Print nerd

Print nerd

Jun 12

I’m a print nerd too. All of us here are nerds of many things and given enough time it will all come out. I worked at a student newspaper for many a year, which is where I got my first taste of just how cool it is to publish something. This was the proto-digital era, meaning the text got laid-out on computer, but that was printed out and arranged with seperate elements not on the computer (like ads and photos) on a card, slightly bigger than the size of the final page. Actual physical contact*.

By the time I left, photos were being digitally scanned into the layout, and a few short years after that, most of the photos were being taken digitally. But when I was there, the photos got printed on-site and scaled as needed on a halftone camera (remember when photos in papers were made up of those little dots?)

The elements were laid out by running them through a waxer, which would apply a thin layer of wax on the back of the sheet, which would allow you to stick them to the final page (which would be later sent to the printers, where they’d do their magic), but pull them off if a correction needed to be made. This was essentially the same technology that had been in use for decades before (only, the text wasn’t being done on a computer, but we’ll leave that out for now.)

I mention this, because I got an email from Profiles in History – I’ve been on their mailing list since they first started selling Ghostbusters props. And this time round, they had some awesome Jack Kirby covers. Kirby alone is worth staring at, but what caught my eye was the tell-tale signs of the old school printing I just described – Have a look at the comic title, the issue title explosion, the issue info on the top left… lookit those beautiful edges.

You can see how Jack drew the cover, leaving deadspace at the top, where Marvel layout editors added the titles – anything that got used constantly, like the titles, they would have hundreds of photo-ready copies on hand. Note that the comics code and “greatest comic” call-out at the top are on the same piece as the “Fantastic”, but the “Four” has been cut and moved to the right, to accomodate the starburst. The issue info is built from some constant pieces, like th headshots, and various numbers and dates. And in a couple of places, where the title would have covered Kirby’s art, they cut away the title, and hand drew it in on the other side.

It’s not rocket science, but there’s a satisfying art to laying out something that’s going to be printed. It’s still cool today, but the tactile aspect of pre-digital layout was something special.

My love of the old ways have even cropped up in my collecting – if you ever looked in the entertainment section of old newspapers, you might have noticed there’s something a little strange about those mini-ads. The movie ad is fine and dandy, until right at the bottom, where the theater info was – then things looked, at best, a little off-kilt, and at worst, slap-dash. That’s because papers would get sheets with the ads in various sizes – then the marketing people would call later, buy a particular sized space, and the paper would cut out the appropriate size. The bottoms of these ads were blank, so local theater times could be added. In some small town papers, the times were typewritten then added, but by the 80s, most papers had a graphic set from which they could build the times.

Wanna see what I mean?

I’ve got maybe 12, 13 different sheets of just Ghostbuster ads – they had version for holdiays, versions for it being the number one movie in theater, they had versions for when the film screened again the following summer (bet you didn’t know Ghostbusters had a second run – right after its first run. It was that big of a movie. The list of movies that did that is, like, Star Wars and Ghostbusters.)

In case you’re wondering, the letters SAU on the top of the ad sheet stands for “Standard Advertising Unit” – “For SAU Use” means the width of the ads are set to fit within standardized newspaper columns (about 2 1/16 inches wide, with a 1/8 inch space between columns.)

I never really thought about it until recently, but this old way of publishing printed materials is pretty much gone – I don’t often think of having anything to teach, but this is something I felt was worth sharing. Cheers.

*Ha ha! Bookend Ghostbusters references. Yay me! Yay Ghostbusters!