Cary wrote:
[quote=Lizabeth]
IBM Selectric on special paper and a dedicated typesetting machine (who's name I forget at the moment) that you saw less than one line on a tiny screen. Changeable film strip fonts. Compugraphic 7400 or 7500?
I remember when my dad's typography business sold all their hot lead - Linotype machines, racks of California job cases, lead melted/pig machine, table saw, proof press, etc., and moved to 2 Compugraphic machines with the film strip fonts.
Took a lot of the coolness out of the business for me.
In the mid-'70s I worked a few years in the bindery of a smallish printing operation. They still were doing some hot lead the setting on machines from one of the competitors to Linotype, can't recall the name now. Over the 3 years I was there, the volume of type setting went down by quite a bit as more jobs came in with camera-ready material.
The days they were busy, they could go through quite a few pigs. When not busy, more than a few of those pigs spent time in pickup beds of the foremen during winter to provide better traction.
This place was a bit odd. It had been created by a NYC publisher to handle printing of monthly supplements and reprints for NY State law books, but was in W. MA. Their union shop had already been moved to NJ for lower costs, this was non-union. We had to keep the printing a bit on the down low, mailings were trucked over to the US Post Office facilities near Albany to have the source appear to be in NY. That meant keeping two different sets of postage meters.
