Pasteboard

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.

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

An interesting video

Is this product what some of you are describing?

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

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

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.

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. 🙂

Awesome!

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

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.