Did editors or authors actually cut out sections of pages and paste them onto other pages? Did they have little paste pots sitting on their desks, and a pair of scissors?
Further, what was the overall process like before computers? I know people used typewriters, but I’ve heard that some authors would insert a long roll of butcher paper (or something) so that they wouldn’t have to be continually inserting pages.
Any other quirky things authors and editors did back then?
Yep.
I was making a staff magazine for my workplace, using a typewriter, a pair of scissors, some glue, and a photocopier. Only seventeen years ago, too. I tried to resurrect the magazine a few years later, but I did it on a PC, and it just “wasn’t the same”.
You need to distinguish between editor and proofreader. In any case, neither would have any need to actually cut a manuscript with scissors and paste things. Proofreaders write special marks on the manuscript regarding punctuation, spelling, etc. Editors deal with content.
As to “butcher paper,” you probably heard about how Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road. I can’t imagine why any publishing company would make this a practice.
Yes. Photo ready copy was the term, and not all that long ago, either. Newspapers were produced by photographing the finished page, which was done by typing and cutting each area of the page to fit. In some cases, typed text was made onto tape, which could be applied to the copy page in lines, broken according to fit. The photograph was then used to expose a large format press plate. In later years the photo was exposed onto plastic film, which was used to coat a press machine plate. (Drum, really)
TrisI think the OP is referring to professional publications–books and magazines which have never been photocopied. You have to distinguish between the method of reproduction and the process of creating the final manuscript which goes to galleys.
I’m curious about the whole process, for amateurs as well as professionals. Interesting stuff, thanks!
This is more of a page makeup technique than an editing technique. Back in the day type was set in galleys, which are long columns of type with the headings inserted. A layout person would cut enough type to fill a column on a page and then paste it down to a board that corresponded to 1 page’s worth of type. Jason Pettigrew, one of the editors of Alternative Press, wrote once that he used to put the magazine together that way when they first started out.
I worked in a typesetting shop where this was done with mylar sheets 2 pages wide and either paper or film type that was waxed down to the mylar. Occasionally we’d spot a small error in a made-up page and a single word or line of type would be cut in.
In the early 1970s, I used to both write (as a co-author) and edit (as a coauthor) manuscripts for journals such as the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) and for “books” such as the Annual Review of Biochemistry.
When reorganizing text I did a lot of cutting and pasting to save the typist some work. Invited reviews were almost all cut-and-paste of older papers. I never thought of this as the least quirky.
If we had had more money, we could have had an IBM Mag Card II (with an 8,000 character memory!) but it had no CRT. When primitive word processors with CRTs became available in the late 1970s we retired the scissors and glue pot.
Even in the early 90s, I was involved in print production of brochures and magazine ads, that used rub-on lettering (Letraset), paste, tracing paper, scalpels, pasteboards, and photo-film. In 1993, I produced a newspaper supplement on a computer using Aldus PageMaker, but the newspaper concerned didn’t yet have any DTP technology, so I had to print it out on A3 paper, and they then photographed it to make film.
“Back in the day” wasn’t all that far back, either. I worked on a weekly newspaper in college that was doing all their page layout with exacto knives, glue, and everything else that’s been mentioned here, when I left in 1995. Photography (my field) still involved film, darkrooms, chemicals, enlargers and prints drying on clotheslines. If I stopped by the office today, just over a decade later, probably 90% of what I remember would be completely gone.
Man, that brings back memories. If there’s one thing I loved, it was working in the darkroom.
Before word processing, the author would hand in typed copy (generally, in what is now called Courier font) using a standard manuscript format. The format is still generally used in book and magazine publishing, though there are more exceptions as people submit electronically.
It would then be sent to the typesetter. In the old days, that meant the type was set via lead slugs, each with a single character. The type was gathered together, held in place, and then used to print a galley. In the very old days, galleys weren’t printed; the lead type was what was used and changes were made by moving the slugs around or by setting a new line.
Later, this was done with photo typeset – just a strip of photography paper. This produced galleys – long pages of text limited only by the length of paper.
The galleys were then pasted up. Paste was eventually phased out in favor of wax. You’d run the galleys through a waxer, which put a thin coating on one side. The wax was sticky enough to hold the galley to the base, but weak enough so that you could lift it up and reposition as necessary (sort of like post-it notes).
In books, the galleys were cut so that there were a set number of lines to a page. The main complication were footnotes, especially when the footnote was at the bottom of the page. It could be challenging to fit in the text so that the footnote reference was on the same page as a long footnote.
Magazines and newspapers were more complicated, since the space issues were more acute. Sometimes a new article would require repositioning, for instance. One of the biggest pain was “chasing” an article: if a new second paragraph was added after the article was pasted, then all paragraphs had to be moved; this could be especially difficult if the article was continued on another page. Similarly, if you cut out a paragraph, everything would have to be moved up.
So there was definitely cutting (with an Xacto knife, usually) and pasting (though with wax, not actual paste) up until word processors were invented.
I worked on an alt-paper in the late 80s to mid 90s (supposedly the oldest continuously publishing alternate community paper in the country…who knows?) and we used this technique. We’d generate the galleys and lay them out and paste them down on specialty graph paper (with wax, as RealityChuck noted) and when we caught typos we’d print out a new line of copy and paste it directly over the old one.
