Does anyone know how publishers designed books before computers? It came up last night in conversation and I realised I have no idea how layouts happened pre desktop publishing! #Publishing
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It was literal cut and paste, wasn’t it? You had a big board and you laid blocks of printed text out on it and moved them around to figure out the layout.
Pre computers (and before printers were commonly available) designing books/mags was a manually intensive, expensive pain in the ass. I talk a little about it in this recent Guardian interview. Also, Google hot metal printing process! That stuff was just bonkers!
Yeah. One of my earliest purchases after I started working at ZZAP. That thing really was awesome. Went with me everywhere, and was only replaced when I got a Walkman Pro (which I still have and will have to be prised from my cold, dead hands). 😀
Don’t forget the pin bar. Everything was attached to a pin bar to make sure every page of a mag lined up to the same grid. Then you had the roll waxer with which to glue B&W illustrations (photographic repros) to the layout. Transparencies for colour illos, or a 9-sheet acetate colour separation.
I came into magazines in '91 as a teenager, and they were using Quark Xpress by then, but there was still all the physical tools, Letraset sheets, etc hanging around the office. They'd sometimes get dusted off for a tricky cover.
Yeah, Quark Xpress was revolutionary. It all seemed like a very rapid change t’me. In ‘89 we were still doing paste-up physically and the book would ultimately be put together at the printers; by ‘94 all preproduction had moved to the in-house publishing computers. Which were mostly macs.
When Marvel UK were changing over to computers they dumped loads of unwanted Letraset, letters and dotscreens, so I took them. All the dotscreens and zip-a-tone FX in Hugo Tate and other Deadline strips by me is courtesy of various rescued Letraset sheets from Marvel UK.
Probably still got some of ‘em in a drawer somewhere! I kept a lot of them for years, and scanned them when I had a scanner so I could repro them digitally as resource layers in PSDs. The digital files are archived somewhere, long lost, but the physical artefacts are still around.
Ahh. I miss the smell of the hot waxer in the morning… it smelled like journalism!
We used a roller machine to make the back of typeset galleys tacky for sticking down, along with ruby lith and rule tape and cow gum
Knowing the mechanical process still helps
As editor, I'd still have to check the four-colour separations on film sheets, held together with masking tape, watching out for any rogue RGB images that had slipped through. Maybe splash out on a chromalin for covers we weren't sure about. Looking back, it was a weird mix of digital and physical.
It absolutely was! And lawd, “chromalin!” There’s a word I haven’t heard for years. All that arcane printing jargon will probably die with our generation…!
There was a documentary about the NME where Danny Baker said in the 70s he often used to take that week's pages to the printers and would fill gaps on the spot by scribbling new bits of copy and handing them to the typesetter.
Don’t get me started on the typesetting. It feels incredible to me now that you’d type out what you wanted to see in print, send it away, then send it back for corrections. Took days. Sometimes you’d do last-minute splicings with a scalpel blade and the waxer to correct a missed spelling error.
I remember on Doctor Who Magazine somebody had made a joke about Princess Diana a day or two before she died. There was no time to re-do the page, so we just scraped the text off the acetate sheet before it went to the printers.
I was taught Quark for a bit, back when InDesign first came on the scene. Our teachers scoffed at Adobe, saying Quark would be around forever.
Forever.
Forever.
Physically cutting and pasting images and typed out columns of text, plus Letraset. And a machine used to create enlarged or reduced text / pics. That's how mags were done. Presumably books were the same but I'm keen to read the replies.
As an apprentice, my dad started off hot metal typesetting all sorts of publications before moving on to linotype and eventually wysiwyg stuff. I grew up around rostrum cameras, wax adhesive, bromides, scalpels, cow gum. Fantastic smells!
Then as a ten year old I remember him bringing home a beige Apple Macintosh with a copy of Illustrator ‘88 - I still have some birthday invitations I designed using it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5lyQ-kp2Ck
Sorry but I’m just imagining those people in medieval times all over the world painting and doing calligraphy in big beautiful books of parchment or whatever that was…
Lots of grid boards, xacto knives, and machines for making text sticky so it could be moved around in white cardboard. Was how my art team worked on marketing stuff (brochures, slit cards) and covers. 1980s.
The pen may be mightier than the sword but for many years, relied upon it. There’s some kind of parable or metaphor or fable to be extracted from that!
