Pasteboard

[Mike Witherell]

Hey everybody,

What is the origin of the term "pasteboard"? (Not as related to paper stock.) Does anyone have a picture of a pasteboard in pre-DTP days?

[Nick Passmore]

In the days between hot metal and and full-page onscreen production, halftone screen photographs and type output on photographic paper in "galleys"  had to be pasted onto layout sheets. When I worked on a student newspaper (late 1970s) this meant smearing Cow gum (rubber cement) onto the back of each piece. The more sophisticated process involved a machine with rollers that applied hot wax. The assembly was generally done on a large board, often a proper engineer's or architect's drawing board with a space around to hold strips of work in progress.

Pictures from News & Tech magazine September 2009 of a very late conversion.

[Mike Witherell]

Awesome!

Would it be accurate to say that a pasteup board is the same as a draftsman's table?

[Jeffrey_Smith]

Nick's description is spot on. The pasteboard does not refer to the actual table, rather the area on the table where the galleys were kept until needed.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

No, the table (like my PlanHold across the office) is where you put all that stuff. A paste-up or blueline board was the actual card stock, blank or printed with fadeout blue guidelines, on which you stuck the bits.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I have no pictures and more to my regret, no examples on hand. I started my career in layout doing blueline board work, and produced everything from business cards and letterhead to some very long product manuals using it. In an either hard-hearted or sensible move, I discarded all my boards a couple of relocations ago, including one very large (3x4 foot) hand-drawn PCB layout of breathtaking complexity. (A dual-band satellite receiver.) I wish I had at least that one, some days.

Typical work was on either an 8-1/2x11 or 11x17 blueline board, about two inches larger than that in each dimension, with fadeout-blue grid markings in eighth inch increments. I used a typesetting service for fancy work, getting anything from a few square inches to a square foot or two of headings, art text, composed body text, etc. I used various things for art, including hand-drawing (I do still have my set of graphic pens!), and advanced use of scaling photocopiers to resize elements. Cut out, paste in place on the blueline board. (Pros had a "waxer", which laid down a thin layer of melted sticky wax on the back of art; I worked more slowly with glue sticks and a limited budget.)

For the product manuals etc., I had a fancy Olympia electronic typewriter and four or five type wheels that let me do three sizes of type from a huge 10pt Orator down to a tiny footnote-sized font. I'd type out the information in vertical columns, then cut those "galleys" down to paste on the board. A little later, I had a PC and WordPerfect and could do more easily composed galleys (but nothing like layout).

Lots of work. Really wish I had one sample board left somewhere.

And then I was hired by a small "desktop publishing shop" that had Ventura Publisher, Arts&Letters (a precursor of CorelDRAW that used keyboard input) and miracle of miracles, a laser printer. We did tons of work using local print shops more used to blueline boards and film output. It was run by two guys who figured out every clever trick there was to get the most from this limited gear, including things like hand-editing PS files to make them compatible with RIPs of the day... but we still sometimes solved problems, like 2-up work-and-turn layouts, by pasting stuff up.

The original PageMaker, if I remember (never much used it, myself) was little more than a digital pasteup board on which you could stick digital elements. Very little actual layout automation or features, just an electronic version of an art table and waxer. Ventura, for all its many many many faults, was a miracle tool in that respect, with proto-versions of many things we completely take for granted now, even in Word.

Excuse me, I am feeling very old and need to go find my roll of engineering blueline vellum, used for large projects. It was very expensive and I only used half of it or so. So I kept that. 🙂

[Mike Witherell]

What was the pasteboard made of? Was it made from the heavy paper stock known as pasteboard?

I myself did only a tiny bit of paste-up back in 1979 and on. I mostly did darkroom stat camera stuff, along with stripping and platemaking for a duplicator offset press.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I don't know the precise term (from among the many printing/stock terms for stiff paper/board) but it was white, fairly stiff (12-14pt) and had a hard calendered surface — not coated, I don't think, but hard enough that ink did not sink in and spread. You needed to use a blotter or dryer or a coffee break to let things like crop marks and drawn-on elements dry.

Maybe bristol, but I recall that being a softer surface that would absorb ink.

[Nick Passmore]

On this, eastern, side of the atlantic I don't think I actually ever heard anyone use the precise term "pasteboard" in the days of paste-up.

I've always worked in magazines and newspapers and we used layout sheets that were just heavy waxproof paper with columns and folio locations marked in non-printing blue. They were fastened to a big sloping drawing board with masking tape on the corners. 

