THE JOY OF PRINTING
By Patricia Nell Warren
Best-selling writer and publisher (Wildcat Press), Patricia Nell Warren, continues her helpful resources articles on self-publishing and resources for writers. Revisit her article THE ULTIMATE UPDATE: GOOD SOURCES OF CONTACT INFO http://www.rldbooks.com/Newsletter/IGW-V3-Issue2/IGW-V3-2p17.html
The May-June, 2005 issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review contains an invaluable piece by Ms. Warren, titled "'Traditional' Marriage: A Secular Affair"
"Those who try to
define marriage as an unchanging institution, a sacred bond, need only
look to Continental Europe to find an entrenched tradition of secular
marriage..." PNW
By Patricia Nell Warren
Recently I got a phone call from an author who asked for advice on self-publishing his first book. When I mentioned the advantage of working closely with his printer, he said, “Isn’t that, um, complicated? Do I have to deal with that?” Clearly he believed that his creative challenges ended with writing and designing his book.
I’m often amazed that some writers know, or care, so little about printing. You might as well design a beautiful car with no thought for the actual manufacturing process of that car. After all, printing is how a writer’s creation becomes something that can be sold, and that communicates your thoughts to others. Once you’ve taken personal command of your own publishing process, a basic understanding of printing can only amp your artistic achievement and commercial success.
After a decade of “please help me” phone calls, I’ve heard it all. There were the neophytes who forgot to put bar codes on their covers. There was the lady who thought she could drop off her messy handwritten manuscript at a local printer and come back in a month to find boxes of finished books. “Won’t the printer take care of…everything?” she asked hopefully. For a self-publishing author, the print job can make or break on whether a distributor wants to handle your title. Yet a brilliantly produced book is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. It can even put an independent imprint on the map. Booksellers see it that way… so do reviewers, librarians and readers.
One reason many authors back off from this challenge is, they’ve convinced themselves that printing is too technical and arcane for them. “Pantone colors?” they protest. “Pros and cons of cross-grain binding? Why the hell should I have to know about that stuff? Let the pros take care of it. That’s what I pay them for.” Yet these same authors might already have mastered the basic technology of word-processing and computer graphics. Post-millennial printing has gone heavily digital. So these authors have already made the first step to mastering today’s print basics.
Let’s say you’re deciding whether to go print-on-demand or the traditional (non-digital) route. This decision is partly financial -- POD might cost you $8 a copy, compared to $2 a copy for a conventional job. But the decision is also a creative one. Why? Because a paperback book that is printed and bound on a Xerox DocuTech digital press has a different look than the paperback that emerges from a web press and a standard bindery. Different paper, different process, different everything.
“Okay, what’s a web press?” those authors ask. “You mean the World Wide Web, right?”
A History of Bright Ideas
That question gets us into the guts of the subject. In the 1500s, when Gutenberg was printing the first Bibles, presses really “pressed” in order to print. The printer prepared a plate with the print image in raised relief – a process that came to be known as letterpress. He or she inked the plate, laid the sheet of paper on it, and used a large high-pressure device hand-powered by a large screw, in order to press plate and paper tightly together. This created a clean imprint. Europeans had adapted this apparatus from the screw-operated wine press and olive-oil press that they’d been using for centuries.
The problem was -- you were making impressions laboriously, one at a time, a few an hour.
Finally some bright person said, “Let’s design a cylinder with the impression on it, and squeeze the paper against the cylinder as it rolls.” Another person lit up and said, “Hey, let’s go one better, and design a machine that cranks the sheets mechanically off a whole pile of paper and feeds them to the cylinder.” Thus the sheet-fed rotary press was born; it could clank off 250 impressions an hour. By 1818, sheet-fed presses were printing paper on both sides, at a rate of 1000 an hour. But the process was still a page at a time, powered by human shoulder-muscles. Printers tended to be built like weightlifters.
On the heels of the Industrial Revolution, in 1863, an American named William Bullock got the bright idea to invent the mechanized rotary web press. The “web” was a continuous feed of paper off a roll. It took printing from human muscle to machine might. More important, it was the print version of Henry Ford’s mass production for cars. Now, in an hour, web presses could spew 10,000 newspapers, or Sears-Roebuck catalogs, or Civil War casualty lists -- anything using cheap newsprint. The expression “quick and dirty” comes from web printing. As presses grew in size, inventors developed ways to duplicate a page several times across the wider cylinders, to boost capacity. For a long time, web presses didn’t do color – just black and the halftones of photographs.
