Discussion

By Jim Hamilton on Feb 11, 2022

I was a Boston-area freelance paste-up artist in the 1980s. It still amazes me that I was able to bill rates of up to $20/hour during that time. All that for a skill that became virtually obsolete not very long after thanks to PostScript.
The biggest lesson I learned from using X-Acto knives, rubber cement, and wax is this:
Neatness counts.

By Gordon Pritchard on Feb 11, 2022

Freelance paste-up artists where I worked were called "mechanical men."
One of the criteria for letterpress houses was how well they could match the density of type in the galleys they delivered when text changes were made. To wrap text around a graphic we had to cut out each word and paste it individually in place. Very often, especially at very busy times or after an all nighter, you'd step away from the paste up and notice a tiny piece of a word that had fallen off the board and stuck on to your pants. Yikes.
Then you had overlays of rubylith to do the windows for photos and tissue overlays with instructions for screen tints and colors for prepress to follow.
Memories.

By HARVEY LEVENSON on Feb 16, 2022

This is an excerpt of a longer story I sent to Frank.

I started my graphic arts career in New York City working for an advertising agency (1961 - 1964). My job was a paste-up artist. I was fast at it! For those of you who know what paste-up entailed back then, you know that type and copy would be pasted down with rubber cement. This was before wax and certainly before “cutting and pasting” on a computer. For you newbies, now you know the genesis of the term “cut and paste” in desktop publishing on a computer.

Anyway, the way you would clean-up residual rubber cement on the paste-up (also known as a mechanical) was with a small ball of dried rubber cement. Yes, there were those little rubber squares or rectangular gizmos that could be used. But those were for sissies. A REAL paste-up artist used little dried balls of rubber cement. As you did more clean-up, that little ball of rubber cement would get a little too big to work comfortably. When that would happen, I’d simply take that slightly too large piece of rubber cement and drop it in a cardboard box along side the drawing board on which I worked. Well, one day the accumulation in the box got quite large and I was going to throw it away. But, you know, I couldn’t. It was like part of me. I became emotional about it. So what I did was to start sticking the accumulation together, and after three years (when I went off to RIT to continue my education) I took a beer glass, broke off the bottom, and mounted the three-year accumulation on it. And there I had it, my one and only sculpture entitled, “THREE YEARS ON THE DRAWING BOARD.” That sculpture now sits proudly in my home office as part of my “credentials”…61 years later.

I also did Leroy Lettering, but that’s another story.