Other than on my student newspaper, these were all unionised of course — so as a sub (copy-editor) my job was strictly hands-in-pockets and could-you-possibly-open-that-headline-up-a-little requests to the comp (compositor) who held the scalpel. This was even after Atex and other "direct-input" systems arrived in the late 80s. 

(I do have my original PageMaker floppy disks. Version 1.0 I believe.)

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I don't recall ever using the term 'pasteboard' — the universal term in my area of the west coast was 'blueline board.'

Did some work for small newspapers in my area as well. Not union, so we could move our own damn headlines. 🙂

Next, we'll have to get into acetate and rubylith (added elements for multi-color and masking on boards). Don't miss either of those.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Pretty soon we're going to be into Letraset and the many, many stick-on elements (like IC pad layouts) for PCB design using board.

Huh. Not sure where my large collection of Letraset went. Don't think I threw that away. Maybe.

[Nick Passmore]

Ah yes, Letraset. Still have a couple of nice little pencil-like things with smooth nylon tips for rubbing that down. It was a nightmare to store in quantity and so frustrating when you had six half-used sheets but not one of whatever character you need at that moment.

And yes, the strict division of labo(u)r in the composing room seems strange now — but with offstone time looming and the chief sub looming even larger there was something to be said for it! Stone subbing on a daily paper was one of the best, or at least most satisfying, jobs I ever had.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

"Pasteboard" is pretty much a catch-all word. It depends on where you worked and how, but mostly it was a scrap piece of paper near your work area where you kept the pieces of what you needed. In my case, we'd use wax, so the last thing you'd want is to use your actual drafting table surface to stick stuff to as it would get pretty yucky quite quickly. At the paper, we would have preprinted flats with non-repro-blue guides to indicate the verical columns of the newspaper with a baseline grid usually at 12 pt. Our assembly time was very quick so we lined stuff up optically to these grids... i.e. we didn't even use T-squares or parallel rules.

[Mike Witherell]

Hmmm. There appears to be more history here than first thought.

[Mike Witherell]

Is this product what some of you are describing?

https://www.jerrysartarama.com/strathmore-400-drawing-and-sketch-pads-17302000000

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

That's it. It is/was bristol, I guess. 🙂 (Paper terminology is so arcane I was never sure if it was a precise or generic term.)

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

pretty much any light card stock was used. We just bought full reams of full press sheet size and printed the non-repro grids on. In later years, when I was working at actual graphic design studios, we would buy a pure white coated stock which took black ink very cleanly, and the clay coating of the paper allowed you to cleanly scrape off the ink to make sharp corners, etc. fun times.

[Jeffrey_Smith]

An interesting video

[Mike Witherell]

In that video, the practicer of the lost art appears to be working on top of a draftsman's table. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Not a lot of diff between a drafting table and and art table. I have a vintage PlanHold here, acquired for $100 when an architectural review firm down the hall shut down and had a dozen for sale. Tilt-top that can go from flat to about 80 degrees vertical, big paper drawer. It could easily be fitted with a drafting machine or the like, or used as a square board, or just as a big art table.* (One of my office treasures; I recently discovered it's worth a crazy amount to vintage furniture types.)

* Mine is serving in the venerable tradition of "horizontal surface that collects random crap." Sigh.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

I still have some pasteup artwork in a closet somewhere. I will dig some out when I get a chance, but basically, the pasteboard was anywhere at the side of your work area that you used to store pieces of galley type/artwork that you then "cut" and "pasted" as  needed onto the final artwork board (in my years in newspaper, we would use a waxer, which was a device that deposited a thin coat of melted sticky wax onto the back of our type galleys to adhere it to the flats... much quicker to work with than rubber cement as it was easily movable; rubber cement was more permanent. I worked at a weekly newspaper in the mid 70s and we worked standing up pasting up the flats for the newspaper on a steeply angled workboard that spanned the width of the room (as opposed to sitting down at a single drafting table), where all the flats for an edition could be laid out side by side, and we could move from one to the the other easily.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

Here's some pasteup for a poster I did in the late 80s. All done with wax, and typical of artwork at the time, an overlay of translucent paper to write the colour-breaks and other notes for the printer to follow when shooting negs. Also, a shot of a 17-yr-old me (right) in the 70s while shooting negatives of the pasted-up flats for the newpaper I worked at (a stack of which you can see at the bottom)

 

 

 

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

(Gad, I wish I was that weight again!)

[Nick Passmore]

The haircut too?

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

"The haircut too?"

Ouch!!  lol