P.S. A Column On Things

Helpless is the face of Fonts

I know rag left, centered, rag right and justified aren’t fonts, but do you ever notice them?

And speaking of noticing, I noticed the name tags at Moraga Safeway are in various typefonts. Like the name tags at Disneyland (silver decoration for 5 years service, gold for 10, diamond for 25), I thought the fonts indicated seniority, and that’s what some employees told me. But the manager said the tags are made at corporate, and she had never noticed that some were Helvetica Bold (that is, sans serif) while others were in an Italic decorative font. Pay attention people!

Things (hardly) no one will ever do again: Have A Single Sex High School education

   Vicki and I both attended single-sex high schools: Westlake for Vicki, Benson Polytechnic for me. Both are co-ed now. There are still single-sex high schools: about 400 public and 400 Catholic.

Vicki went to Westlake because it was a great private school. I went to Benson because it was the best public school in Portland (admission was based on grades and recommendations, as opposed to proximity), and because it was all-male. And because it had a 250-watt AM radio station. I was shy and awkward around girls, wanted to go to MIT, and felt I would be less distracted in an all-boys school (not to mention more able to become a broadcaster).

Research says single-sex education results in less socialization: students don’t learn to work with and befriend members of the opposite sex. Probably, based on my experience.

I went on to what was, at the time, essentially an all-male college. MIT was 10% women in the class of 1974. I loved MIT women, loved being around them. Still, many of the same problems there. Now that it’s 50-50, I am sure things are better.

 

Things No One Will Ever Do Again: Work 20 Years In One Place

My grandfather was a milkman for 20 years, mostly at his own Lakeside Dairy. My father was a milkman for 40 years, 20 at Lakeside. When I was a boy, I vowed never to stay so long at one place. Five jobs in five years after college. Then, 20 years at CMP Publications.

Now, of course, no child has to make that vow, because no one will ever again work 20 years in one place.

The twin truisms of work in America have finally sunk it: “management are idiots,” and “company loyalty runs in one direction, from you to the company.”

One reason is the fatuous management mantra: “shareholders first, screw the employees and the public as long as I make $10 million a year in stock options.” And thus the rest of us trampled and impoverished.

The other is, “Who needs unions?” The answer is: everyone who is not a capitalist. Without a union, the power imbalance is hopeless. Capital will drive wages and benefits down to the lowest common denominator.

 “I don’t need a union; I am a talented professional, always in demand, set my own terms.” The word hogwash suggests itself. If you spend a half-hour reading about American Labor History, you will realize we needed unions then and now. Without them, everyone except the 1% would live in poverty that would make China in the 60s look like a worker’s paradise.

Things No One Will Ever Do Again: Set Type (7) Goodbye, Farewell, Amen

Incredibly, I have run out of things to say on the topic. I notice that I claimed these would be Paul stories, but mostly  they involved  me showing off how much I remember from 50 years ago, and how I still use this arcane (soon to be archaic) knowledge today. Not the IBM MT/ST or the Compugraphic so much as the font stuff.

Now we come to The Tech. My MIT degree says management, but based on the amount of time spent, it should be The Tech  and management… or maybe just The Tech. It was my Alpha and Omega (well, WTBS, and Student House, and Sherry and Beth, and Mike, and Harry/Harrison, and John Taylor rank in there somewhere too. Maybe I’ll unpack this some day)

I was a columnist, news editor and editor-in-chief of the newspaper. Foolishly, I also learned to do typesetting for our twice-weekly editions. Also, we did nearly all the typesetting for MIT. As a result, out typesetting income was usually greater than our advertising income. Plus, prodshop workers were paid for outside jobs, albeit not for newspaper work, which they were expected to do on a volunteer basis. I needed the money as a scholarship student with a lousy all-loan scholarship that left me $10,000 in debt on graduation day, despite setting type and fixing phones.

No production shop/no newspaper. So, I spent the second half of my term as editor managing the production shop, a job I was stuck with for 18 months. Someone had to do it. I left when I got my job with the Associated Press. But that’s another story, hopefully shorter than this one.

The whole series: Things No One Will Ever Do Again: Set Type.

 

Things No One Will Ever Do Again: Set Type (5)

An idiot’s guide to fonts

As NY Times columnist Russell Baker once wrote, “Of all the people expressing their mental vacuity, none has a better excuse for an empty head than the newspaperman: If he pauses to restock his brain, he invites onrushing deadlines to trample him flat. Broadcasting the contents of empty minds is what most of us do most of the time, and nobody more relentlessly than I.” That could well be the motto of PSACOT.

The 50,000-foot view of fonts: Fonts hanging out

Useless knowledge I carry around:

• fonts are either serif (the ones with little lines at the end of each letter, like Times New Roman)
• or sans serif, the modern ones that are all straight lines, and you can’t tell the difference between a 1 and a lower case l. (Which is why this column is in a serif font: 11 point Georgia)
• Kerning is the space between letters, and you can make a line of “type” or a headline fit by reducing it (usually allowing one letter to encroach under the overhang of another)

The whole series: Things No One Will Ever Do Again: Set Type.

