Book about playbills?

[Hari_Seldon]

Many years ago, probably 40, I read a written by a man who had written something like a history of playbills. He decided to print it using computerized typesetting. For reasons that I cannot recall, he did it in the following way: He paid cheap typists in China (I think) to type it on Selectrics using a special ball optimized to be machine readable, a problem not well solved in those ancient days. Anyway, it was then scanned into a computer and the book prepared from that. In the days of microcomputers, it would have made sense to rent a couple for the typists, so I think it had to have been in the 70s. Does anyone recall the book or the name of the author?