You had lead plates!!! All our pages were done by hand set and when that page got locked up and being carried to the press I can still recall the whole page falling to the floor, you would have loved to hear the pressman have a talk to the compositor, language so colorful it would look good in a comic section. I ran that old press for a couple of years and really learned to curse, then onto Linotype and then to four color offset printing, funny thing I had never run any type of offset press and I was on the Linotype and one day my boss almost begged me to try to run it. So all day setting type and at night trying to figure out how this sucker worked, in the 1 1/2 years we had this machine we went through six operators and be damned if I was going to let any machine get the best of me, after ten years it finally did, developed disc problems and the boss had to hire two guys to try and run this machine and all they bitched about was they needed a Heidelberg and finally the boss gave in, guess what, the Heidelberg was faulty, naturally, so one weekend, shortly after two surgeries the boss had someone load the press up for me and I managed to get 20,000 impressions without too much trouble and I had never run a Heidelberg before. Well the long and the short of it was the boss had these two guys in his office for a nice little chat, oh, to be a fly on the wall!!!
Another cute story, I'll try to make it short. We were in the process of setting a book for the local university, it was about half done and this prick comes in and says he wants the book set in Baskerville Type, man was I pissed, I was also production manager at the time, anyway my boss tells me not to worry as this ass was going to be paying for the new type fonts, so, OK
When the new fonts came in we set one page with the new type, Baskerville, and the other with Press Roman and nothing else marked on the sheets, are you ready for this, they had to send the sheets back down and have us identify which was which, we could have marked them wrong and they'd be none the wiser, but I have yet to get my revenge so before all the pages go to camera I had one of the typists set a short paragraph in Press Roman and let'er go. There is only one person I know who could find that wayward paragraph and that would be my brother who really knew his typefaces and wouldn't let me put type back in the cases because I've been known to screw up in that category at least. Have a good one Gar, Ed