Comment by nasalgoat
11 years ago
I worked at the Auto Trader in the late 80's/ early 90's. First as an assembly worker, then as an ad layout artist.
We had the typesetting printers and a small team of dedicated typists who entered the hand-written car descriptions into the standard ad size box (paid by the word!) and then matched the black and white photos of the car to the ad copy.
When you say glue, I'm assuming you actually mean WAX. Using a very light coloured wax offered the same adhesion as glue but allowed you to move the photos and type around, and was invisible to the stat camera.
The wax machine was half the fun - two rollers, one rolling through hot wax, would grab the paper or photo from the back, roll hot wax onto the bottom surface, and deposit it on the other side ready for placement.
The second most fun tool was the stat camera, which allowed you to resize photo or type by physically moving the photo or type from the camera lens, or allow you to put a halftone filter over a black and white photo to allow for single colour printing.
What used to require a team of 40 people - ad layout designers, line workers, typesetters - to handle six weekly magazine could probably be done by one person now.
> When you say glue, I'm assuming you actually mean WAX.
We used to use a rubbery glue called Cow Gum. It too was repositionable and invisible to the camera. I haven't seen it for years, gone the way of Letraset probably, but it was good stuff. The raging solvent-fume headaches after a day of pasting up were not so good though.
Wax was great because it was non-toxic, quick drying and smelled good.
You just had to make sure not to wax things twice because it gunked up the machine!
You've jogged my memory and are correct. I remember a hot wax roller that sat in a reservoir of some kind, and little wax sticks about the size or 3 sticks of chewing gum or so.
I think there was also several kinds of adhesive tapes used for some of the work with different patterns on them as well.