When I need to kill trees...
Dec. 10th, 2009 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pseydtonneBack when I worked in desktop publishing, I hated making thumb books. Perhaps that's not the real name for these things, but I never heard another one. Thumb books were tiny booklets one made by slicing strips of paper and folding them up to look like a small version of a printed, bound folio. Then you'd take a pen and number the tiny pages, which would be the only contents of each page. After this you took the thumb book apart and figured out which of your content pages had to printed next to or on the back of each other. If you didn't know any programming languages in the 1980s or 1990s, this was the fastest way to get a result.
If you're having a hard time visualizing this, imagine you wanted to print seven pages of information to be bound down the middle like a book. If you printed two pages on each side (1 & 2 next to each other, 3 & 4 on the flip side) and tried to fold that into a booklet, you'd get page 1 as your back cover, page 2 as your front cover, page 3 as the inside front cover and page 4 as the inside back cover. Then page 5's content would face page 4's content, page 6's content would face page 3's content and page 7's content would be dead in the center facing a blank page. This would be fine for a minimalist experiment but not very good for a literary magazine.
What you want is page 1's content on the right side of a sheet that has nothing on the left side, then page 2's content on the opposite side from page 1's content and page 7's content to the right of page 2's. Try doing this with 20 pages using only your head and you'll be out of the zine biz pretty quickly.
If I had been publishing more often, I would've made sets of thumb books for various page counts and kept them in three-ring binders. "I need to print a 40-page zine and have it ready for a stapling party in four days. Let's see -- ah, my 40-page thumb book is right here between 36 and 44." I would pull out just the one I needed, copy the stats and tell the print job which pages I needed where.
Why did this matter? Because if you were sending galleys to a printing house until about the late 1990s, you had to print them out yourself first. That's right -- you printed it before you went to the printing house, much like washing dishes before you put them in the dishwasher. Printing press houses still used offset publishing and optical scanning back then, whereas home zine people used laser printers and later inkjets (back then they had substantial price differences). You could do everything you wanted on a laser printer, but the laser printer would choke on doing five thousand of something. So you printed a couple nice copies of what you wanted and had the printing house take pictures of those pages for its offset liths.
I realize this sounds primitive. I also had to work with physical paste jobs for a while, which were even more primitive. You had a tray that heated up a brick of glue, fed your printed copy through the rollers of the tray, one of which would smear hot glue on the back of your strip. Then you aligned that strip of paper very carefully onto a sheet of grid paper which would get photographed at the printing house. Then we'd chase the dinosaurs off the front lawn.
Today I'm at work, researching some customer issues. I knew I'd be going back and forth over a few pages from a manual and I wanted to save my eyes some strain from the monitor. So I was about to print these 26 pages -- two pages per side, double-sided so it's only seven sheets of paper. Then I thought, "wouldn't it be cool if I could make a booklet out of these printouts, so I wouldn't have to flip them around and spread them all over my desk?"
The printer manufacturer also thought this was a fine idea. There was a button in the printing options for "Make a Booklet". When you click it, it asks how wide a gutter you want and whether you want to worry about creep (the pages on the outside being so fat from folding around the inner pages that the page contents are pushed to the edges). Then it printed the booklet perfectly the first time.
This printer also staples. O brave new world that has such pre-press options in it...
Then again, I'll only be able to blame myself when the print job goes wrong.
If you're having a hard time visualizing this, imagine you wanted to print seven pages of information to be bound down the middle like a book. If you printed two pages on each side (1 & 2 next to each other, 3 & 4 on the flip side) and tried to fold that into a booklet, you'd get page 1 as your back cover, page 2 as your front cover, page 3 as the inside front cover and page 4 as the inside back cover. Then page 5's content would face page 4's content, page 6's content would face page 3's content and page 7's content would be dead in the center facing a blank page. This would be fine for a minimalist experiment but not very good for a literary magazine.
What you want is page 1's content on the right side of a sheet that has nothing on the left side, then page 2's content on the opposite side from page 1's content and page 7's content to the right of page 2's. Try doing this with 20 pages using only your head and you'll be out of the zine biz pretty quickly.
If I had been publishing more often, I would've made sets of thumb books for various page counts and kept them in three-ring binders. "I need to print a 40-page zine and have it ready for a stapling party in four days. Let's see -- ah, my 40-page thumb book is right here between 36 and 44." I would pull out just the one I needed, copy the stats and tell the print job which pages I needed where.
Why did this matter? Because if you were sending galleys to a printing house until about the late 1990s, you had to print them out yourself first. That's right -- you printed it before you went to the printing house, much like washing dishes before you put them in the dishwasher. Printing press houses still used offset publishing and optical scanning back then, whereas home zine people used laser printers and later inkjets (back then they had substantial price differences). You could do everything you wanted on a laser printer, but the laser printer would choke on doing five thousand of something. So you printed a couple nice copies of what you wanted and had the printing house take pictures of those pages for its offset liths.
I realize this sounds primitive. I also had to work with physical paste jobs for a while, which were even more primitive. You had a tray that heated up a brick of glue, fed your printed copy through the rollers of the tray, one of which would smear hot glue on the back of your strip. Then you aligned that strip of paper very carefully onto a sheet of grid paper which would get photographed at the printing house. Then we'd chase the dinosaurs off the front lawn.
Today I'm at work, researching some customer issues. I knew I'd be going back and forth over a few pages from a manual and I wanted to save my eyes some strain from the monitor. So I was about to print these 26 pages -- two pages per side, double-sided so it's only seven sheets of paper. Then I thought, "wouldn't it be cool if I could make a booklet out of these printouts, so I wouldn't have to flip them around and spread them all over my desk?"
The printer manufacturer also thought this was a fine idea. There was a button in the printing options for "Make a Booklet". When you click it, it asks how wide a gutter you want and whether you want to worry about creep (the pages on the outside being so fat from folding around the inner pages that the page contents are pushed to the edges). Then it printed the booklet perfectly the first time.
This printer also staples. O brave new world that has such pre-press options in it...
Then again, I'll only be able to blame myself when the print job goes wrong.
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ah waxers
Date: 2009-12-11 05:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-11 01:46 pm (UTC)That company is still around thanks to the need for lamination. And of course, they're on Long Island.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-11 05:51 am (UTC)I miss optical typesetters and the New York Times letterpress machines.
I do not miss manually figuring out justification.
And embedded control codes are still with us. Yay HTML!
no subject
Date: 2009-12-11 03:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-12 06:49 am (UTC)