Waxing Nostalgic

I was on the phone with Gladys last night, and we started in on the effect that computers and the web are having on our lives and our culture. There is a lot of press about this topic lately, whether the magic of the technology is a good thing that makes us more efficient and more connected, or a bad thing that makes us more isolated and more stressed.

But there is a part of the revolution that is rarely discussed: what we’ve left behind in our zeal to move forward.

When Henry Ford started rolling out his Model T’s, he also started a revolution. But one that would put the whole of the horse-and-buggy trade out of business. This was no small segment of the economy. Horses had to be bred, fed, shod, housed, and tended to. Buggies were designed, handcrafted, repaired…not to mention the manufacture and maintenance of the hardware that connected one to the other. This wasn’t just a few blacksmiths put out of work. This was a whole way of life.

Similarly the computer changed the way we do business and the way many people earned a living.

For instance, the graphic design and printing trade, which I’ve been a part of for the past twenty years. As late as the mid 80s, if I was designing something that would eventually be printed, I needed to first sketch out the design, and plan where the text and graphics would be placed. I’d take a typewritten copy of the text, mark it up by hand with secret code for the typographer (this was called a “spec”), send it out to a type shop, wait for it to come back, proofread it for errors, send it back again, until it was perfect. The final type galley came back on impervious photographic paper. I’d prep the mechanical (tape an appropriately-sized piece of white illustration board to my drafting table and with a blue pencil, t-square and triangle, trace out the dimensions of your printed piece), then either run my type galley through a waxer or put rubber cement on the back, then trim it out with an Xacto knife, and paste it on to the board. Ad nauseum, until all the type was in position. Photos were merely indicated by red squares marked “FPO” (for position only), and the transparencies were given directly to the printer along with the completed mechanical.

The printer worked his magic and voila, my brochure or catalog or book cover was born.

No more. I can now create the entire document, color-corrected images included, FTP it to a printer’s server, where it is spit out directly into a printing plate.

No longer are the craftsmen of the printing trade needed. This encompasses a whole host of occupations: typesetters, negative-strippers, color-correctors, plate etchers.

I was an assistant art director at an ad agency at the cusp of this revolution. It was the mid-eighties, and we still created mechanicals by hand, although we were lucky enough to have an in-house type department. I remember my boss coming back into our office after a meeting with the president. He flumphed into his chair, looked at me dishearteningly, and said, “I have to go to this conference about ‘desktop publishing.’ What the heck is desktop publishing?”

We were all soon to find out.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m grateful for the change in the industry. At least as far as my job was concerned. No more sweating out if my crop marks were exact, no more worrying if the type would fall off the board on the way to the printer, no more contorting my body over drafting tables and light boards or slicing my fingers with the Xacto. No more breathing in benzene (from the solvent used to thin or clean off rubber cement) or coming home with bits of border tape stuck all over my elbows.

But with one mini-Mac and mouse placed atop a desk, then another, then another, a whole lot of people who couldn’t fit their specialties into the new world lost their jobs. These were artists—craftsmen—but that’s the way it went. The blacksmith had to find something else to do, too.

We were warned – evolve or become obsolete.

But a lot of people couldn’t evolve. Especially the older guys, who’d been stripping negatives or color-correcting plates for years. Or the ones who just couldn’t take to computers and longed for their drafting tables. Some left the business altogether. Paste-up artists became desktop publishers. Typesetters became data-processors, and eventually, some became web designers (HTML is remarkably similar to typesetter’s code). A color-corrector I knew went back to school and became a Pilates instructor. Some just retired.

I'm heartened to see that there are several museums dedicated to this part of American culture. After all, Ben Franklin was a printer. He hand-set metal type and operated a printing press. True, the majority of printing presses used in the US were German, and are now often Japanese or Korean, but everything involved in the printing business was a huge part of our economy for many years.

So every time you make a greeting card on your computer, or retouch a vacation photo on Photoshop, remember how it all started.

I'm considering writing a book about these lost arts. Ironic that it would be printed in the very manner that put them all out of business.