Those of you who love books as much as I do will also be riveted by this video about book production in the good old days. Found at Arun Kale‘s blog.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Book production back in the old days
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow. That video was cool! My first thought was HOW CUMBERSOME! My second thought was how, even with machines, could they keep it all straight if they had all the pages right. Wow. Amazing. Thanks for sharing that. I won’t feel so irritated when I self-publish off my computer now and then take it to the printers. How far we’ve come!
Glad you liked it Maya. Yes, I was thinking heavens, what if at the very end someone picks up the book and two of the chapters are the wrong way round?? Eeek!
I used to work for a publishing house and have seen book manufacturers at work. They are much more automated than the print shop in the film and there are fewer stages. Most printers now take computer files and create the printing plates straight from the files. And, of course, the plates are not made of copper. They’re made of a flexible material onto which the image of the pages is projected photographically (or nowadays digitally). The plates are flat, and made of materials that only accept ink where there is to be print and water where there is to be no print. This is litho printing and is much less labour intensive than you see in the film.
But even litho printing is being challenged by high quality and high speed digital printing.
However, whatever the method of printing, the process still involves printing the book in sections, glueing the sections in the right order into covers and sending them out all across the world.
My wife is a publisher and we still talk about these things… (Perhaps we should get a life!)