When I worked on antoher one about a decade later we did all layout directly on a computer. Frankly in comparing the two I think we were faster and more efficient using the old-school methods.
I always get a laugh when I see an old book with a word or a line printed slightly askew. I remember the days of trying to get a single word to stick down to the page without getting it completely obscured by wax…
Back when I was at university, I was involved in editing a student newspaper. It was a time of change – rotary offset lithography was becoming popular then – and we get copy set on linotypes in one printing house and printed on a small letterpress machine on long pieces of paper. We would then cut those pices of paper up and stick them on newspaper size sheets marked with blue lines where the columns would be. With the completed sheets, we then ent to another printing shop with an offset machine: they photographed the sheets, turning them into printngplates for the offset machine.
Nowadays, letterpress has gone except for a few very specialised uses, and offset plates are created with a completely computerised system. But we really did cut-and=paste back in those days.
Along with other professions, these were advertising terms when putting togther a “lay-up”, such as a sales ad for the local retailer, that would soon appear in your daily paper, etc.
I did cut and paste for our high school newspaper in the late 70’s. One thing that has not been mentioned is that it was not really paste, but a rubber cement that dried fast, and you could peel stuff off if/when you needed to change something. The last step of layup was to go over the copy with putty erasers and white-out to clean up all the glue spots, fingerprints, etc.
We’d type the copy into columns, but since we used several typists and typewriters, the fonts wouldn’t all match…and of course the right margins were ragged.
Headlines were done using rub-on lettering. The masthead and such were re-used from month-to-month. Yes, it was enough work that putting out an issue more often than that was not practical.
Yes to all of the above. I’ve done just about every single thing that’s been mentioned. Which is why I bought a computer in 1984 to write my first book. Didn’t want to go through it again.
Beyond what’s been mentioned, many authors would take their manuscript drafts and revise them by cutting out what they didn’t want to keep and rearranging the remaining sentences. The final page would then be retyped for a new draft and the process could start again.
It could happen later in the process as well. I’ve taken material from an editor and pasted new sentences in to cover changes.
Absolutely none of this was quirky in any way. The need to be able to move words around in a pleasing fashion has been innate in all writing since the dawn of time. Just because people had to invent mechanical solutions to do so doesn’t make them quirky, even to people who have apparently grown up with computers.
Kerouac’s typing on a continuous roll of taped-together paper was almost unique. Virtually every other writer simply typed on regular sheets of paper. Or else wrote in longhand and had it typed by a professional (or spouse) or dictated and had it typed.
That waxer was a plug-in heater with a reservoir of melted wax, with a steel roller turning on a motor with its bottom in the wax. You ran the stick of copy over the top of it to apply the wax.
It was a hot, messy business, but not as bad as the gunkiness of using spray-mount. There was no way to keep that off your fingers, then tranferring crud onto the copy.
Ah, memories (at least those that I retained: both the wax and the spray-mount were bad for you to inhale all day.)
Yup.
You know those display ads with, say, the silhouette of a cow with the price of beef superimposed on it? One of my jobs was to check it against the copy, and if it was incorrect (or prices had changed), to compose and print a new price strip with reversed tones (white on black), wax it, cut it down with an Exacto, and paste it over the old cow. By this era, newspapers were using computers for composition but not layout, and display ads and other non-photo graphics were composed freehand using clip art and drawing.
A magazine I worked on at the same time was similar, with galleys coming off the machine (they were unstorable and uncorrectable, so if you made a typesetting error, you still had to compose a correction and print it) on a continuous roll of paper, which was waxed, cut, and pasted onto non-photo-repro blue grids with the page size marked. There was a limited selection of fonts and sizes, and you could set the leading (space between lines, referring to lead reglets that used to be inserted between lines in hot type composition) and kerning (space between letters).
For photos, you’d use a ratio wheel to determine size, typeset and paste in borders for the picture, and hope you’d gotten it right. When the galleys were ready, we’d haul them to a printer a couple of towns away.
We used a newspaper’s equipment; I don’t remember what they charged us per foot of paper, but was enough that it made good sense to make a list of corrections, type them when we estimated we had a foot’s-worth, and then wax, cut, and strip them in.
ETA: When I was in Providence, Burning Deck Press used a hot press (using type slugs and striking the imprint) for broadsides and small books, and I was terribly envious. I never quite got up the nerve to ask if they’d let me set their type.
Even though I’ve never had experience with the pasteup layouts of ye olde days, even in the digital world it can happen:
My old paper would send the computer file over to the imagesetter, which would basically expose the file onto a piece of film. Then that film gets developed. If I spot an error and it’s too small or too late to redo, the guys in the pressroom can trim out an offending bit and paste (tape, really) a new bit in if one is handy. They can also use red tape to mask out something before making the plates that go on the press – that makes it so it doesn’t show up.
They’re also capable of crude editing directly on the plate – there’s a pen that will rub parts out (if, say, there’s an extra digit in the date for example) and I’ve even seen them scratch in something small and imprecise with a penknife (the case I saw it was an accent mark over a letter in a person’s name).