It’s good to see one publication returning to the RESOURCES of paper and press. Other RESOURCES are unused in recent decades. Printers allowed digital to capture those tricks and didn’t try to take them back.
1. NYTimes has started using its especially talented presses and pressmen to print full-page or triple-page works of art. A Renaissance triptych deserves a triple fold, so it gets a triple fold.
2. Science and history books, including encyclopedias and ‘enriched’ Bibles, often had transparent overlays. You could take off the skin and muscles, or you could look at the historical changes in land and boundaries, by flipping the successive overlays. Magazines sometimes included flipcard animations. The animations have been replaced online by GIFs. The overlays really can’t be replaced in digital form. I’ve used overlays in courseware, but pushing a button isn’t nearly as MEMORABLE as flipping or peeling a page.
3. Scribes and illuminators often drew cartoons to express frustration, indicate a deletion, or make a parodic point. Some manuscripts, commissioned by rich patrons, were more about the strange or obscene drawings than the text. This capacity was NOT entirely lost with handset, but it was harder. A drawing or decoration required a woodcut. By the 1800s, especially after linotypes, the casual or snarky comments were gone. Woodcuts and engravings were solely for illustrations in the modern sense.
Casual illustration COULD have been recaptured in the offset era, dominant since 1960. After filling in some text with a VariTyper, the author could have sketched cartoons or diagrams. Low volume personal publications like the Aberree or club newsletters continued the medieval tradition, but big commercial magazines and newspapers didn’t bother.
Polistra's Mill 