Today the web for a big press might be nearly 6 feet wide; the rolls can weigh several tons. You hoist the roll onto the press with a forklift. You thread the end through the rollers, like you’re loading a film projector. You press a button, and the big machine starts up slowly and grandly like a freight train, while ink flow and color and other things are adjusted. If all is moving well, the press goes to high gear, which today might be 80,000 impressions an hour – nearly a mile of paper. It screams along till something goes wrong (a wrinkle in the paper, for instance), or the roll starts to run out, or the plates are wearing down. The train slows but doesn’t stop, while a new roll is swung into place or plates changed out. Speed is resumed, and the process continues till the run is complete – say, 1.3 million copies of the Los Angeles Times Sunday edition.
Today sheet-feed presses are still in use, cranking along primly at copy-machine speed -- everything from restaurant menus to art posters to specialty books. Today many are high dpi laser printers, resulting in beautiful quality. Our nation’s paper currency is printed on sheet-fed presses, to meet the imperatives of that special watermarked paper.
But some items today need to be churned out by the billions -- our paperback books, supermarket advertising, election guides and a host of other things. To get these, today’s printers rely on high-speed web presses. Giant web presses can even be tourist attractions. Big city newspapers often offer tours of their plants, so visitors can see these amazing machines in action – their thunderous size and speed fill several floors and make the whole building vibrate.
To many hardcore print professionals, web presses have the same appeal as a Formula 1 racing car to a NASCAR driver. “I’ve been in this business for 30 years, “ a plant manager told me feelingly, “and I’ve run a lot of different presses…but I love web presses. I can’t help myself. Man, the speed! The adrenaline! There’s nothing like it!”
Magnificent Monster
How did I first fall in love with printing? Just out of college in 1959, I landed a publishing job that hurled me straight into it -- the copy desk of the Reader’s Digest’s U.S. edition. RD’s head office was located near New York City. Since I had edited college publications and learned how to talk to printers, I eventually became the editorial department’s working liaison with the magazine’s print contractor, McCall’s.
McCall’s Corp., which published the women’s magazine of the same name, also owned one of the biggest printing plants in the world, located in Dayton, OH. This vast plant printed everything from dress patterns to Aviation News – 50 magazines a month -- on an elaborate schedule. McCall’s aimed for their presses to be up 23/7 and down only for maintenance and job change-out. The Digest was their biggest job. In addition to handling the daily stuff – teletyping proof corrections, etc. -- I was the troubleshooting grunt. Whenever my boss didn’t want to deal with the plant manager (who was permanently irritated at the Digest’s habit of stopping the presses just to fix commas), she put me on point.
Worst case scenario: a political article might be knocked out of RD’s table of contents by breaking news. I would be told to phone Dayton and stop the press that was printing that section of the magazine. Then, with the press down and the clock ticking and both companies now losing money, the RD courier car rushed me to LaGuardia Airport with the uncorrected copy for a new piece in my briefcase. (Fax machines weren’t around yet, so we couldn’t simply fax the article to Dayton!) Since the schedule for 49 other magazines was now a jumbled wreck, it was my job – when I got to the plant -- to smooth feathers on the manager and everybody else involved.
We’d work all night to get the new article proofed and on press ASAP. Letterpress make-ready was still slow and laborious, not much different than centuries before. Each curved iron plate had to be cast in the foundry, then hand-fitted into its correct spot on the cylinder, along with dozens of other plates. Since the print image was in that delicate raised relief, it was easily damaged by tools or being dropped. Working with those McCalls’s people – the pressmen, the Local 114 typesetters who ran the clattering dangerous linotype machines in the composing room – was how I learned that printers are a breed apart – high-tech professionals with a fierce pride in their work.
Printing history was about to happen -- RD aimed to pioneer a new era in high-speed mass-production printing.
The Digest was then at the peak of its power and prestige, and its popularity was straining McCall’s ability to print enough copies in 30 days to fill the monthly print order. At that time, the U.S. edition was pushing towards 18 million circulation, which meant that McCall’s had to spew more than half a million copies a day to keep up. The plant was running most of its magazine jobs on the rotary letterpresses that you’d print books on, because these ensured the quality – good 4-color reproduction, etc.-- that the Digest demanded. But McCall’s available letterpresses were vintage – they weren’t fast enough, and they couldn’t handle more than a 24-page section of the 200-page magazine at one gulp.
