We once had a power outage, and had to get a magazine to the printer. We had to make all changes with x-acto knives and wax. Among other things, I had to compose, by hand, an entire lengthy paragraph, grabbing individual words and characters from wherever I could find them . . . and the whole thing had to be justified.
I was going to chime in and say the same thing. Our college newspaper was only starting to phase that stuff out when I left in 1998.
Teletype paper is what was used, and Kerouac wasn’t the only author to use it. I know that Isaac Asimov used it as well. In fact, Asimov was such a prodigious typist that he had to have his typewriters modified by IBM because the “return spring” wasn’t strong enough for him. According to people who knew Asimov, he could carry on a conversation with you, while typing something completely unrelated and never make a mistake. Asimov said that he was able to do this because he was basically able to “buffer” his writing in his fingers. (Sounds more like automatic writing to me, but who knows?)
I do that all the time! It freaks people out at work. Good party trick too!
Re the OP, I did layout for a military newsletter in the mid-80s and used Letraset letters, x-acto knives, and glue. It was all pasted together on large (maybe 18 x 24 or somewhere around there) Bristol board and then when it was all done, photographed or copied somehow to make the individual copies. (I wasn’t involved in that part and don’t know what happened after it left my area, which was the layout, art, and text.)
Same here. We used wax and exactos and the whole shebang. We had laser printers, but they were soooooo slooooooow that it really was faster just to exacto out a word from a previous draft and paste it onto the page. Hot wax-tastic.
Back when I worked on my high school newspaper, I cut and pasted strips of copy onto dummy sheets, using a lightboard, a T-square, and an X-acto knife. Then we cropped and sized the photographs manually. (Actually, the first year or two that I worked at a professional newspaper, we still did that with photos, but we at least printed out four sheets from our laser printer and cut and pasted them, instead of the galleys.) We also manually applied those little black lines that you see between columns or above or below stories, or around photos.
Also, I had to learn to count headlines. Each letter and punctuation mark has a certain value, and for a 1 column headline, you might have 15 spaces (I don’t recall, exactly). For example, a capital “M” was 2 spaces, a lower-case “i” was a half-space, and so on. It was imperative to understand picas and points and such to do a proper page layout.
Now I feel old, but it was a lot of fun doing paste-up the old-fashioned way.
I actually did a bit of old fashioned cut & paste in the late 80s. It was kind of a hybrid deal; some of what we did as a typesetting company was on a Mac Classic (type, mostly – headers, clipart, etc.), but then we had a light table downstairs on which we’d literally cut and paste bits into place to make up layout the client wanted which, once done, we’d then run down to the printers for them to make plates out of so they could run the job. It was kind of a fun job, actually, though the manual cutting and pasting got a bit tiresome. Thank Og for desktop publishing. 
Cutting and pasting went on well into the computer age, before laser printers. In the early '80s papers for high class technical journals were typeset by the publisher, but for conferences you did it yourself. You’d get sheets of camera ready paper, with blue outlines showing where the title and author went on the first page, and the column margins for the text. You printed several versions on your Selectric typewriter hooked up to your mini, printed with column width set to the width of the column of the camera ready paper (a bit under 4 inches) and used a paper cutter to cut right size strips. There was no way to get the page size big enough to fill a whole column. Then you’d carefully glue the cut strips into the right places. When I was scanning in some papers for a best paper collection I put together, I saw some papers with corrections by hand. It was all fairly painful, and was the one place where my kindergarten skills paid off.
In 1980 when I did my dissertation paying someone to type it was still standard. My department just started to allow submissions from a printer. One professor was finishing his, and had to run the entire thing through a printer twice to get the subscripts, so I designed mine to have no equations and only diagrams that could be produced by a printer.
Laser printers changed everything. We have it so easy now - but they eliminated a source of income for grad student spouses.
Mine was one of the last classes in our journalism school to learn the cut-and-paste method of editing a layout. Now a useless skill.
When we were bored, we’d draw a snaking line of Rubber Cement along the copy desk and then light it on fire.
(Aside - could it be that the small world of the Dope has a third graduate of the tiny Defense Information School at Fort Benjamin Harrison besides Chief Scott and myself?)
Wow, the number of really old publishing geeks in this place is sort of scary.