In the design shop at a university I worked in in the late 80s/early 90s just as the transition to page-based layout was happening, we put used X-Acto blades into an empty aluminum soda can. It weighed several pounds when full—exceedingly dangerous!
Pre desktop publishing we also had computers. You would write or import your text, have the computer arrange it in suitable width, and then print lenghts of type that was cut and mounted to form the layout. This image was used to make the printing plate. 1/3
Desktop publishing also used phototypesetting - we just cut out the whole "exacto knife and hot wax" montage step. Now the layout was made on the computer and the whole page or spread was printed on paper and made into a printing plate. Or later printed directly to plate. 2/3
Before phototypesetting and computers there was various automation in typesetting starting with Gutenbergs original loose types.
Most notably the linotype machine that could cast whole typed lines of text from hot metal.
I am 62 and saw linotype machines but never worked with one. 3/3
This is in my personal collection, a newspaper stereo plate (1970s); partially broken, still about 40 lbs/18 kg. Soon to be donated to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library at the Ohio State University.
I have a proof of a 1940s illustrated edition of Wuthering Heights and it’s sort of cobbled together out of a previous edition with illustrations pasted in and hand written position notes
Funny enough, I talked to a printing techniques enthusiast the other week. He had a novel template that has the bleed and edge measured out, then you painstakingly put the letters in the press. Gutenberg got like 20 books out per year...which was still faster than the handwritten copies.
@jazrignall.bsky.social wrote about this in his recently released book & could probably tell you! Sounds like it involved lots of sticky tape and faith?
Drag in camera-ready proofs to prepress. They yell at you for being late. You yell at them for expenses. They make plates and schedule printing for wee hours. Muscular men put their arms into massive machines. At 2am, inspect the print run. Then at 8am, publisher calls about bad typos.
It's funny how quickly digital technology took over - I didn't really touch Photoshop until the mid '90s but now I marvel how I managed to produce comic pages without it! Sometimes when I'm drawing on paper these days I attempt to 'Ctrl Z' when I make a mistake!
Working in an ad agency in the mid-90s, at one point I was so close to burning out I dropped my house keys as I walked up the path and was baffled that Control-Z didn't undo the error.
HA! I'm only just starting to draw digitally and I fear I'll start doing that pretty quick when drawing on paper (well, tapping with my fingers given that's how you do it in procreate)
I'm glad to hear that drawing on cels is a universally bad drawing experience because as someone trying to learn cel animation in this day and age, I keep thinking maybe I'm just buying the wrong kinds of inks for it. 🥲
I never enjoyed it, always felt like a necessary evil - & shooting them is a nightmare - they're designed to attract every speck of dust & lint in the immediate 5 mile radius! ; )
The control z thing I relate to. The thing is when I try to do a page with physical ink now, far from finding it harder, it's actually much quicker. I don't think I ever inked that fast before computers. The problem is I'm so used to using layers now that it's pointless
Not even mentioning casting off and copy fitting tables (every typeface came with copy fitting tables!)… if you didn’t estimate the length of the book (not picture books) how would you know how much paper stock to order and how much it was going to cost?
I did all this studying graphic design at art college in the 1970s (little did we know it would soon be obsolete) and NEVER got to grips with the maths bit. It was like algebra all over again, but worse! I loved all the typesetting and spacing and fonts though.
I worked at a newspaper in the early 90s - computers were just starting to come in, they were used to layout the ads, but the rest of the paper was pasted up old-school - glue, bromides, typesetters, scissors,etc!
And the newspapers themselves used hot metal type for headlines and body copy. My class visited the Wilmington News Journal when I was in the second grade and I saw it done. Metal type was inked and used to print papers
My first DK gigs were in the transition period of the mid-late 90s – mostly left that magic to the designers as we had rudimentary DTP (early Quark Xpress) for the text plates, but I do remember transparencies, taped on black-paper masks for vignettes and other cutouts, chinagraph pencils... (1/2)
... and then the whole package went to a specialist reprographics house (somewhere Holborn-ish IIRC) where they had drum scanners and other such magical devices! After about a week you got back "wet proofs" of the colour plates and a huge (for the time!) digital file... (okay, 2/3)
Most of our computers couldn't handle the size of the colour file so you wouldn't load it unless you really had to... We spent a lot of time flying blind! 😂 (3/3)
I caught the fag end of this and helped out on exactly one job laying out an advert for a second hand car place. Glue + paper etc. And also doing it at 2x the size coz it's easier to work big.