Digest management had looked yearningly at high-speed newspaper web printing – some of the editors were former newspapermen. They wanted to marry black-ink newspaper speed to 4-color mass magazine production. And they wanted to print offset, not letterpress. Offset lithography had been around since 1900 -- it used a large thin flexible plate of a special metal treated with photosensitive materials. A single plate could accept the print image of an entire section. The limber plate wrapped clear around its cylinder. Its flat surface “offset” the image onto a rubber cylinder, which in turn delivered the image – in the form of ink -- directly to the paper. Hence the name.
Offset needed way less time for make-ready – meaning presses could spend more time up, and earn more money. But offset hadn’t been found suitable for mass manufacturing, especially web printing. There were problems with color quality. Worse, there was smearing that occurred as the fast-moving web left the cylinders with its ink still damp. As a result, offset had stayed relegated to small jobs.
So a Danish firm designed and built a monstrous multimillion-dollar 4-color web offset press that met the Digest’s specs. Simultaneously our Canadian paper supplier cooked up a new type of paper -- something like a heavier newsprint, but with a smooth surface that would accept quality color reproduction. Around 1962, as the Monster arrived in New York Harbor on a freighter, champagne corks popped and press releases went out. When the press was finally set up in the Dayton plant, print executives from many companies made pilgrimages to see it. The Monster may have been unique in the industry at that time.
The next time I went to McCall’s, I could hardly wait to see the Monster up and running! It was almost half a block long, and had a cathedral-sized room to itself. Tended by a whole crew of pressmen, it could handle a 72-page chunk of the magazine, whizzing maybe 45,000 impressions an hour off the four huge plates – one for each color -- cyan, magenta, yellow and black, the key color. In each color unit, the web sped past a bar of gas flame that set the ink instantly, eliminating the smear. The paper moved so fast that it didn’t catch fire. From there, the web swept into a complex cutting and folding system, to become piles of finished sections, or “signatures,” piling up at the delivery stations. From there the signatures were stacked on pallets, and moved off to the bindery.
That machine had a fierce spirit all its own. Even the pressmen talked about it in awed tones. There were glitches, of course. A wrinkle in the web could cause a high-speed paper jam. Result: the Monster would make like Old Faithful, spouting a geyser of torn paper at the high ceiling. If the gas jets didn’t shut off immediately, the whole press caught fire. Then warning bells rang, men ran up with extinguishers, and the Monster was down till the grumbling press crew cleaned every bit of ash out of the machine.
Whenever I got back to the head office, editorial colleagues always asked me eagerly, “Did you get to see a press fire?” The Monster’s fires were legend.
After five years on that high-adrenaline job, I moved on to be a book editor. But I wouldn’t have missed the experience for anything. My writer’s consciousness was now inked with an indelible impression: printing is at the heart of that creative process I live by.
Digital Change
Why am I telling the Monster’s story? Because high-speed web offset presses are the norm today. They do all kinds of jobs, including beautiful books and sophisticated color graphics. When your books and mine are printed on this type of press, they trace their inky ancestry back to the Monster.
Since 1960, the printing industry has roared through all kinds of change. Heat set is now done with hot-air blowers, not real fire. The old “hot lead” typesetting machines bowed to electronic typesetting; this, in turn, was the ancestor of HTML. Personal computers, desktop laser printers and typesetting software (like Pagemaker) broke the monopoly of union shops, and put desktop publishing and printing in the home offices of many Americans. Plate foundries and even offset film rooms are giving way to pre-press process that is now 100 percent digital: computer files, not foundry fire or offset film, are used to generate plates.
Today’s new web presses are heavily computerized and robotic, safer and cleaner, even going smaller as the cost of floor space soars. “Towers” now push certain operations towards the plant’s high ceiling instead of extending them along the floor. The big press crews have vanished – a single pressman can tend a giant Timson Six. Printing solvents and waste water, once a big pollutant, are shading into soy inks and waterless processes that make printing more kind to our planet.
