Just when you thought you’d heard every story I had to tell… here’s some stories even my wife and daughters haven’t heard. I managed a typesetting production shop at The Tech in 1974, after four years of setting type at MIT.
What I will be demonstrating is what regular reader Peggy Coquet (a former typesetter herself) called “A head full of useless.”
In case you didn’t know, typewriters (before the IBM Selectric) were mono-space and single font. Each letter took up the same space and they were all the same serif font. (A translation of this gibberish later). For more words per page, you needed a second “Elite” typewriter. Oldsters will remember searching for an Elite typewriter when the teacher set a page limits, leading to a “no Elite” specification.
A half-century later, in my first year teaching 8th grade U.S. history, I realized I had to specify Times New Roman, 12 point, one-inch margins for all papers. Otherwise, everything I received would have been in Microsoft Comic Sans, with either two-inch margins (for the strugglers) or half-inch margins (for the brilliant, leaving no room for corrections or comments). Any teacher of mine, up to and including my MIT professors, would have been flummoxed by that specification.
A Little History
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 once can tell anymore: thank you Internet for normalizing bad design.
Some Justification For This Story
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 that long-dead world.
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 21st 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 (look it up) connected to the time-sharing MULTICS mainframe (the father of UNIX). There was a word processing program (a what?) that produced justified text (with a little help from the operator). That was the Volkswagen of typesetting.
In April 1971, I switched to MIT’s real newspaper, The Tech, which drove the Rolls Royce of typesetting, the IBM MT/ST.
Driving A Rolls Royce
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 able to remove it was carbon tetrachloride. I loved the sweet smell and would occasionally sniff it out of the bottle; 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. 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.
VGC Photo Typositor
The device we used to set headlines at The Tech : VGC Photo Typositor.
Probably not the model shown, but similar. Ironically, the article is not about the device, but about the font used for the word Typos it or on its frame.
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. I don’t know why we called them that; the word was 1 letter shorter than heads. It was probably just 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 the ability to carve a good buggy whip. 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.
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 overhand of another)
How font-crazy am I?
Who else would notice?
In 1977, when I was at Bank of America, the company had an official type font (probably Franklin Gothic Condensed). Use of any other was proscribed.
Vicki follows Mātā Amritānandamayī, whose worldwide organization uses Garamond in signs and typed material
The London Underground has its very own unique type font, which I used on my PowerPoint slides while I was teaching. Ditto the French Metro (Parisine), which I didn’t use.
I was designing coffee mugs for a family company that owns rental properties. So I (Borrowed? Paid homage to? Plagiarized?) Downton Abbey’s distinctive logo. It took only a little research to find that the words Downton Abbey were in Adobe Caslon Regular Small Caps. I had to buy it―good commercial fonts, like all the Caslons, London Underground, and Parisine cost money. Here’s what that logo looked like. I don’t want to broadcast the name, so I used gibberish―Lorem Ipsum (look it up) to replace the company name:
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.