Retro Gizmo: Artifacts from the Pre-Digital PrePress Department

 

Light Table, Prepress Department

Last year we featured a blogpost on an antique piece of bindery equipment still being used in our print shop. Today, we’re thinking about a few other vintage relics that have been gathering dust in the art department. The pre-digital days in prepress were not all that long ago – extending into the 1990s. The print industry was an early adopter of computer technology with digital imaging technologies, workflow and of course design software from the early days of Adobe, Quark, Corel, Aldus and others. Early Macs were the industry leader in digital typesetting, page layout and graphics. Both the design process and the photographic techniques used to image plates for offset printing underwent a rapid transition just before the new millennium.

The 90s saw the tail end of prepress imaging techniques that had evolved over decades.  Design skills included “paste-up” – manually positioning type and graphics onto each master sheet for printing. You’ll really appreciate a straight tool line once you paste on a piece of tool-line tape by hand! For graphic elements and photographs, anything other than 100% black had to be rasterized by imagesetters into “dots” to create grayscale halftones. Full color printing required four separate pieces of developed film, “stripped” into exact position with a hand-trimmed mask. Large print shops had many full-time employees whose job was to “strip” plates for the press, usually at light tables like the one seen at the top of this post. Below are some relics from those days when graphic design was as much craft as art:

Scale for enlargements
Resizing graphics and text was often done photographically before desktop publishing – requiring some math skills for percentages of enlargement or reduction. This handy tool was invaluable.
Pre-Digital Artroom Supplies
Paste-up: manually creating a master of the printed page. Red Litho Tape was used to block any light shining through a stripping sheet. “Cold Type” supplies included decorative tool lines in the form of tape. E-rulers were handy for measuring point size of imaged type.
Art Room Supplies
Strippers were small metal tabs used to keep film in perfect alignment for processing plates. It was also the name for the folks who handled that entire process. The orange sheet here is a stripping sheet, where printable areas would be opened up (masked) to allow photographic imaging of the press plates.
T-Square and grayscale or color targets
Manual skills and a steady hand were essential skills for paste-up. The T-square and other tools helped. Also, much of the imaging process relied on traditional photographic techniques to achieve proper color and grayscale output.

 

The skill and craft of fine printing and effective marketing is more alive today in the digital world than ever before. Strive to buy your print locally! A community printer will understand communication and design, with a special emphasis on your local market. They should be able to provide you with the latest information, inspiration, technical advice, and innovative ideas for communicating your message through print, design and typography, signage, apparel, variable data printing and direct mail, integrated marketing and environmental responsible printing. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!

Call us at 828.684.4512. ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your print and marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.

Explore the World’s Most Expensive Printed Book: The Bay Psalm Book

 

Fan of the long s? Then you should enjoy the finging the pfalmes from the most expensive book ever published. Read on for some interesting facts about this record-setting publication and how you can perufe every page:

Bay Psalm Book Preface

The Bay Psalm book, a small Psalter, holds two world records. It was the first book printed in British North America, of which only 11 are known to exist, and now it has sold at Sotheby’s in New York City, for the highest price ever.

  • The price? $14,165,000, which was actually lower than some pre-auction estimates that ranged as high as $30 million.
  • The new owner? David Rubenstein, entrepreneur and philanthropist, plans to generously lend the book to libraries and exhibits. Rubenstein also bought a copy of the Magna Carta in 2007 for $21 million.
  • The printer? This book was, amazingly, printed a mere 20 years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock by Stephen Day, the first colonial American printer.
  • 1,700 copies were originally printed. Only 11 are known to still exist.
  • The previous highest price paid for a Bay Psalm book? $151,000 in 1947. At the time, that was also a record for a printed book. Quite an appreciation in value!
  • Sotheby’s website includes fascinating detail about the publisher, printer and the creation of the book, its many errors and other printing details. If you are a printer, you’ll find out all about everything from watermarks, hyphenation and typesetting to quartos, folios and financing.
  • Typos? Oh yes. Even at the time, the Bay Psalm book was criticized for its poor quality of printing and abundant errors. Misspellings, inverted commas instead of apostrophes, uneven inking…. nobody’s perfect, right? A critic, over 200 years ago, noted the book “abounds with typographical errors” and said the printer “must have been wholly unacquainted with punctuation.” (source)  Ouch.
  • Other firsts in 1640? The first Finnish university was founded in the city of Turku. The first European coffee house opened in Venice. Charles I (another first) was on the English throne.