Wildcat Press, the publishing company that I co-own with Tyler St. Mark, started up in 1993. Tyler came to our partnership with his own print history – as a veteran media specialist who had cut his teeth in mainstream advertising, he put in his own time with printers and presses. At the ABA in 1996, Tyler and I saw a new kind of press – the digital model -- in action for the first time in our lives. On the convention floor, Xerox had set up their new DocuTech press as a demonstration. As Tyler and I stood there watching open-mouthed with other exhibitors, we knew we were looking at a new print revolution.
The DocuTech machine wasn’t half a block long…but it was big and impressive, a marriage of copier and digital technology. At the press of a button, it downloaded the appropriate computer files for text and cover. It hummed through the simultaneous operations of printing a 4-color paperback cover on one track and a 1-inch-thick text block on another track. Then it trimmed the block, slapped on the cover, secured the binding with glue. Finally, as we watched, the DocuTech spit the finished book onto a tray at the other end – job done in five minutes. Gutenberg would have watched this and muttered, “Ach du lieber!”
Another pioneer, Harvey Ross, patented a digital press in 1995, the BookMachine, that he described as “print on demand” –a phrase that has stuck for the process generally, though POD actually refers to the press itself. Recently his company won a patent infringement lawsuit against Ingram Book Co. and its Lightning Source – the court determined that the defendants had used Ross’s process without a license. Meanwhile scads of copier companies have rushed into the marketplace with their own designs, both toner-driven and ink-driven – Canon, HP, IBM, Konica, Xeikon, assorted Japanese firms. Even that master European manufacturer of pre-digital presses, Heidelberg, has joined the digital land rush. It’s enough to make Gutenberg’s ghost dizzy.
In 1996 the pundits assured us that every Barnes & Noble would soon have a digital press right in the store. You’d order your copy of John Grisham’s latest and wait for it to be printed while you had a latte. Most bookstore and warehouse inventory would go away, (the pundits said) along with most shipping costs. Everybody would make lots more money and be happy-happy.
These sweeping predictions haven’t come true yet. The unit cost of a book printed this way has stayed more expensive than books printed on web presses. Only a few big booksellers, notably Tattered Cover in Denver, have these presses on site. The machines are still costly to lease or buy, and exacting to maintain. You mostly find them at printing plants, graphics firms and some book distributors. But the technology is here to stay, with roll-fed digital presses now appearing, to replace the earlier sheet-fed models.
Today the “monster” of digital presses may be the 5-color Xerox DocuColor iGen3. “It runs the largest sheet, and it’s the fastest,” says a California printer who caters to the entertainment business. It’s the digital descendant of the Monster I knew at McCalls, and its quality is said to be close to that of the best web offset jobs today.
Pundits can say what they like about the importance of TV and the Internet, but the globe’s hunger for printed matter has never been fiercer. Old workhorse pre-digital presses may get retired from service in the U.S. but they are seldom scrapped. Good print equipment is very expensive; printers tend to use a press for a long time, depreciate it to the max – then sell it to somebody else. Today the old models are often reconditioned, and sold to print firms in developing countries. McCall’s is gone forever (indeed the Reader’s Digest may not be around much longer – it has sunk to 10 million circulation, a shadow of its former self). But those vintage letterpresses that I saw in Dayton are probably still up and running somewhere, maybe in Brazil or China now.
I’ve often wondered where the McCall’s Monster is today – my old love, that T-Rex of web offset presses.
Creative Print Options
Today’s printing industry offers the small publisher or self-publishing author a whole new array of creative options.
If you’re looking to do more than 1000 copies of a paperback and want the lowest unit cost, a web-press job is your best bet. But if your budget can’t choke an entire web-press run -- if you’d rather print just a couple hundred at a time and not pay for book storage -- POD comes to the rescue. It will cost more per book. You may also run into distribution problems – some jobbers don’t carry POD books. But POD is a cheaper start-up option for many small presses and independently publishing writers.
If money is no object and you want your book of short stories to have that private-edition look that appeals to connoisseurs, you can go to a specialty printer who runs letterpress. Many are listed online. Those old-time heavy-iron letterpresses – some of them manufactured around 1900 -- can still be found across in the U.S. They’re owned by printers who love them the way railroad societies love the steam locomotives that are still working. Paper that has been pressed by those heavy metal plates has a very different feel than an offset page or a POD page! You can tell just by running your hand over the page.
