Shoebox Stories » Printing

how “real” women make books

cj-madigan — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 05:48:07 +0000

This is how books have been made since the time of Gutenberg in the mid-15th century. And, despite the changing equipment to execute the various steps, the same tasks need to be accomplished: text and images transferred in some way to the page, signatures bound and trimmed, covers attached.

This is why I consider e-books merely a metaphor. Books are composed of atoms – inky atoms and slurry atoms and textured atoms and smooth atoms. Lots and lots of atoms – not a byte amongst them.

print production circa 1970

cj-madigan — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 16:04:54 +0000

A recent episode of Fringe [my favorite must-see tee-vee now that Caprica has not been renewed for a second season] centered around a series of cascading and deadly events triggered by a ballpoint pen. When the agents from Fringe division started investigating, they found ballpoint pens at each scene.

Charlie: When was the last time you saw one of these?

Olivia: I don’t know. Pre-school maybe?

In preparing a workshop I’ll be giving next week at the annual conference of the Association of Personal Historians, I was looking for some images to convey how print production was done in the pre-digital era and I came across this fabulous two-part photo essay series: Typesetting 1970s style.

Those were the days of paper cuts and ink under the fingernails, kids.

Now I have no nostalgia for the 1970s – bell-bottoms and Richard Nixon figure prominantly among my reasons. But I do have a keen interest in the history of our craft and a belief that by understanding this history, we can do a better job with our contemporary tools.

For those of you planning to attend my workshop, we’ll look at historic workflow in detail and relate it to today’s cleaner and faster process. And if you won’t be in Victoria, don’t worry. I’ll be digging into this topic for many posts to come.

a brief history of book printing and binding

cj-madigan — Mon, 03 May 2010 16:07:00 +0000

The other night in my Print Production Workflow teleclass, some questions came up about terminology and how, exactly, the physical book got put together.

Youtube is an invaluable source to help us visualize a process. Here is a curated overview of book printing, from letterpress, the same process that produced the Gutenberg Bible, to the Expresso Bookmaker, and back to contemporary letterpress and hand binding.

If you have just entered book production in the past five years, where all you’ve known is Word and InDesign and blurb, this shows you the amount of hand-work that went into creating books and why they were so precious.

For those of you who participated in the teleclass, notice the workflow aids in the commercial printing, such as job jackets and tickets, physical stations, and quality control.

letterpress

I mentioned in the teleclass that I love factories with clankity-clank machinery, so this video from John Kristensen of Firefly Press in Massachusetts is almost-heaven to me. [Heaven would be actually being there amidst the font drawers and presses.] He mentions the problem of “too many choices” with computers. But even within the limited scope of hand-set type, you will see the exacting [some might say, obsessive] attention to detail.

traditional [commercial] printing & binding

Depending upon your generation, this video might be delightfully retro or just downright irritating [“men” in the press room, “girls” in the bindery.] Nonetheless, it is a very good overview of traditional printing and bookbinding on a commercial level. It also provides a historic context for some of the language still used in digital page composition.

Feminist side note: Interesting that in an era when virtually all women were secretaries and typists, few are pictured as linotype operators.

Another video from the same 1947 series, shows more historic context and the high level of skills once required* . Just because the mechanical tasks are being taken over by computer programs does not lessen the need for judgment and a trained eye. And, even though we no longer have formal apprenticeships, that doesn’t eliminate the need for experience.

*This language—“a growing industry, high on the list of those offering stability of wages and employment, …and real opportunities for advancement.”— evoked the same emotional response—sadness and a sense of irony—as Shelley’s poem Ozymandias.

inline binding

The production of C-Span’s book on Abraham Lincoln. shows the same process as previously, only much faster with fewer operators.

expresso bookmaker

And the same process again, this time printing one at a time in a fraction of the space. Because there is little human intervention, there is also no real quality control, a given in print on demand [POD] publishing.

fine hand printing & binding

Now to come full circle to the Pictorial Webster’s: Inspiration to Completion

This man shares my soul in his love for these engraved blocks and the opportunity to organize them and print with them. I just love all the jigs they use. You can see how labor intensive sewn signatures are. However, the good news for personal historians, is that we often produce fewer than 50 books. So this is certainly an option to consider for some projects.