Also, to line up the registration marks for color separations.
Actually, that’s small for a stat camera. Some of the cameras used on daily newspapers were built through a wall - there was a “light side” where the pasteup went, and a darkroom on the other side of the wall. The camera was mounted through the wall itself.
I bought the first stat camera for our newspaper. I found one that was small enough to fit into our tiny darkroom. It was a vertical Agfa. There were some trade-offs with a camera that small (magnification ratio, mostly), but it did the job, and was a lot of fun to use. The lenses were amazing - you could resolve detail that was only visible with a magnifying glass.
Ahhh, yep. I’d forgotten about those monsters. The last stat camera I’d actually touched (about 20 years ago!) was at a book publisher that mostly did “trade paper” sized books so they didn’t need the capacity to shoot ungainly things like a double-truck broadsheet.
My great-grandpa worked as a typesetter for probably 60 years for the Reading Eagle in Penna. I thought he placed letters like that but instead he used some sort of machine that typed a proof that then could be photographed?? He was the last person using the machine so when he retired, it did too. 
It was a big monster.
That was my father’s mother’s father. My father’s mother married a future cartoonist at the paper and I’ve seen proofs of his four-color Sunday magazine (not glossy, on newsprint) covers. He had black, red, blue and yellow sheets on vellum? that got combined for the final printing.
You young kids get offa my lightbox!
How about “cut and butt” for mitering rules to make a box?
Brunings or ozalids?
Velox
upper rail to make italics?
kerning pairs?
The four sheets would be for the black, magenta, cyan blue, and yellow ink, but they would all be printed in black for the camera. Those are the colour separations I mentioned before.
Composition floor
True story –
Caller: “May I speak to the managing editor?”
Newsroom clerk: “I’m sorry he’s not available now. He’s on the floor.”
Caller: “Can’t he get up?”
He probably used a Linotype machine. They were a wonderful (but very noisy) device that had little moulds for each of the letters, numbers, etc., and what looked like a typewriter keyboard (but with an ETAOIN SHRDLU arrangement). When you pressed the key for a character, the appropriate mould dropped into a line. When you finished the line, it was passed across to have molten type metal poured onto the moulds to create a line of type (hence the name). The type metal solidified very quickly, and when that happened the moulds were automatically sent back to the top of the machine and sorted back so they could be reused. A very neat piece of technology which is totally obsolete now.
YES! That’s it. I wondered how they could afford to have unique stuff set in metal but melting and reusing it makes sense. This looks about right, from the other newspaper pictures I’ve seen of him and it being relocated at one point.
From the description, I doubt if it was a Linotype. Those were designed to create type that was used to directly imprint the paper - so called “hot metal” or “hot lead” printing. The description sounds more like a phototypesetter, which made masters designed to be pasted up and shot photographically, to be offset printed.
BTW, I think the Linotype was one of the most amazing mechanical devices ever created. The story behind it’s development is a good read.
We probably would’ve if he’d piped up, but just moving the thing involved damaging it beyond practical repair. Any service contracts involved in maintaining it were voided at least a decade earlier, and it was in pretty sad shape at this point anyway. Not only was the camera itself as big as a refrigerator (as noted elsewhere), it had lights and a vacuum pump that also made the thing a bit sprawley.
Also, he wasn’t sentimentally attached to the camera itself. As long as it was in the building, he had a specialized and respectable trade; after it was gone, he spent a while stacking bundles in the mailroom. He was pretty old, his English was negligible, and learning the computer well enough to operate the Polaris direct-to-plate system was basically out of the question.
An expert, no. In college we had to buy this huge wonking book that had over a thousand pages of just font after font in different sizes and you had to Xerox the page you wanted and cut the letters out to use them (this was for photo layouts not real writing or anything) and I can say I’ve used scissors to turn a comma into a period. Technically, I don’t think you were supposed to Xerox the page, I think you were supposed to cut it out and use it, but that’s another story.
Speaking of another story, back in the day the editor actually had to know grammar and spelling. Take the following–
Now running the Microsoft Word 2003 spelling and grammar checker on whatever settings I have it on, I can tell in less than a second that there are no spelling or grammar errors there. If I were an editor back in the day, it might take me all day, or some serious drugs, to come to that conclusion.
What are you talking about? That paragraph is nonsense. Whether it’s grammatically correct or whether there are any spelling mistakes is beside the point.
And any professional editor who relies on Microsoft Word’s grammar and spelling checker to do his job for him isn’t going to be very successful.
It was a joke (I assumed the “or serious drugs” line would have given the joke away) however if you ever watch Jay Leno’s headlines there are quite often times where it looks like an editor HAS used a spell checker without really reading the headline or article with hilarious results.