And best of all… you can study every page of the Bay Psalm book online for free, courtesy of the Old South Church in Boston (the same church where Benjamin Franklin was baptized).

Digital Bay Psalm Book

 

 

 

ImageSmith is proud to be a printer in an exciting era of digital communication. Your printer should be able to provide you with the latest information, inspiration, technical advice, and innovative ideas for communicating your message through print, design and typography, signage, apparel, variable data printing and direct mail, integrated marketing and environmental responsible printing. They should also be able to work with you to solve any difficult prepress issues with your files. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!

Call us at 828.684.4512. ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your print and marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.

Your Life… on Paper. The Power of Print.

 

From conception to expiration, paper and print are there at every important milestone in your life. Consider how print and paper record, accompany, educate, entertain, sustain and preserve your journey…

From Conception to Expiration

Print and Paper on the Journey of Life

 

Print Paper Life

Print and Paper

Recording the journey

(For some great insights into the value of paper in our culture, check out Domtar’s Paper because… campaign.)

ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.

8 Moments in, Not the History of Paper… but the Paper of History!

We love paper – and it is not very difficult to make a case for the iconic role paper has played in our lives and history. Take a look below at a few watershed moments of the past century and notice the piece of paper, print or photography right at its center.

1920 – Women’s Suffrage

After a struggle that began in earnest in 1848 at Seneca Falls, NY, women were finally granted the right to vote in the U.S. through the adoption of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. The power of that small paper ballot and the extension of suffrage to all people changed the face of all elections to come.

 

1927 – Lindbergh’s Welcome Home

Following Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic in The Spirit of St. Louis, he received a hero’s welcome in what had already become an American tradition, the Ticker-Tape Parade. Filling the skies of New York City with paper seems a fitting way to pay tribute to the pilot who worked hard to promote snail mail through the U.S. Air Mail Service.

Manhattan Project and Dewey Defeats Truman

1942 – The Manhattan Project

The notebook seen above on the right records an experiment of the Manhattan Project, the US Government’s secret race to build an atomic bomb during World War II. Noted on this yellowed paper is the world’s first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, achieved on December 2, 1942.

1946 – “Dewey Defeats Truman”

The now infamously wrong predicition of the Chicago Tribune‘s banner headline has become synonymous with jumping to conclusions before all the facts, or in this case votes, are in. The presses rolled too soon, as Truman emerged the victor of the 1948 presidential race.

Eisenhower's executive order for Little rock and Photos of Guantanamo Bay Missles

1957 – Desegregation at Little Rock’s Central High School

Above (left) is President Eisenhower’s executive order of September 23, 1957 which sent Federal troops to Central High School in Little Rock, AR. One piece of paper – Executive Order 10730 – placed the Arkansas National Guard under Federal control and brought 1,000 U.S. Army paratroopers in to restore order and enforce the U.S. Supreme Court ruling of Brown v. Topeka Board of Education that overturned the “separate but equal” laws and enforced the desegregation of public schools.

1962 – The Cuban Missile Crisis

Printed photographs like the one above reached President Kennedy in Washington in October of 1962 and provided proof that the Soviet Union had installed medium-range nuclear weapons in Cuba which were capable of striking major U.S. cities and killing tens of millions of Americans within minutes. The world held it’s breath for two weeks until the Soviets agreed to dismantle the missles, thus averting international nuclear war.

Campbell's Soup Paper Dress and Earth Day

1966 – Warhol’s Soup Cans and a Paper Dress

Symbolizing the ongoing revolution in art, culture and marketing of the sixties, Andy Warhol’s screen printed images of a Campbell’s soup can even made an appearance as the ultimate in disposable fashion – a dress made of paper. Pop Art transported the commonplace and mass-produced into the realm of high society with a healthy dose of irony.

1970 – Earth Day

The modern environmental movement gained widespread attention in 1970 with the first celebration of Earth Day, symbolized by the now internationally recognized symbol for recycling. The “Mobius Loop” design was the work of a 23 year old college student named Gary Anderson. Today paper is an environmentally sustainable and renewable resource, and 87% of Americans have access to curbside recycling for paper products.

For any questions about print, marketing or communication, ask your printer. They can help you consider your choices and develop a marketing plan, long or short range. If they can’t, you have the wrong printer! The best advice, always, is to ASK YOUR PRINTER!

 

ImageSmith is a full-service print and marketing provider located in Arden, North Carolina. Contact us at ImageSmith for quotes on all your marketing projects, and more useful tips on how to create custom, effective, high impact marketing solutions.