This is great! Thank you to whole of the workers in the book’s world.

Female workers are “girls.” Some of them look middle-aged.

Also on YouTube….. Search for “Print on demand”. It’s laser jet that spits out soft covered books! The plan was a bookstore would print the book you purchased in the store!

@alansmisclass was that comment really necessary? and beside, that has nothing to do with the video.

@alansmisclass Best comment ever.

@darksofa They didn’t always melt them down and they do turn up on the antiques market. I’ve seen them mostly for illustrations and for very old books.

I wonder where I could get some of those copper plates. It would be awesome to have a few pages of some of your favorite books.

Copper is hard.

@jetsonjoe They’d have melted the plates down once the print run was finished, to be reused for new books (thus why prints were a limited edition thing–they’d have to retype the plates to reprint it).

This trimmer was the most satisfying part to watch.

Those were not “primitive” conditions. They were the best the world had to offer.

Better-quality video available at Internet Archive, from where this video comes.

There are actually still letterpress companies that do this.

Mass distribution is all computerized now, but you can find smaller letterpress companies that do it with old Kluges and such. It’s an amazing process and really interesting…but man its boring work!