Followed by drum scanner for sharp images to create the 4-colour process printing plate (I’m pretty sure this was what my dad did - he was a printer ‘70s-‘90s)
Printed then glued on special boards. Real headache. We used to measure articles by inches instead of words because we knew this spot needed 8 inches of text. (Much older papers had fillers - small facts to fill gaps.)
Same! Letraset, scalpel, spray glue (sorry, lungs), the big ReproMaster camera box, that super-fun headliner machine with the spools, all that stuff. Was too late to see actual books set by hand but was in the Linotype room when we set the type for the back of U2's Unforgettable Fire album.
This is what both my grandfathers did. It was astonishing. One of them was a colour separator. He would do that by eye and could take rgb paint and come back with any colour exactly
Yeah, it was very physical manipulation of all the bits. And unforgiving. If you were using sheets of transfers, you could be up against a deadline on Friday evening, mess up some lettering and realize ‘Shit, I’ve no “M”s left in this font.’
I vaguely remember spotting odd letters in different typefaces, which meant someone had to deal with this quickly
we had a big old litho machine and print shop, and the moment laser printers were hi-res and affordable enough to do complete proofs was transformative to layout
AMAZING. AMAZING!!!! (It came up cos we watched Giant last night and Dahl was checking layouts with quentin Blake's art and for some reason he hadn't seen the designs beforehand and I was wondering if people went straight to art?? But that sounds mad so surely they did the letraset bit with designs?
WHYYYYYY did the Letraset producers never manage to figure out they needed more “e”s? Every package should have just included a sheet of the damn things as extras. 29 sheets with lonely X and Z while you buy another set cause you need E. And the placing of diacritics! Slicing bits to make extras…
I remember doing that (also painting Tippex round edges to avoid photocopier shadow, for zines). Tad later but also remember checking Cromalin proofs. And sending my student paper to the printer via modem which took almost the entire night, & had to be watched to make sure the whole file transferred
The weirdest interim period was the move to computer layout, but without WYSIWYG displays. Did newspaper shifts and the layout would be green text on a black screen with codes for where everything would go… You wouldn’t see the page until you sent it down to the printers.
Yes! Used to typeset legal text in Word in the early 00s with a bunch of macros and no preview but you acquired a mind’s eye for the page. I’m still very good at html.
So you’d draw it up on paper, and then program instructions in. Like all early computer programming it was a Matrix style coding exercise. Screens that showed you what the page would look like were a good few years away.
i was involved in designing a poster and booklet for a university in Florence in 1994. i did a full scale mockup of the poster which was photographed by the print company (medium format) and then the negative was used to print the poster. analog days were pretty amazing.
Instead of assembling individual type pieces and then loading the rack into a machine, the page would be composited using molds and then molten metal poured in to create an entire page to be used. Popular with newspapers.
i used to do zines with elmer's glue and scissors. there was a shade of blue colored pencil that was supposed to not pick up on the xerox machine, but i always preferred to eyeball it.
in my oldest books (17c) you can actually see where the typeset letters don't line up perfectly if you look close.
Loved reading these replies. I remember lots of tippex and glue, in 1980s office work, and a personal superpower no-one else seemed to know about: Economy Labels which you cut up, lick-and-paste over a word and retype
It’s actually quite fascinating, and I don’t think people realize how much technical limitations and innovations in print technology affect not only design but content and even genre. When I tell kids that a typical picture book has 32 pages because that’s the way paper folds, it blows their minds.
And endpapers are not just a pretty decoration, they evolved from the need to glue the pages into the cardboard cover. These things matter even in novels. Digital printing on a continuous roll of paper enables page counts that aren’t multiples of 8 or 16, but some machines still require these counts
We still call the final mockup of a printed book a “sunprint”, even though it’s been decades since creating and reproducing blueprints with light-based technology was the standard. For that matter, blueprints aren’t blue anymore.
