Book Experience – from the inside out

My first professional experience with books was learning the hard slog of making them. I was what they called a “Printer’s Devil”, a job that meant a lot of tasks way below the normal printers capabilities. Sweeping floors, cleaning up etc. This job was more or less a chance to see if I could become an Apprentice and spend 7 years learning the trade – an ambition I did not embrace.
Luckily I had a better education to most of the other hopefuls thus I got a rapid elevation to be a reader (copy taster) quite early in the game.
This meant that I worked with a compositor who made the corrections of errors in the type that had just been made.
We worked with “Hot Type”. Linotype machines made up the lines of type by pressing molten lead into brass molds These lines of type were called “slugs” and each line would leave Lino machine and slide into a long steel tray. The actual lines were “typed” into a keyboard that assembled the molds. All type was just a fraction of an inch high and the slugs width was variable, depending on the layout of the item to be printed.
My job (apart from reading) was to carry this tray to a table, run a roller coated with black printers ink over the type, place a sheet paper over the area and slip it into a press – basically a flat board that was lowered with handle to press the paper onto the type evenly. The paper was then called a proof.
I would then take the proof to the “proof Reader” to make the correctons. My job was the read the original manuscript aloud and the Proofer was to catch the errors. These were marked with hyrogliphics of the trade and sent back to the Linotyper for his redoing. The slugs could not be altered so every mistake on a slug meant the whole line had to be reset. The old slug was thrown into the molten lead pot.
Frequently the original could be in long hand and sometimes what I read was in error, but many authors had terrible hand writing and (for my good luck) terrible memories too.
Once corrections were made the slugs were divided into a size to fit the pages selected. Each page was locked into a form, a steel frame, and then each page was put into a larger frame in a layout, the location of which each page would fit where was decided how the pages would be folded. Obviously the back was blank and when the first side was finished being printed the whole lot would be turned over and the new form put onto the printer.
These “forms” were usually 32 pages at a time, and when the printing was completed you ended up with a 64 page paper. But they could be any size but always in groups that could be divided by four – eight, sixteen etc.
All this printing was done on a “Flatbed” Machine where the type stayed stationary and the paper was rolled over it. There two types of printing in those days, Rotary and Flatbed. Rotary was strictly for Newsapapers or Magazines and could turn out thousands of copies per hour. Flatbeds were much slower.
Our layout was odd in that the typesetting was done on the top floor, the middle (street) floor was for the offices and the basement contained the presses and bindery. Luckily we had a “dumb waiter” affair that would take the forms to the basement and back again.
Once it got down there it went onto printing press where everything was mechanical. There was a reservoir of ink and a roller would pick up what it needed, coat the print on the form and a another part weould feed the paper and press it down on the type. Then the sheets were expelled and the process was repeated.
When both sides were done they went off to the Bindery there the sheets ran through a machine folder which process them into the 64 page quire. Thats what they called it.
From there a unit of women would sew the part that was going to be glued into the book, using needles and special cotton.
These quires were then put together with the others from the same book, neatly piled together and went to the guilotine which pressed them down and then trimmed three unsewn edges, leaving a book, ready for binding. Quite often the outside edge wasn’t trimmed, but left rough – proof the book was unread.
Then a piece of paper, stronger than that used in the print process, was glued to the back of the book. This paper supplied the backing and the outside pages that were to be glued into the Spine and boards of the book.
The glueing of the pages to the boards was all done by hand and the finished product would be piled up and left for a couple of days to dry.
They were then shipped to another Printer who would print and apply the Wrappers. This was because wrappers were multi colored and we didn’t own machines that did that. It could be done by our presses, but required that the black ink had to be cleaned out and another color put on. Each color needed demanded another washdown so you can see it was too time wasting for us to handle.
Four color machines took up a lot of room, and our premises were just too small too handle them.
Before the Linotype machines came into play, all typsetting was done by hand and our shop still did a lot of it. The little pieces of type were kept in font drawers, and they had dividers in them that seperated the letters, commas, stops, semi-colons et al. The most amazing part of this was that there were no indicators of what was in each divider, there were all memorized by the compositor.
Well I stood this for about three months and manged to get myself fired. Seven days of this was enough – but seven years?