When I was in high school, I worked on the high school newspaper. As with most things having to do with high school I had repressed this memory until this article landed in my inbox from an old friend:

Typesetting and paste-up, 1970 style

This is how we did typesetting in high school, and this is how most newspapers did it in that era. And this was considered a HUGE advancement, because it replaced letters cast out of lead.

Students would write the articles. Then on Saturday, the newspaper staff would go to the place where the typesetting and layout happened. A man named Mr. Chapman would take our articles and run them through the “typesetting machines” shown in this article:

Typesetting and paste-up, 1970 style

The “fonts” were letters on these transparent disks, which rotated and exposed this paper film letter by letter at the correct column width. Obviously changing the font was not easy, since you had one of these disks for each font. So the whole paper was done in a single font. Headlines were done separately with a separate machine, as shown.

The paper film would then be developed and dried. It was coated on the back with beeswax as shown, with a waxing machine. The wax would make the paper sticky, and then you would cut out the blocks of words and stick them on paste-up sheets. The wax gave you the ability to pick the blocks of text up and rearrange them when you needed to.

Cutting out individual typos with an x-acto knife and replacing them with tiny bits of paper was part of the fun, as shown.

There was also a machine that would take B&W photos and turn them into halftone images.

So you had the blocks of text, the headlines, the photos and all the corrections on these little pieces of paper coated with beeswax and pressed onto big layout sheets. If you dropped one of the layout sheets, it was a disaster.

Once everything was laid out on the sheets, you drove them carefully to the printing factory so the newspaper could be printed.

It is painful to look at this from today’s perspective… It’s so easy to do layout on a computer now…

If you go back to the early part of the 20th century, you set type letter by letter, like this:

Letter-by-letter typesetting was replaced by the linotype machine, which would cast a set of letters in a line for you, like this (a huge advancement):

The optical/film typesetting machines described above replaced the Linotype. And then computers replaced those.

[[[See previous BFTP - The Federalist Papers]]]