Discussion

By Frank Cost on Dec 11, 2020

I remember visiting Elizabeth Typesetting in New Jersey in the late 1980s. The air inside was blue with cigarette smoke. Whether or not you held lit cigarettes between your lips, you were a chain smoker in that place. The faculty conference room in the School of Printing at RIT was also an adventure in second-hand chain smoking during that time. I miss those days of relatively dirtier lungs and cleaner souls.

By Pete Masterson on Dec 11, 2020

I was the last manager of Recorder Typesetting, San Francisco in 1991. We had a Penta system that ran on a mini-computer (Data General -- can't recall exactly). Our office had 4 workstations and output was on the Linotron 202. The Penta was one of the highest quality systems available in the "cold type" era.

Our specialty was books (though we also did a few smaller jobs from time to time). Our service was a division of Recorder-Sunset Press, which had already shut down (and was in the process of liquidation) when I was hired to manage the typesetting service. Recorder-Sunset press had been in business for roughly 100 years -- the "sunset" part of the name derived from being the original printer of Sunset Magazine when it was a promotional periodical owned by Southern Pacific Railroad.

We worked with major publishers, typesetting books and also worked with some top ranked graphic designers. The company had "fought" against desktop publishing, but it was a losing battle. Ultimately, the costs of overhead made the business unprofitable. (For example, the "maintenance agreement" for the software/hardware was $50,000 per year.) We developed a plan to "migrate" to a DTP solution -- I even brought in my personal Apple Macintosh IICX where we typeset a book for Addison-Wesley. It proved the concept, but unfortunately, a major client (about 25% of our annual revenue) moved all their work "in-house" (with DTP equipment), putting the company deep in the red. Within weeks, we finished the on-hand projects and shut down.

Ultimately, I became a freelance book designer and worked with independent (self) publishers and served several terms as president of the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association. (I'm now retired.) In the process, I became a "font junky" and still have some 15,000 typefaces in my personal collection. (I previously had owned a small print shop for several year.)