Things No One Will Ever Do Again: Set Type (4)

I have scoured the Internet, and cannot for the life of me find the actual name and model number of the Compugraphic headline typesetting machine.

There were a number of font strips (hung on a wire above the machine) representing various type fonts and sizes. An editor would specify a headline as “36 point.” You’d grab the 36 point font and place it in the back of the machine. As I recall, it exposed a strip of film that was advanced by hand between each letter.

They were called heds. The word was one letter shorter than heads. It was probably the eternal human desire to cover specialized skill with pointless jargon. Calling lead paragraphs ledes made a little sense, since it was a homonym with the lead that was melted to make type. But heds? Go figure.

If you developed the film and the hed was too long, you could reduce the space between letters (kerning) by backspacing a quarter space or half space between letters. Quarter and half were not marked, so it was by feel. A good touch on the Compugraphic was a marketable skill, now as valued as good buggy whips. I was good, but not great.

The headline rule at The Tech (as I am sure elsewhere) was: 9 pm it must be good and fit. 10pm: OK and fit. 11pm: fit.

The whole series: Things No One Will Ever Do Again: Set Type.

Things No One Will Ever Do Again: Set Type (3)

The IBM MT/ST (look it up) was the machine upon which Len Deighton wrote the first word-processed novel. It was large, expensive and heavy, and was built around the IBM Selectric (“golf ball”) typewriter.

At a newspaper, you printed text on coated paper, cut out the copy with an X-Acto knife, placed hot wax on the back, and affixed it to a cardboard form with a roller.

Thus it was that this clumsy soul was frequently advised, by John Hanzel and Bill Roberts, among others, “Don’t bleed on the copy.” My frequent finger cuts threatened the pristine text, which would have to be reprinted if bloodied.

Hot wax got on our tilted glass composing table; the only solvent that removed it was carbon tetrachloride. I loved the smell and would sniff it. Essentially, I was sniffing glue. Luckily I a) didn’t do it often, b) didn’t get hooked and c) apparently didn’t destroy my liver.

In today’s computerized world, text is never long or short because of computer layout. That wasn’t true in 1973. We used Wizard of Id panels to fill in when text (we called it copy) ran short. Professionals had other ways to fill the space, with bus plunges or Japanese earthquakes.

The whole series: Things No One Will Ever Do Again: Set Type.

Things No One Will Ever Do Again: Set Type (2)

When I was at Windows Magazine, my editor Mike Elgan threatened to write a macro that automatically cut the first three grafs (paragraphs) of every story I wrote. He called them “throat clearing,” which, I admit, has been my only bad writing habit. In any case, the throat clearing (or exposition as they call it in the script-writing business) is now over. We get to my personal experiences in the long-dead world of typesetting.

Although the Beech Street Bugle attempted justification with a typewriter on mimeograph masters (look it up), it was very difficult and looked ugly. But a straight right edge, in 1964, screamed “professional news.” I could have this column justified, but I decided it’s the 21^st century, so, no.

My first experience with real, automated justification came at MIT in 1970, during the nine months I worked at Ergo, an alternative Objectivist weekly newspaper at MIT.

Every classroom and activity at MIT had a teletype terminal with a daisy wheel printer connected to the time-sharing MULTICS mainframe. There was a word processing program (a what?) that produced justified text (with a little help from the operator). The Volkswagen of typesetting.

Then I switched to MIT’s real newspaper, The Tech, which drove the Rolls Royce of typesetting, the IBM MT/ST.

The whole series: Things No One Will Ever Do Again: Set Type.

Things No One Will Ever Do Again: Set Type (1)

From the time of Gutenberg to the time of Neil Armstrong, good looking printed matter was expensive and laborious, and involved molten lead. The first chink in the armor of the prosperous job printing industry came around the time of Mark Twain (the author of the first commercially published book written on a typewriter).

Typed documents were OK, but screamed amateur; if you were a professional you had printed stationery and business cards. Job printing, like so many other industries, was destroyed by computers (the multi-font Apple Macintosh and its successors) and the Internet (why print something when electrons and email are free?)

In case you ever wondered, quotes and underlining were simply the typewriter way to imitate italic and bold type fonts used in printing.

Among the things we have lost are taste and talent. Now, any schmo with a computer thinks he can design and print a good-looking document; self-publishers think the same of books (which is why there is an entire industry of talented book designers―check the credits at the front of the next paper book you’ll never buy). Fact is, amateurs produce work that looks like crap. But no one can tell anymore: thank you Internet for normalizing bad design.

The whole series: Things No One Will Ever Do Again: Set Type.