Heavy metal machines black lotus3/20/2023 ![]() The God-forsaken heat and glare generated by all those light tables took its daily toll, and in my time paste-up jobs were pretty transient.įigure 6: Wax gets in your eyes. Or having to put your hand in the molten wax to retrieve a wayward correction without which you could not go home. Accidentally putting the galley in the waxer upside down meant scraping wax off the type for an hour rather than facing the wrath of the typesetter and asking her (mostly) to run it out again. When not amputating small chunks of flesh, the paste-up artist could count on any number of other work-related setbacks. “Don’t get blood on the boards!” someone would invariably yell, and if you were lucky, the stitches got you out of work for a few days. If you work around sharp knives, glass tables, and steel rulers, you’re eventually going to take a trip to the emergency room with your fingertip cut off or a slice so deep you can’t get up the nerve to even look at it. Not all my own memories of paste up are positive, I must emphatically state. But an $8 million pagination system finally signaled that it was time to put away the sharp knives and pica poles, scrap the light tables, and turn off the waxer.įigure 5: In the plate room of 1926, stereotypers formed curved metal plates from flat composed metal pages. The Chronicle was one of the last large-city papers to run a composing room, thanks to an unusual mix of union contracts, ownership changes, and timing. It was sad for me to learn that the San Francisco Chronicle recently celebrated the paste-up of its final physical page. But for anyone who worked in a high-production paste-up department, the memories will linger like the smell of Bestine and hot petrochemicals. When the history of page composition is written, paste-up will be just a footnote compared to the reign of metal (300+ years) or the coming longevity of digital pages. It had a social hierarchy of sorts and took place in a unique work environment. Paste-up, in all its glory, was more than just a page-composition technique. Paste-up is not a technique that will likely enjoy boutique revival someday, though there is a moderately active market on eBay for old waxers. And though I’m mostly thrilled it’s gone, I also feel a little sorry for those who didn’t experience it. ![]() No, my coming-of-age in the graphic arts is definitely the paste-up era. ![]() I worked in shops that still had letterpress presses, but they made plastic plates from film by then. That is until you become a cranky old whiner.Īs much as I sometimes want to, I can’t honestly date myself back to metal pages in any way, shape, or form. We say things like “but then, I was a surgeon before they invented anesthesia,” or “my first computer filled three rooms, and generated enough heat to power a small city.” In the rest of our lives we tend to want to minimize our age and experience, but in things work related, longevity is a badge of honor. In every profession people date themselves by the work practices or technology in place at the time they entered their chosen field.
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