The Changes I Have Seen: Personal Reminisces of Printing Processes

I have seen quite a few changes in printing processes in my life. All have brought improvements, but there were a few drawbacks. My introduction to some of these processes occurred in school; others were learned as a process of my job.

 

In early elementary school, everything was taught from a chalk board or text book. At my school, we did not have textbooks for most subjects and we had to take notes from the chalkboard. We hoped to get it all down on paper before the teacher started erasing the board and that we could later read our handwriting.  For a test, we had to wait until the teacher wrote the questions on the board. If we did not write the questions down, getting the test back was not very useful.

 

Then we got the mimeograph machine. Now, we could keep information and tests. Drawback? The tests were getting longer. Often the school only had one machine and there could be a line waiting to use the machine or it could rumple the template and it would have to be recreated. That was really frustrating if you were trying to create a thousand copies of the school paper. The mimeograph process used a two or three part paper with a film that

 

felt very waxy and worked like carbon paper. The special paper could be written, drawn, or typed. Then the pages were separated and the top edge of waxy piece was inserted into a slot of an approximately 8 inch drum. A flip of a switch, clamped the paper firmly to the drum. As you turned the crank handle on the side, the drum rolled the special paper through a tray of liquid chemical and then pressed the wet sheet against a clean sheet to produce the next copy. I remember vividly the smell dampness of fresh copies. Even fourty-five years plus later, when smell something similar it still reminds me of the color purple, which is the color of the copy. And no, that was not the sniffed chemicals providing us a group trip.

 

While working on the school yearbook, we performed most of the publishing functions. We had to compute our budget, plan the size, theme, and layout, track our accounts, perform marketing for advertising and yearbook sales. The entire book was divided into sixteen page sections. Each section was printed as a single sheet, folded in a certain order before binding.  Color, due to its increased cost both in dollars and time, had to be restricted to a section. Each page was carefully drawn on a multipage layout sheet. All text was typed on the page. Any special instructions for font type, size, and cropping were written in blue pencil. Each picture had to be identified on the page and the back of the picture before placing it in the envelope of the layout set. Every page was proofed and triple checked. Once the proofs were received, we had to keep the changes to a minimum or we would incur additional changes. After the final submission we crossed our fingers hoping we had not missed too many things.

 

According to an article by Anne Carney, yearbooks, like other printed books, are a dwindling market and if newer processes are not adopted, they may become a thing of the past. eHow’s article on planning a yearbook makes it all seem so simple now.  Today, electronic and desktop publishing make it so easy to lay out pictures and text to create our own e-books or bound books with much shorter turnaround time. However, many of these lack in quality and design due to less fact checking, less proofing, and generally sloppy work.

 

Maryellen Bailey