Ooh, me too! Student newspaper production nights: beer, pizza, hot wax and sharp knives. I'm surprised I still have all my fingers.

Not me...

::bashfully lowers head behind monitor::

I've seen but never used my company's waxer, although I do wield a mean Xacto. Do any of you hand-production vets miss it?

My first NYC job was as a bullpen production artist in a type shop. A pile of boards to work on with the studio manager giving you deadlines like "I need this by 10, the next one by 10:20, after that make sure this one is done by 11:15". Pretty much like that all day long.

As to knives, I was a single edge razor blade man myself. After I "caught " by my Xacto knife as it rolled off my desk. Single edge blades were the best, you could put them in your mouth while you adjusted something on the board, and you always knew where they were.

As to Rapidograph pens. They were actually high-tech if you started out using a ruling pen.

One of my first gigs was helping out on a liberal weekly paper back in Anchorage in the 70s, at which my mother was a contributing editor. I mostly pasted in corrections. They operated on a shoestring and we hated to send out for corrections, so I spent a lot of time cutting out words, rearranging them, and rejustifying lines by hand. I also got good at making n's out of h's, or h's out of n's and l's -- that sort of thing.

I was an X-acto man, myself. Still am. And James, I used to stash mine behind my ear while I was working -- hey, what can I say? I was young, brash, and reckless.

I still have my handy pica pole over on my cutting board and I still enjoy using my 00 rapidograph.

I do miss those days, sometimes. But I don't miss spec'ing type and casting off with c/p tables and a calculator.

-- K.

"Do any of you hand-production vets miss it?"

Oy vey!

How many times have I torn my hair out trying to make a computer do what I could have done with a typositor and an Xacto knife in no time at all?

How many times have I screamed in agony when trying to force a Scitex to do a trap I could have done with a sharp knife and one hand tied behind my back?

I passed this article around to the print production team at work today and nearly everyone over 40 stopped by to regale me with their own memories -- Bestine fires, waxer jams, processor eruptions.

That article reminded me of that movie made when The New York Times switched from hot metal to cold type: "Etaoin Shrdlu" by Dave W-somebody? I gotta get me a copy of that one of these days.

Sigh. Yup. I'm old.

I'm spoiled.

I played with a miniscule amount of Rubylith in HS and we used a process camera to photograph laser prints so we could image plates...that's as close as I've gotten to old school graphics.

Everything else has been directly on computer.

I wouldn't be a graphic artist if it weren't for computer. I found out when doing rubylith, I don't have the patience nor the ability to do it correctly. Pasteups, mechanicals, all that ••••...I'd ruin them and be fired.

Yay computer!

/me sacrifices a virgin in the memory of ENIAC.

I spent the first ten years or so of my career in the paste up era. One of my early jobs was doing paste-up (also known in the midwest at the time as keylining) at a weekly newspaper in Minneapolis. Even later as an art director I did it quite a bit, but often worked with someone else who did most of it.

Even though I was pretty good at it, I don't miss it at all. I would never go back. Think about it: You were mainly trying to get things to be straight and square. With computers, it requires a deliberate, conscious decision to make things crooked. Straight and square is automatic. Overnight, T-squares and triangles became obsolete. Good riddance.

I'm probably younger than everyone who posted in this thread... but I have memories of hanging around at my stepdad's newspaper when I was 8, 9 years old and helping around with the IBM composer and making headlines with letraset sheets. I still have an Olfa knife from back in the day.

Never used a waxer though.

I too remember using a waxer and rubber cement to affix galleys of type to boards, cutting Amberlith overlays, litho tape, and using Rapidograph pens to ink on Mylar. Stat cameras were also a big part of production, and you had to be aware of the reduction in line weight as you reduced an image. Don�t forget light tables, my hamstrings were quite limber after a few years of bending over doing paste-up.

I do agree with Kristen, some things were far easier with the old tools, but the majority of what I do now is easier on the computer. There�s no �undo� function with most traditional media. Pencils and drafting vellum still beat the hell out of trying to noodle on a computer though. I also share Tiffany�s memory of slicing the end of my finger off with an x-acto knife, and spending quite a while in the local neurosurgery unit while they sewed it back on. One of my first jobs was at Stanford University, where we put together student newspapers. I share many similar memories with all of you.

I miss Spraymount...mind you, it was never the same after they made it 'safe'.

Ah, the good old days, the depilatory effects of waxing machines, minor operations carried out with scalpels, making scalpel "blades" out of tracing paper and tossing them to colleagues, studio juniors being sent for a long weight while the experienced types carried out their black arts. You never forget the first time a scalpel slid off the drawing board and landed in your thigh. But the old timers would tell you how easy you had it compared to the molten metal splashes from Ludlow machines. So much physical pain was replaced by crashing computers and waiting half an hour for a colour laser print only to discover that it had pixellated the type. Still like to get the scalpel and the rotring pen out though.

I still have my last blue pen of the paste-up era. Ah, the memories!

At my college newspaper we were in a weird place where production was still done with hot wax, but we had Quark 3 or something that the stories were laid out on. Then they were printed on 11x17 and pasted to layout sheets and couriered to the printer every night.

I played with a miniscule amount of Rubylith in HS and we used a process camera to photograph laser prints so we could image plates...that's as close as I've gotten to old school graphics.

So did I. They called it "Industrial Arts". We used photoplates, an ancient 2 color offeset press, lots of Ruby, and screen printing for t-shirts. They had 3 old macs (no idea what kind) that we'd play on, and mess around in Photoshop. Our teacher was an interesting mix of shop foreman and Mac zealot. His name was Mr. Moxie, if I remember correctly. Guess that fit pretty well.

But once I put my hands on a G3 in college, there was no going back. All of my professional work had passed through the computer.

I was an "Industrial Arts" teacher. My first job out of college. Teaching letterpress printing, mechanical drawing and wood shop to eighth grade students.

I wonder what "Interesting mix" of personalities I was to them.