You might even fall in love and decide to become a printer yourself. Just do your homework before you invest in equipment. One guy I know decided to print his own series of science-hobby chapbooks. He went right out to a used-equipment fair and bought $25,000 worth of vintage printing equipment. Then he looked into the necessary toxic-waste disposal (solvents, etc.) and learned that the high costs in his county – owing to strict environmental regulations -- would put him out of business before he started.
Knowledge of print creativity can work for you on many fronts. Covers, for instance. If you’re up to speed on printing tech, you have a better shot at creating an eye-catching cover. And covers sell books. Magical new processes are out there – color enhancement, foil stamping, holographs, embossing, luminescent inks, perfing, metallic papers. These special features make covers and dust jackets ever more amazing. Some of them aren’t as expensive as you’d think.
Paper is another place where a little knowledge makes for greater creativity. Paper is the biggest single cost on your print invoice, so you might as well maximize the creative choices that it gives you. Do you want your book to be a low-cost conveyor of information that people can throw away after reading it if they wish? Do you want your book to be durable and museum-quality, cherished by collectors? Do you shudder at the tiniest hint of show-through? Do you want color illustrations sprinkled through the text of your novel? Are you concerned with how easy on the eye a paper’s hue should be? These questions, and many others, will determine what paper you pick.
Unfortunately the downside of these creative options is that a writer/publisher has to be aware of them in order to take full advantage of them.
According to a recent issue of Innovate, around 90 percent of print jobs today need some pre-press “repair.” This figure includes the growing spate of self-published books. More and more printers are using a program called FlightCheck Professional, that alerts them to tech problems in any new job they get in. You may arrive at your printer’s door with PC fonts in your text files, only to find that he uses Mac fonts – the two are still not compatible. The dizzying variety of sophisticated graphics programs makes it mandatory that you pick a printer early in the creative game, so you can work in programs that “talk to” your printer’s software. Otherwise you may get hit with thousands of dollars in set-up changes to make your files compatible with systems that the printer is running.
Getting Educated
How does a writer learn the first thing about printing? There are books, magazines, websites, workshops, college courses, conferences, tutorials, consultants who can be hired. Indeed -- printing being what it is, there are oceans of printed sources to help you. Best of all, you can always find a passionate printer who will talk your arm off about the trade.
Nor is the trade as male-dominated as some people believe. A Google search can dredge up loads of information about women printers. Since Gutenberg’s time, women have been vitally involved in printing -- European convents got involved in printing religious books at an early date. Many of the American colonial print shops were run by women. Benjamin Franklin’s sister, Ann Franklin, was the most unstoppable – she did government print jobs and ran two newspapers besides. A recent exhibition showcased the work of 40 leading U.S. women printers.
The best printers never stop educating themselves. They’re like doctors – they have to stay up to speed on the science, or they get left behind. Recently I met Pat Reed, plant manager at Delta Printing Solutions, a large firm located near Los Angeles.
“I never go to bookstores to buy books,” Pat told me. “I go there to look at books and see how they’re made. I can sit there for hours looking at bindings and glue and how the paper comes out. Paper is alive. Hey, it comes from a tree! That paper is going to react differently to moisture depending on what time of year the trees were harvested and a lot of factors, like whether the binding is crossgrain or with the grain. I always learn something new in the bookstores.”
That’s my kind of printer.
There’s one last reason why a writer should know about printing. When you hold that finished book in your hands, you’ll feel your own personal input radiating warmly in it -- from the first glimmers in your imagination to the last pixel on the cover. The more deeply you’re involved in the production of your own book, the more it will go out there and do for you in the bookstores, libraries, classrooms…and the hearts of your readers. There’s nothing like it!
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Further reading:
What Desktop Publishers Need to Know About Printing Presses
http://desktoppub.about.com/od/printingpress/
Two magazines that are good industry sources for up-to-the-minute stuff:
Printing Impressions -- http://www.piworld.com/doc/283405530817772.bsp
Innovate – www.innovate.com
Introduction to Letterpress Printing
http://www.fiveroses.org/intro.htm#Equipment
Print on Demand – the Digital Printers’ Resource
http://www.printondemand.com/MT/archives/000715.html
Printing Terms -- Glossary
http://developers.evrsoft.com/article/web-development/
miscellaneous/say-what-terms-every-self-publisher-needs-to-know.shtml
http://www.printindustry.com/glossary.htm
Copyright © 2005 by Patricia Nell Warren. All rights reserved.