Good stuff! I remember a lot of this technology, too.
I should point out a few things, though:
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Editors and authors didn’t do the cut & paste. Layout (paste-up) people did. When I edited something, I was writing on a manuscript. Generally speaking, somebody else took care of actually transferring those edits into print.
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The technology changeover was far from instantaneous. As others have mentioned, there was still manual cut & paste going on a decade ago. Heck, it’s probably going on now. On the other hand, I created a book (a tech manual) using desktop publishing in 1981–I had to leave big spaces and manually paste in pictures, but the minicomputer I was using handled all typesetting, including multiple columns, page numbering, headlines, justification, etc. I was having type set on a Linotype machine around that same time. There was an IBM mag-card typewriter I used in 1975 that fully justified lines.
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Mixed methods were common. I did a newsletter in the early 70’s (I was still in high school). I built a front page template and a “rest-of-the-pages” template manually and had copies made. I’d compose each issue on a computer and print it directly onto templates using an IBM 2741 computer terminal (basically a Selectric typewriter with a serial port). Pictures (if any) were then pasted or drawn directly in place.
By 1987 at the latest, I was making layouts that in theory could be complete with pictures, although in general the quality of pictures one could use on a Tandy Color Computer 3 (my home computer which was better than anything at the University of Akron at the time) was limited. I had pictures in there as a placeholder but manually pasted the picture in later. But that was when I got the Big Book O’ Fonts I mentioned earlier and learned the hard way to do it.
However, about a month ago, my boss had to put something together fast for Halloween, literally in minutes. So she manually cut about three ads and pasted them together in a different way and had the photo ready copy done quickly–probably quicker than if she used a computer because she could spread everything out and look at it pick the elements she wanted then quickly shift them around on a real sized layout and get something together fast. Just because a method is old, it isn’t necessarily outdated.
As pointed out above, there were a series of transitions made. I came on board as an ad salesman at a small weekly in Oregon in 1988, when they were phasing out the big Compugraphic galley typesetting machines.
By March 1989, the publisher had purchased four Mac SEs (just a month before the SE-30s came out, naturally) to go with the Mac Plus already onsite and we all were trained in their use. That is, ad sales people were expected to create their own ads. This was using Quark 1.0.
Eventually, we were pasting up (waxing, really) full broadsheet pages by laying them out on the Mac (remember the 7 inch screen?) and printing them out in tiles on our singe laser printer. It took six 8.5 x 11 inch pages (the biggest the printer could handle) to equal one broadsheet page.
They’d be waxed and aligned on a big sheet with non-reproducing blueline grid printed on it. The ads were built separately on their own paper with border tape, photocopied cuts, logos, etc. They would be reused week after week until they needed updating or repair.
The advent of computer ad layout led to the demise of the border tape due to
wait for it
Perfectly square boxes! And circles! and ovals! Reverses! Shaded boxes!
Somewhere down the road we acquired a primitive scanner with even more primitive editing software so we could scan in logos, and never worry about a small wax logo shifting or falling off on the trip to the printer (20 miles away).
Oh, and color cutting. In the early days, we had very limited use of spot color. The composition folks would cut goldenrod or rubylith masks - tricky stuff with xacto knives and razor blades.
We would have one or two front-page four-colors picture a year. They would have to be shot on slide film. Then the film would be taken to a process house in nearby large city (90 miles away) and returned to us as film separations (four transparency sheets in black that would be used for the cyan, magenta, yellow and black passes that, when completed, would form the color image. Time-consuming and expensive.
Darkroom involved developing negatives, using the enlarger to make prints, PMT (photomechanical transfer) equipment, etc.
I eventually got pretty good at winding developed film onto the reels, mixing developer and fixer, etc. But the worst was printing car photos. The auto dealers would cram as many car photos into a small ad as possible. Sometimes we were developing photos a half in tall by an inch wide. Even with perfectly square tiny frames (thanks to the Mac) to show where they’d go, trimming, waxing and rolling those tiny shots down accurately on the ad were maddening. And there was always a risk of them slipping or falling off in transport.
The advent of digital photography was a godsend. Just open the digital photo inside of a photo box in the ad after minimal tweaking in Photoshop and you’re done.
Sorry - wandering too much. These days there are no pasteups and only reduced page printouts for proofing on 11x17 laser paper. The whole page, ads, photos and etc. included, starts as electrons on a Quark page which is converted to PDF, squirted down a T-1 line to the press in the adjacent town, which just added a direct-to-plate burner, eliminating the film printout step. Amazing progress.