Paste up

Article summary

, held in the Oxford University Press museum Paste up is a method of creating or laying out publication pages that predates the use of the now-standard computerized page design desktop publishing programs. Completed, or camera-ready, pages are known as mechanicals or mechanical art. In the offset lithography process, the mechanicals would be photographed with a stat camera to create a same-size film negative for each printing plate required. Paste up relied on phototypesetting, a process that would generate "cold type" on photographic paper that usually took the form of long columns of text. These printouts were often a single column in a scroll of narrow (3-inch or 4-inch) paper that was as deep as the length of the story. A professional known variously as a paste-up artist, layout artist, mechanical artist, production artist, or compositor would cut the type into sections and arrange it carefully across multiple columns. For example, a 15 inch strip could be cut into three 5-inch sections. Headlines and other typographic elements were often created and supplied separately by the typesetter, leaving it to the paste up artist to determine their final position on the page. Adhesive was then applied to the back side of these strips, either by applying rubber cement with a brush or passing them through a machine that would apply a wax adhesive.…

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