The Olde Curmudgeon -- Chapter 5

...continued from Chapter 4.

Chapter 5. The Allegory of the Printing Plant







Old Number 9, a flatbed Miehle

You may think, the old curmudgeon told Jack, that the allegory of the printing plant involves a shrub who could not write cursive.  But although such a tale has a certain whimsical charm to it, our allegory is set more prosaically in a place that printed technical journals.  They produced serials for such organizations as IEEE, ACS, Audubon, et al. They printed Physics Today, The Journal of Astronomy, and numerous other such things.  They employed degreed chemists as proofreaders.  Many of the journals were printed on flatbed Miehles from hot lead type in 300-lb forms.  The sheets would often hold sixteen or thirty-two pages on a single impression. There were web presses, of course, and perfectors, and even an offset web.  These were the Old Days, and printing a magazine was no job for weenies, let me tell you.
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