And looking at old artists’ work spaces with the cutting boards, and parts of illustrations scratched out so they don’t carry over to the engraving which is later incorporated into the print block (I don’t know all the terminology in English, sorry)
I still do some cut and pasting even now - though I'm looking to go digital in the near future. But sometimes I'll get most of a drawing right, then cut out part of it and stick so I can trace the whole version (I could cut and stick and scan but I fear my scanner would chew it up!)
when i was first on staff at the wire in the late 80s we still cut out text and fixed it onto boards -- creating a huge parcel on pressday to post off to the printers by red star at kings cross station
there two kinds of glue, a (probably toxic) fixer spray for blocks that weren't unlikely to need moving again and hot wax for items you wanted to play around with
if careless (me at least once) you sent off the parcel and got home to find a key element in a headline affixed not to a board but to the elbow of your jumper
I'm writing a book about the Linotype so... In the days of handset type, pages were set, proofed, printed, and the type had to be redistributed to be reset for subsequent pages. If the book sold well and warranted another edition, all the type had to be reset.1/
Stereotyping and electrotyping--making molds of complete pages--changed much. Now a publisher could print fewer books and more titles and, if a book sold well, a new edition could be published without resetting the type.
Now to you point, these technologies also made a huge different in design. 2/
Illustrations in books either came with woodblocks, which were fragile and could support only so many copies, or engravings/lithography, which needed to be printed separately and inserted as plates. 3/
Electroplating--creating a duplicate of an illustration by placing it in a chemical bath with copper & electricity-- allowed illustrations, including color illustrations, to be included in pages with type. This from my working manuscript for Hot Type. 4/
Favorite Harper & Brothers fact is that in the 1850s, after their main building burned down and they rebuilt the first super-fireproof building (and then published a LONG book about it and their operations), they had underground vaults that held 100,000s of electrotypes and stereotypes.
Come the Linotype, hand-setting was eliminated; type was molded fresh with every setting. At first, there were few fonts, aimed at newspapers. But Mergenthaler Linotype came to take typography seriously & the specimen books are filled with variety. So some book design became rather, uh, rococo. 5/
The primary competitor to the Linotype, the Monotype, molded fresh type a letter instead of line at a time. It was used more in book publishing, especially in the UK. Read Beatrice Warde (The Crystal Goblet) about its relationship with type design. 6/
Worked for a print shop many moons ago as they transitioned to digital.
In general, typesetting was just a huge pain in the ass, each worker kinda had their own methodology with enough exceptions that the "standard way" was extremely well documented... But oft not practiced.
I'll have to tell my old boss he can consult his hoarde of ancient riches and find that stuff he knew someone would ask about some day 😆
and try and convince him to get it into a blog somewhere
Before more modern machines like the Linotype (using molten lead), set your compositor's stick to the width of the page, assemble a line at a time in it with metal letters, then put the lines of letters into a galley (metal tray) to arrange them into paragraphs for producing a printed gallery proof.
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A new introduction to bibliography https://g.co/kgs/W81VwMM
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2025/mar/04/working-on-video-game-mags-in-the-1980s
Before that, lots of tiny tin letter shapes and big racks. And squinting.
Before that, gallons of Trappist ale and candles and tedious penmanship. And squinting.
We used a roller machine to make the back of typeset galleys tacky for sticking down, along with ruby lith and rule tape and cow gum
Knowing the mechanical process still helps
Forever.
Forever.
Didn’t go well
🤦♀️
Most notably the linotype machine that could cast whole typed lines of text from hot metal.
I am 62 and saw linotype machines but never worked with one. 3/3
EZ-PZ
we had a big old litho machine and print shop, and the moment laser printers were hi-res and affordable enough to do complete proofs was transformative to layout
It's pretty much scrap booking. 😀
Pagemaker, and then Quark, came in quickly - but always interesting laying up an A3-ish paper on a 9" screen Mac :-)
And I looked for Letraset recently, because I need some for a project. YIKES.
And of course printing presses.
Dodge = underexpose an area = darker
And much much more ✌️😁
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkroom_manipulation
And I also found this interview with a guy who I realised worked with my dad! https://glog.glennf.com/tiny-type-blog/2021/5/17/steve-finan-memories-of-the-last-days-of-metal-printing
in my oldest books (17c) you can actually see where the typeset letters don't line up perfectly if you look close.
Now to you point, these technologies also made a huge different in design. 2/
Even in the middle of winter, they had a door open, because of the heat of the machines.
The smell of hot lead, oil, and sweaty linotype operators will stay with me always.
In general, typesetting was just a huge pain in the ass, each worker kinda had their own methodology with enough exceptions that the "standard way" was extremely well documented... But oft not practiced.
and try and convince him to get it into a blog somewhere
Crazy how much things have changed.