Last time you said you had moved to a new section.
Right. To Technical Publications. Tech Pubs for short. They prepared the camera-ready copy to be delivered to Reproduction. That was the section that printed the final documents that would be delivered to the customer. Usually the Air Force or Navy.
And what did you do there”
A number of things. First I would confer with the engineer who brought in the job.
Made sure I knew what he or she wanted. Agreed on a deadline for finishing it. That kind of thing. Then I would go over the material and start editing
How did that go?
Well, remember: That was in the old days, so to speak. 1970. We had dedicated word processors back then. And hand-drawn artwork. No desktop computers like we have today. We were working with hard copy. Typing and artwork were handled separately and later combined. We’d wind up with pages of text plus images that would be photocopied and printed in multiple copies. No electronic transfer.
Okay.
So I would go through the manuscript and drawings that the engineer had brought in. The text I would mark up to tell the typist what to type and how to format it. I would handle the engineer’s rough sketches and mark them appropriately. If I did the job right, it would all come together and fit well in the end.
Got it.
The manuscript I would mark with the standard editing marks I showed you before.
If the sketches needed any editing, I’d do the same for them.
Now’s the tricky part. Stop me if I get too technical.
Okay.
The text went to the typists
And the sketches went to the artists.
But first I would have to judge how the drawing would work best in the document. We had four ways to show a drawing. A half page. A full page viewed vertically; that’s if it was higher than it was wide. Or a turn page; that’s a full page but wider than it is high so you would rotate the document to look at it. Or a pullout. That’s a drawing so wide that you would want it to take up two or more pages pulled out. The way some magazines do it. National Geographic, for instance.
Am I getting too detailed?
No, go ahead. Some people might be interested.
Well, we had a form with multiple carbon copies. I would indicate on it a control number, a figure number, a caption, and the format I specified: half page, pullout, or whatever. The card would go with the sketch to the artist, a copy would be stapled to the edited manuscript to tell the typist how to format the blank space where the image ultimately would go, and I would keep a copy to help me keep track of the job. You follow me?
I’m with you.
The bottom line is that, if all goes well, the typing gets typed, the drawings get drawn, I put it all together, and it all goes to Reproduction and we wind up with printed documents.
Here’s some more trivia for you. The books I showed you have a comb binding. Another way of binding we called staple-and-tape.
I don’t know about you, but I think that’s enough for today. Next time I’ll mention a few more things about my Tech Pubs experience.
Okay. See you.