Open Writing

I hope I will be forgiven if my memories sound like a lecture ... just blame my age!

Sitting here at my laptop, thoroughly enjoying it, appreciating how easy it is to use - and how versatile - my mind still dwells on the way computers consigned so much heavy machinery (and so many jobs!) to the scrap heap in the newspaper industry in the early 1980s.

'Spike it!' the chief sub-editor cries.

'Ouch!' says a colleague, sucking at the trickle of blood that comes from the ball of his thumb as he follows this instruction and impales another unwanted freelance submission on the 'spike' - a sharpened six-inch length of stiff wire mounted on a wooden block on his desk.

Another reporter's typewritten copy ('copy' means 'original', by the way) is blessed with the sub's attention. His/her pencil flashes busily across the paper, pausing occasionally to reach for the Concise Oxford Dictionary or Roget's Thesaurus, or perhaps Hart's Rules to check on spelling, punctuation and style, sometimes walking across the room to consult one of the 24 volumes of the complete Oxford Dictionary - too heavy to carry back to the subs' table.

'Set left x2, 8/10 Roman, P4' - or something similar, is scribbled at top left of the page. The compositors will know that this piece of text is to be set in Roman typeface (the normal style, not italic, bold or underlined unless marked with a pencilled code under selected words or lines, or in the margins). It is to be set in 8-point type, on a 10-pt slug (don't ask!), 2 columns wide, flush with the left hand edge of the column and is to go on page 4.

Precise instructions had to be written by hand on every piece of copy before being handed to a messenger, who would take them to the composing room - called 'case room' by the old hands because that's where the cases of individual metal type were stored and used. But by the 1980s, the operation had been almost entirely automatic for generations. Great lumbering machines (Linotypes and Intertypes) noisily cast each line of type ('line-o-type' - geddit?) at the touch of expert fingers on a multi-ranked keyboard, and the world learned two new words: 'etaoin' and 'shrdlu'.

Everybody today is familiar with the acronym QWERTY - the top row of the typewriter keyboard - but may not know that etaoin and shrdlu were the lines of type produced when the operator ran two fingers down the left hand edge of the keyboard to check that all was working properly (brass dies in place and the molten metal running freely) before starting work. Sometimes these slugs (metal lines of type) were accidentally left in, and appeared on the printed page.

Each galley (tray of cast type) would then be proofed and sent to the proof-readers, who always worked in pairs. One would hold the 'copy' (that's the original, remember) and the other would read the proof and mark any errors for correction. At the same time, another galley proof would go to the sub-editors in case any further alterations (editor's revisions) were required.

Because of the mechanical nature of typesetting a single typographical error (called a 'literal' by British printers and a 'typo' by the Americans) the whole line - and frequently the whole paragraph - would have to be re-set. There was no on-screen 'WYSIWYG' then, in fact no screen at all; it was all done with chunks of metal!

From there to 'the stone' - a heavy steel bench on which the type would be assembled into a page. 'Stone' is the English translation of the Greek, lithos, and lithography was an early form of printing, the name subsequently resurrected for the method most commonly used in the 21st century.

The 'stone sub' (who might be the original sub or another sub-editor) would supervise the make-up of the page, which would then go to the proof-puller, and after a few more stages the completed 'forme' (a complete page of type and pictures) would be wheeled on a sturdy trolley to the foundry to be cast into a single metal plate or cylinder, ready for the press, but first a mould, or matrix, had to be made by compressing it against a damp sheet of specially prepared papier-mâché (known as 'flong') which would then be shaped into a half-cylinder and baked to receive the molten type metal.

On its journey from the reporter to the plate-making stage a story would pass through anything from 6 to 10 pairs of hands (including messengers). It was extremely labour-intensive and costly. Wouldn't it have saved time if some of these stages could be cut out?

Many of them have been, now.

Modernisation of the industry, with its potential to put everything in the hands of a single operator (although in practice still divided between various departments) has been a life-saver for the printing industry but at great human cost in terms of massive job losses, widespread distress and riots in the street (Wapping, east London) before it could be fully implemented.

As one who left the industry during the early 1980s revolution I still hanker for the 'good old days', the evocative sounds of the clattering linotypes and the constant smell of poisonous fumes from the molten alloy of lead, tin and antimony (hence the term 'hot-metal' printing) but I am fortunate to have such comprehensive editing and typesetting facilities at my fingertips now and - unheard of in my day - the ability to send words, pictures and even whole pages instantaneously and simultaneously to every corner of the world.

I could go on for ages. Perhaps some readers will think I already have - but this is only the tip of the iceberg that was an immense historic entity: 'The Print', with its chapels (union branches) and fathers-of-the-chapel (shop stewards), the names reminding us that printing began in the monasteries, all speaking the language of 'ens' and 'ems', 'pica', 'nonpareil', and sans-serif, not forgetting that pretty little type called 'ruby' and such customs as 'banging-out' . . . I may write some more about it one day.

I still have my 'casting-off book', from which the exact space required on the printed page could be calculated from the number of words, size of type and width of column in infinite variety, and my old 'style book' - a publisher's in-house editorial guide to preferred spelling, punctuation, forms of address, etc.

It's easier now: buy a computer, take it out if the box and produce a newspaper or magazine without help of all those highly-trained time-served operatives, what of the result?

The style book is probably all that survives in today's automated world, but not even that, one suspects, on some of the free newspapers which have sprung up in almost every town in the last couple of decades, some of them produced largely by part-time staff with good typing skills but no experience of layout or publishing. Not all, I hasten to add, because there are a some splendid exceptions, but I sometimes wonder where we will go from here if print technology 'progresses' any further.

Nostalgia may not be what it used to be, and is unlikely go away, but even the dinosaurs remain a talking point millennia after they became extinct, so why should that not also be true of hot metal printing, which made such an important contribution to the world of knowledge and employment?