This 1957 film on printing careers reminded me of the STUPIDEST decision I ever made. Speculating about the past is pointless, especially when based on information that wasn’t available at the time. Some of this info was available, some wasn’t.
The film itemizes the various specialties in printing. One is the Markup Man, who lays out the design of a form or page and decides which fonts and images belong in each area. In modern terms it’s page design. The M in HTML stands for Markup because HTML is basically a page design language. It controls the same variables that the Markup Man controlled in hot lead or offset.
In 1972 I was working at Cromwells. After gaining experience as a Ludlow Man, I was also doing offset. I was marking up pages using xacto knives and cement; then taking a photo of the page; then transferring the photo to an aluminum plate**; then running the offset press to turn out the required quantity of pages for the job.
One thing was known for sure at the time when I quit: Offset was the future and hot lead was the past. If I had stayed there for one or two more years, my career in printing could have moved out of the obsolete mode, transferred easily to computer typesetting, then probably to editing. Offset work was the most creative and artistic part of printing, but I didn’t recognize it then. The 1957 film made this point, and obviously wasn’t in the future, but it was completely inaccessible. I had no way of knowing that such films existed, and no way of viewing them if they did. The Web removes all excuses for lack of information!
The more important gap in my knowledge was in the area of prestige and status. Parents and mentors and overall society expected me to pursue academia. They disdained printing, even though it fitted my specific talents and tendencies and skills perfectly. One mentor called it ‘occupational therapy’. I was determined to resume college, DESPITE several years of negative experience with college and the obvious upward trend in my actual experience at Cromwells.
My life outside of work was also messy, with a disloyal wife who didn’t approve of anything I did. So the futile alt-history would have to include a different external life as well as a different set of parents and mentors and overall culture.
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** I don’t remember the details of this part of the process, but it certainly wasn’t as complex as seen in the film! I think the machine that made the photo also did the developing. It was about the size of an old-fashioned Xerox machine. You put the paper and plate on the glass, closed the cover, started the light, then flipped the whole thing over to do the developing part. Maybe.
The lack of detail is salient because I remember handset and Ludlow completely. If you put me in front of a Ludlow right now I could turn out a page of type immediately.
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Found a similar machine in a 1976 printing catalog.
The one we had was larger, floor model instead of table model, but it worked the same way. This is familiar.
Polistra's Mill 