Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Vintage printing and typesetting videos

From the "you don't know how easy you have it!" department:

If you've been around the printing, publishing and typesetting industry for more than a few years, you'll appreciate the following 2 videos. If you are a relative newcomer to the industry, you could benefit from watching these, both to get a feel for how far the industry has advanced in the last 60 years, and to learn a bit about how early typesetting and page makeup worked. Many of the typesetting and layout terms that we use today have their roots in this era.

Enjoy!

Making Books, a film from 1947 about the book making process

ScreenSnapz001

Your Life Work: Printing, also from 1947

ScreenSnapz002

2 comments:

Mayerchak said...

Wow - cool, but also a bit sad. Look how many people it took to get the book printed. That's a lot of jobs lost to technology, but would you want those jobs today? Extremely repetitive and boring, by our standards.

And, I know it was the times, but I winced when he called the men "men" and the women "girls" twice.

Unknown said...

That is super cool to see that book printed. It seems like a piece of art to simply assemble the book. @Mayerchak, it is sort of sad that jobs are lost to technology isn't it. However, I'm sure it means that the consumer can have access to the book more quickly than they otherwise would. Overall, I had no idea what a labor intensive effort it was to simple create a single book.
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