Elegy for a Printer -- How Newspapers Used to Be Made

I donated my HP Laserjet 2100M to the Swift Creek Mill Playhouse office in Colonial Heights in 2009. A young man carried it out of my car, up the stairs and left it on a table in the hallway. I said a few final words to it, hoping it would have a nice life and stay busy in the theater world.

Yes, I felt bad about leaving my printer. We had been through a lot together.

I bought it in 1997 for $800 from CompUSA. It was a huge purchase for me because I didn't have a job at the time. My hobby, the Richmond Music Journal, a monthly newspaper I pasted up in my dining room, was almost as time-consuming as a real job and had expenses that were barely covered by the advertising money I raised.

I originally created the newspaper on a Apple Classic II and a Stylewriter II printer, printing out columns of justified type, headlines and cutlines, cutting them out with a razor blade and a ruler, coating the backs with a glue stick and pasting them onto blue-lined sheets of card stock in a newspaper page design. This was the same way the daily newspaper was created between the eras of hot type and computers. I had been a paste-up girl for about a decade at the Richmond Times-Dispatch and News Leader, assembling pages like a puzzle while old, cranky newspapermen acted inappropriately. When a story was too long to fit its diagrammed space and needed a part cut out, you called out, "I need a bite!" to get an editor's attention to come tell you which part you could cut out.

Papers took preplanning back then. You had to diagram them out as precisely as you could because once you had your photos screened, you were inflexible to change anything. I had to have all my art and photography together in advance, crops marked with a grease pencil, and take them downtown to a very small business that did photo screens. I had to know what size I wanted the photo to be in advance. The screen guy would rephotograph the cropped part of my photos and blow them up or shrink them to the requested size, and give the screened photos back to me in big sheets called veloxes. If you looked at the velox with a magnifying glass, you could see each photo was actually a series of dots. Those dots were your resolution and what made your black and white photos have all the necessary shades of gray; otherwise, without a screen all dark areas of a photo reproduced as black. Many of the free street newspapers of the 1980s and 1990s didn't know this, and that's why their art always looked like it came off a pre-computer era fax machine.

Color photos was even more complicated, involving color separations, and was something I never

learned and couldn't afford to do anyway.

I was paying the screen guy anywhere from $75 to $200 a month, depending on how many photos I had, so between the screen guy and the Ashland Herald Progress that actually printed the whole newspaper, my profit margin was very small.

Enter the HP Laserjet 2100M. This printer not only produced sharper text than the Stylewriter, it could do 1200 resolution. If I printed out a grayscale photo on it, it would have enough dots in it to look like the photo. All I had to do was cut it out and paste it down, just like I was doing with the text. I could pay for it in four to six months if I stopped using the screen guy downtown. It was my first big business decision, after the decision to start the paper itself.

I still feel bad about the screen guy because the Free Press and I were his last regular clients and he was on the brink of being an unnecessary business.

So for the next couple of years, I rolled along with the cut and paste, free to resize my photos myself, and then switched to doing the paper on QuarkXPress and printing it out in two big chunks, the top of the page and the bottom. By 2002 or so, my printer in Ashland was telling me, after I did the whole paper in QuarkXPress, to just convert the whole thing to a .pdf and bring it to him on a disc. No more glue sticks or razor blades, and no more need for a desktop printer. It wasn't long after that when I didn't even have to bring the disc anymore. I just uploaded the file to Ashland. And it wasn't long after that before I decided why bother to pay the printer all the money anyway, just upload the file to a website and let people look at it that way. And it wasn't long after that before the website itself became the paper. And then I quit it altogether because I had found a day-job and a boyfriend; I wasn't going out every night chasing bands.

So for its last decade with me, the big old printer just made copies of emails and manuals. It became more and more difficult to connect it to newer computers. I had to buy a converter box to run an ethernet cable through it when USB became all the style. With the Apple operating system Snow Leopard, there was no longer any support for printers requiring AppleTalk, and I had to network it to an older Mac to even use it.

I'm not sure if Swift Creek ever figured out how to get it to work with PCs. That printer was a partner and a companion as I taught myself everything I know today about publishing and print production. I was sorry to see it go, but by the end, there were seven other printers in the house and it was just crazy to have so many.

That printer is also the star of one of my most popular video on YouTube with almost 38,000 views.