Early experiences of publishing

I will start by writing about the period 1964-1978. In 1964 I became co-editor of my school magazine and we published two issues a year. The publishing process was as follows.

As editor I both commissioned and received unsolicited articles, reports, poems, photographs and drawings. I edited the written material which then had to be re-typed double-spaced and proof-read. The number of words would be indicated and we would use special type rules to try and estimate how many column inches each item would occupy. Photographs and drawings had to be sized and scaled to fit the make-up sheet grids. This was then all sent to the local letterpress printer (who was also the printer of the local weekly newspaper).

Typesetting was done on linotype machines which was an expensive process (apprenticeships to be a linotype operator lasted for seven years and their skills were prodigious) but less expensive than monotype (where you could correct individual letters rather than having to re-set a whole line if there was a mistake in it). The printer would send the visual material to a specialist block-making company. These were very expensive and once made their size could not be changed.

We would then receive ‘galley proofs’ (long thin sheets of paper) which would be proof-read and pasted on to make-up sheets using COW gum. If the calculations had been made accurately everything would fit perfectly. Invariably some miscalculations would have crept in as well as some type-setting errors (although the skill of the setters would be such that these were far less common that one currently finds in typewritten or word-processed material) and corrections would accordingly be made.

These make-up sheets would be sent back to the printer who would then make up the blocks of type and photographic blocks etc into the page ‘beds’. Page proofs would be pulled and sent back to us for final proof-reading. Hopefully there would be few or even no mistakes still appearing by this stage and once approved the printer could make the final plates and set the printing presses running,. Finally all the printed pages would be collated, folded, bound, stitched, trimmed and packaged for despatch back to our school.

In 1967 I became editor of my university newspaper and the process was essentially the same. Obviously a newspaper looks very different to a magazine and there is a greater scope for the development of a more imaginative layout. This would include typographical complexity (eg the use of different fonts for headlines etc; the use of different types of paragraph structure eg indented, hanging, full-out, justified, unjustified etc) and layout complexity. Essentially though the processes were identical with only the deadlines being much tighter (the newspaper was published fortnightly). We often had to work well into the night to make the next edition.

However the printing world was in the processing of witnessing great changes long before the arrival of Rupert Murdoch in Fleet Street. In 1968 the university purchased IBM golf-ball typesetting equipment (they looked like golf-ball typewriters but produced professional looking font-styled type-setting and could automatically produce fully justified columns albeit achieved in a laborious and clumsy way) and a web off-set printing press. A secretary was employed to do the type-setting. The result was that the expensive and highly unionised local printers were no longer required and everything was done in-house thereby also allowing a tighter turn around time. Short run printing could be done using paper plates which were made in-house with only long-run and photographic pages having to be sent out for metal plate making.

The university made these changes because the Students’ Union was, forward looking, relatively wealthy and intriguingly not concerned about union solidarity! It could afford to make the capital and salary investment needed (which involved spending a great deal of money up-front) in order to achieve a more efficiently produced range of printed materials, including the newspaper.

Seven years later I was appointed to a job part of which was to produce a quarterly intellectual international journal. Here I found myself back where I started using traditional printers who operated Linotype (and Monotype) typesetting equipment and traditional German Heidelberg printing presses. This process continued to be used until the demise of the journal in 1981.

But in 1978 I co-wrote and published my first book and the typesetting was done on a new kind of (clumsy) photo-setting machine. Again this meant that that non-unionised un-trained typesetters could be employed. The reason they didn’t have to be trained was because, like the IBM machines referred to above, the keyboard had the letters set out like a typewriter utilising what is known as the QWERTY layout. Monotype and Linotype machines had very different and complex double keyboards (one being dedicated to italics alone).

The problem in the early days was, however, that the quality of both the typesetting and the printing of the new equipment was definitely inferior to the traditional methods. This is no longer the case although the finest books printed on the best parchment are still superior when produced using traditional equipment.