So many memories. We used lightboards, hot wax, Exactos, and some weird Radio Shack quasi-networked computers for my high school newspaper, which at the time was one of only two weeklies in the whole state (yeah, that’s a big deal for a high school rag). The Radio Shack machines (I’m sure that’s how they were labeled, not Tandy) were for body type, but we still did use the Macs for headlines and display ads (we were also entirely self-funded). In my senior year, we transitioned to Macs for all of the type, but still did the page layouts on the light tables with scissors and Exactos. Except, we did what we called the “Senior Magazine” in Aldus Pagemaker, but that’s only a single issue.
After high school while waiting to go active duty Army (transferring from the reserves), I worked as a “keyliner” at a local classifies paper. It was even more archaic. We used a camera to copy clipart from a book, used a typewriter for all body text, used that spray-on 3M glue, and big old can’t-remember-what-you-call-em daisy-wheel label maker like machines with interchangeable wheels for any text except for body text. If we didn’t have precisely the correct size, then we printed it anyway, and decreased the size with the camera. Ah, old Agfa paper!
Aside from all of the tech above, it explains why newspapers evolved as they did. Note that they all have consistent column layouts. Maybe a feature story would cover two columns, or even more, but it was always a consistent measurement. Ads are sold as “3 column ads” rather than as a precise dimension. You get the upside-down pyramid style of newswriting, so that the keyliner can lop off as many paragraphs at the end as he needs without editorial approval.
I was instrumental in getting the first phototypesetting machine at our newspaper. Before that, we used Selectrics to set body copy, and the printer set the headlines.
The machine had no WYSIWYG display - all you saw is your text with embedded codes. I got to be pretty good with the formatting, so I could type a full-page ad in, and print it out and it would be pretty close to what we wanted. The paper was photographic - it came out of the machine in a light-tight box, and was then developed in a stabilization - processor, and came out damp a minute or so later. The typesetter (an AM 3410, if I recall), was a huge step forward, but a Mac and $100 laser printer today would blow it completely out of the water…
I worked with someone who well into the 1990’s was still “cutting & pasting.” She liked to see the typed words and arrange then by hand.
We used a waxer, but kept a jar of rubber cement around just in case.
I work in a plateroom. We maintained a camera room for shooting flats (paper/cardboard mechanicals) onto sheets of film as recently as two years ago. While our newspaper went all-digital circa 2001, we maintained some commercial accounts that still used cut-and-paste until surprisingly recently. I remember the day I wheeled the old velox camera out to the dumpster; the old guy who’d operated it for decades cried, and retired soon after.
Word processing was commercially available in the 1970s. As evidenced by this thread, hot wax and Xacto knives were in use well into the 1990s.
Terms today’s kids won’t understand – pica pole, pasteup, compositor, “wheel,” headline count, “did you H-and-J it?” (hyphenate and justify).
Column width was measured in picas but column length in inches. Even on computerized typesetting, type sizes in headlines were limited to certain sizes, mostly multiples of six.
Raise your hand if you’ve seen an expert compositor/typesetter use a knife to make a comma into a period.
What exactly were the light tables for?
If it was going in the dumpster, why not give it to him? Beside the point, I know, sorry.
That would be pretty cool but I wasn’t there - I was a civilian. Were you two there at the same time?
So you could see the guide rules on the page underneath while you were positioning galley strips, images, rules, etc. Also to illuminate film negatives.
Oh, here’s another one – “rule tape.”
Maybe they would have. But they’re freaking huge and they weigh a ton. How would he have taken it? Where would he have put it?
A lot of mechanical composition work was done in layers, so it was done on light tables, rather than holding things up to a window. Also, plate films also needed to be checked to make sure there weren’t too many dust spots or fingerprints - there were special pens for spotting films.
As for the stat or velox camera, those things were absolutely huge, (envision a short side-by-side fridge and you’d be in the ballpark for size) and there’s not much you can use them for at home.
Photos could be fun. Depending on the shop, the keyline artists might have free rein to compose and crop photos - they’d be given a photo with standing orders to make it fit and look good. (This would be more so in a daily or weekly newspaper, than a magazine.) The keyliner would tape tissue over the photo to mark the cropped portion, then grab the “pro” wheel to find the percentage it needed to be shot at to fit the page.
Talk about a ransom note!
I may not be an expert at it, but I’ve knifed stuff into submission. Commas into periods? M’s into N’s? Almost trivial.