Toronto. Aldous Huxley wrote his novel “Brave New World” in 1931. As a youth I read a paper back copy of the story. back in the time when a profusion of paper back titles offered a cheap education to everyone. In this book, originally published a year later in 1932, his tale envisioned a new and strange world.
And like the story, our editor discovered he was in a brave new world when he took the file for his 100th issue down to be printed. Bob Lansdale describes the event like this, “[I] was down to Aries to start the printing of our September issue. Their new machine turns out to be a Versant 180 Xerox machine… very compact and not what I expected it to be. The machine prints both sides of the page, then stacks them in a bin. When the individual book is ready the machine staples the pages together and spits it out the back of the machine.
“Seems to take about a minute to do our 64 page book and it will take a day and a half to do the whole batch. Needless to say I did not stay around for the whole printing. They say everything will be ready for packaging on Thursday but if it is possible for everyone we can do it on Friday. No rush as we can’t mail it until [after] September 1st.
“There is no screen on the pictures. The image is toner on top of the page surface whereas our former litho printing is wet ink that sinks into the page. [The] Machine guy says that for photographs the litho system is best to get good blacks. I’ll have to work my self thru this again [i.e. how to set the darkest/lightest blacks for optimal printing. Check out any journal issue to see how fussy our editor is with print reproduction.].”