The Future of Reading
Bill Hill’s Blog
(FROM PREVIOUS PAGE) That’s to say nothing of the many typing mistakes they hadn’t spotted.
First job was to decide how much space in the page that story merited. Then you knew how much you’d have to cut. Next, editing to tighten it up and fix mistakes.
In those days, because it was a hot-metal printing operation, copy was typed up on small pages (about half the size of regular writing paper). Each page was numbered and had the same tagline.
Reason for this was the typesetting operation. A Linotype or Monotype casting machine works pretty slowly. Each letter the operator typed caused a brass mold to fall into the right place in the line-holder. Once he had input enough to almost fill a line of the newspaper column, it would be justified.
Today a computer does this by inserting fractional spaces between the characters in its memory. But in those days it was mechanical – a set of wedges came down to force the letters apart. Then the typesetting operator hit the control which injected molten printers' metal – from a vat at the back of the machine – and the line of type was ready.
Linotype, Line-o-Type: that says it all.
The setting machines were marvels of Victorian mechanical ingenuity. Operating one was like playing a church organ... The process was so slow that even a 300-word story on, say, five small pages, might be parcelled out to three or four different operators. There might be 30 or 40 of these machines all running simultaneously in a busy caseroom. With 40 vats of molten metal, printer’s ink which got everywhere, and 40 guys cooped up in the same stifling atmosphere, it was a job for RightGard, Industrial Strength. And of course there was a healthy (!) amount of lead dust flying around all the time.
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It was someone’s job to divide up a story into “takes”, and to later combine lines set by different operators back into a single story which would be stacked in a “galley”.
They’d run a roller of ink over it, take an impression on
paper, and send that “galley proof” up to me to check.
As you can imagine, there were lots of opportunities for mistakes. Typos, transposed lines, sections in the wrong order, etc.
Once I’d signed off on the galley proofs, it was time to build the page. A compositor would assemble all the stories and pictures in a “forme” or holder. You could never be sure stuff would fit. Worst problem was to find out at the last minute that you didn’t have enough copy set to fill the page, so you always kept some extra stuff around. Sometimes a story would have to be cut to fit. If the reporter and editor had done their jobs right, the news story would be written in “pyramid” style – with the least-vital information at the end, so it could be easily cut.
Of course, lines sometimes got transposed (or even lost) during this complex process. So the compositor would take a page proof, which you again had to read and sign off before the page went to the mat press, then the stereo department to be cast into curved metal plates, then to the main newspaper printing press.
Despite all this care, mistakes happened all the time; typos got through the net, and papers shipped out containing errors. Not hard to understand, when you’re all working at high speed to meet the page deadline (and you all wanted the chance to get down to the pub before the next page deadline). But once the page had gone, there was no chance of fixing it.
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