News-Lined Walls

Sometimes, when people clean out their attic, they find old newspapers. What this guy found was better than just newspapers: he found a bunch of plates used in the printing process nailed to his attic walls. They don't appear to be the actual printing plates; those would be mirror-reversed for the printing process. These look like they're embossed, like either the mold for casting the printing plate, or something thick and soft run through the presses without ink.

The Oblivion Book

I know little about videogames beyond the NES and Angry Birds and Wii Fit, but apparently there's a videogame called Oblivion that has a number of magical and pseudoarchaic books within the gameplay. Some guy decided that in-game reading wasn't good enough, so he turned the in-game tomes into a hard-copy, leatherbound book:

Per the creator, this was entirely done by hand, using a color laser, real leather, and a bunch of elbow grease. More images of the finished book here; pictures of construction here. And people worry videogames are going to result in fewer books — here's a perfect case of videogames resulting in new books!

Bill and Ted's Offset Adventure

Somebody stole Ben Franklin and brought him to the future! where he learns all about modern printing and communications methods that make his paltry "newsletters" and "declarations" seem boring, lame, and expensive to produce. I bet he sure feels insignificant, now that today we can print out hundreds of thousands of "Buy one get the second ½ off" coupons for Burger King in a matter of minutes. I know, Kodak isn't a content producer, but I think a lot of people are on the same page as Kodak and think any message, prettied up by expensive printing methods, is better than ever. In reality, the message is more important than the message, unless the medium is used really well, but that's rarely the truth. The video is one produced by Kodak to lead students and other prospective employees into the printing business:



Getting serious, though, one statistic from the video stands out: an expected 14% growth in bindery jobs. Today, binderies rely heavily on books and magazines for their business, two segments of the print industry that are lamenting their approaching deaths. What are these binders going to be binding? They must know that, even if the editorial end shifts, somebody still has to stitch and glue the spines. As I've said before, the death of publishing isn't going to be an end of publishing, but a death of how publishing companies have been run, $120 dinners and all.

The Linotype Machine

Above is a hundred-year-old illustration depicting a Linotype text compositor: an amazing machine that creates entire lines of text, molded in a lead-alloy, compiled as a single block. Type text on a keyboard and then the molds, called 'matrices', drop into the mechanism and are lined up, until the line is finished and the text is molded. The line of text is dropped into the galley to cool, and the matrices are returned to their homes. All of this was done mechanically — some power source had to turn the driveshaft, which was eventually electricity, but it could have been steam-powered or water-powered. The machines were assembled with a watchmaker's precision, and many of them were still running, in use, in newspapers until the 1960s and 1970s and electronic typesetting became cost-effective for an upgrade from a machine that had been paid for many, many years before. Several of these machines are still running today, at the Western Minnesota Steam Thresher's Reunion in Rollag, Minnesota. This is one of them, connected to a tape-reader, which allowed text to be sent electronically over telegraph wires or even by mail:



You can see the tape at the far right, in front of the orange thing in the background. They looped the paper around and taped to itself. On the tape was "WELCOME TO ROLLAG WMSTR", encoded (most likely TTY) in a way the Linotype machine understands, finished off with a line-end (see detail here). The machine ran, unattended, creating text slugs from that tape. When the tape got to the end of the loop, the line feed told the machine to cast the text, and then the loop repeated, starting a brand new line. The 'galley' is at the bottom of the image with dozens of slugs ready to go to the printing press. This is where we get the term 'galley copy' for pre-press review copies sent out by book publishers. It was cheaper and easier to have a Linotype machine quickly typeset a manuscript and print off several hundred copies than to typeset an entire book by hand. As the Linotype operator casted line after line after line, the galley would fill, and when there was enough to print a page of text the galley was taken to the press and the Linotype operator started on the next page with an empty galley.

Dear Lulu...

Dear Lulu is a book, but a very special book -- it's a test of printing quality, intended to push the "print on demand" high-speed Xerography/laser printing that Lulu uses to produce its books. Verdict: They do quite good for a new technology competing against the offset equipment that's been perfected over the past fifty years. Want to see the book itself? You can own a copy.