dramatically.

My high school had a print shop with some old hand-fed letterpress machines, using real type. Now a media technology where you stood a good chance of getting your fingers crushed...those were the days.

This skips the very first step that most designers would do: It was a process called "specing the type" — a graphic designer and/or art director would mark up the copy by hand writing notes on the typeface, leading, column width, etc. It should also be noted that for ad agencies there were special services to just set headlines with exotic faces that most typesetters wouldn't have.

I didn't completely get it. After so much of work did they produced just one copy.Does Jan Rodger does the tedious paste-up process for each copy they produce? Doesn't the magazine look like patches? What about pictures?