Gonzo publishing
People have known, pretty much ever since there were people rather than a group of hairy sorts using bones as spoons, about the power of the printed word. Primitive man knew all about making the word material. That’s why when Lug, Ogg and Dud were scratching and grunting about what a great elk hunt they were in for, Gug was busy drawing a successful hunt on the cave wall. If only Gug had used his imagination and painted a machine-gun, he could have really saved some effort then the whole tribe could have hunkered down for a winter of getting fat and watching the firelight flicker on the cave walls or, as we call it today, ITV.
So the printed word has power. For instance, you can spout crap all evening in the pub and nobody will pay any attention to you, but if you start handing out leaflets in the high street outlining your manifesto to burn down every Tesco in Britain, you’ll soon find yourself in a small room with no natural light being interviewed by a man with little hair and less humour who may, or may not, stamp on your dangly bits until you cough up your spleen or the names of your co-conspiritors, depending on how quickly you can make up some realistic sounding names.
Printing has evolved of course, but not really all that much and not nearly as much as, say, meat flavoured snacks. In printing, we moved from woodcuts to block printing to hot metal to today’s offset litho or whatever the hell it is – it could actually be done by magic for all I know, it makes about as much sense. How do the words get from the screen to the printed page? Toner cartridge maybe…but if somebody told me that toner is the ground up bones of fairies, I’d be hard pressed to prove otherwise.
(In the same timespan meat flavoured snacks have moved from small cubes of gristle on a platter to meat on a stick, cooked meat on a stick, meat in pastry, meat in cardboard wrapping, meat in Styrofoam containers that will still be landfill when the sun goes out, meat in cardboard wrapping again and, finally, meat flavoured crisps – an express way to get all the meat flavour you need without all that tedious having to digest protein or mop grease off your shirt. Compared to printing, meat snack technology is practically at the stage where the next step is opening a meat snack shop on Jupiter, or the past).
More impressive than the revolution in printing that has happened over the last few hundred years in the real world is the revolution in printing that has happened in the last two decades in boys’ bedrooms. It used to be that if you wanted to do printing, proper printing that looked real and everything, you used a John Bull printing set.
This incredibly fiddly process left you with a few lines of purple print and the nagging sense that whatever printer’s were paid, they earned it. Basically you had tiny rubber blocks with reverse letters on them, which you arranged on a wooden block, then pressed to a purple ink pad, which you then pressed to the paper and, tad dah, five lines of whatever juvenile crap you had come up with, unadulterated by the constrains of your shocking handwriting.
There were several shortcomings with the printing set. The first was the lack of fonts and point sizes. For any junior tabloid editor this was a real set-back, as it meant you were unable to get your screaming head lines (‘The Green Lane Gang Smell!!!’) into a suitably eye-catching front page splash. It’s also a shame that society missed out on a chance to identify future tabloid editors in their juvenile stage where, through gentle re-education and, failing that, depositing down a disused mine shaft, we could have been spared the damage done to the world when they reached their more destructive adult stage (if that ever truly happens).
Why the ink was purple I have no idea. Possibly to ensure that whatever was produced was not mistaken for, say, ‘The Times’.
So the printed word has power. For instance, you can spout crap all evening in the pub and nobody will pay any attention to you, but if you start handing out leaflets in the high street outlining your manifesto to burn down every Tesco in Britain, you’ll soon find yourself in a small room with no natural light being interviewed by a man with little hair and less humour who may, or may not, stamp on your dangly bits until you cough up your spleen or the names of your co-conspiritors, depending on how quickly you can make up some realistic sounding names.
Printing has evolved of course, but not really all that much and not nearly as much as, say, meat flavoured snacks. In printing, we moved from woodcuts to block printing to hot metal to today’s offset litho or whatever the hell it is – it could actually be done by magic for all I know, it makes about as much sense. How do the words get from the screen to the printed page? Toner cartridge maybe…but if somebody told me that toner is the ground up bones of fairies, I’d be hard pressed to prove otherwise.
(In the same timespan meat flavoured snacks have moved from small cubes of gristle on a platter to meat on a stick, cooked meat on a stick, meat in pastry, meat in cardboard wrapping, meat in Styrofoam containers that will still be landfill when the sun goes out, meat in cardboard wrapping again and, finally, meat flavoured crisps – an express way to get all the meat flavour you need without all that tedious having to digest protein or mop grease off your shirt. Compared to printing, meat snack technology is practically at the stage where the next step is opening a meat snack shop on Jupiter, or the past).
More impressive than the revolution in printing that has happened over the last few hundred years in the real world is the revolution in printing that has happened in the last two decades in boys’ bedrooms. It used to be that if you wanted to do printing, proper printing that looked real and everything, you used a John Bull printing set.
This incredibly fiddly process left you with a few lines of purple print and the nagging sense that whatever printer’s were paid, they earned it. Basically you had tiny rubber blocks with reverse letters on them, which you arranged on a wooden block, then pressed to a purple ink pad, which you then pressed to the paper and, tad dah, five lines of whatever juvenile crap you had come up with, unadulterated by the constrains of your shocking handwriting.
There were several shortcomings with the printing set. The first was the lack of fonts and point sizes. For any junior tabloid editor this was a real set-back, as it meant you were unable to get your screaming head lines (‘The Green Lane Gang Smell!!!’) into a suitably eye-catching front page splash. It’s also a shame that society missed out on a chance to identify future tabloid editors in their juvenile stage where, through gentle re-education and, failing that, depositing down a disused mine shaft, we could have been spared the damage done to the world when they reached their more destructive adult stage (if that ever truly happens).
Why the ink was purple I have no idea. Possibly to ensure that whatever was produced was not mistaken for, say, ‘The Times’.
Labels: Books, Cave Painting, Print, Printing Press, Writing
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