TYPESETTING

The earliest known printed books were produced using wooden blocks with the text carved on them. The blocks were then used as a printing plate.These "plates" were produced in much the same manner as those for wood engravings - except instead of a "picture" carved into them, the actual text of a page of a book was carved into them.

Hot Metal Composition

Johann Gutenberg, first demonstrated his movable type in 1448. By 1462 Gutenberg's invention became accepted and the use of it spread throughout Europe.. The raised image that was inked for printing was called the face -- from this we get the term "typeface". The type was inked and copies made directly from the type.

This advance in technology made possible printing multiple copies of books including The Holy Bible in languages which all people everywhere could read.

Mechanical Composition

The first practical mechanized type casting machine was invented in 1884 by Ottmar Mergenthaler. His invention was called the "Linotype". It produced solid lines of text. The line-composing operation was done by means of a keyboard similar to a typewriter. A “line o type” was created.

Mergenthaler at his line-o-type

Cameras, Darkrooms, Negatives, and Offset Metal Plates

How did typeset copy get to the offset printing press?

In the 1950s Eveready was an early adopter of offset printing. We bought our first offset presses but had no capacity to shoot film. Taylor Impressions took our final paste-up and shot developed, opaqued and delivered negatives. At Eveready our pressman Loyd and also later Zollie, his brother, stripped the negatives on orange masking sheets and made metal plates for our offset presses.

In the late 1950s Charlie Stevens built a camera for Eveready in our new 1817 Broadway location. Imagine a room within a room. The darkroom box was a wallboard two-by-four room about 6’ X 10’ with its own door. The “camera” was a lens in one wall of the constructed room.  Metal rails allowed the copy board to be moved for reducing or enlarging.  A set of photo lights was aimed at the copy board outside the darkroom. Inside the darkroom there was a negative board coated with a sticky substance upon which a sheet of negative film was placed. Then the lights were turned on and a 30 second countdown began. After the 30 second exposure the lights were turned off and the film went into a developer solution. Red lights did not expose the film so the negative was developed in red light. When the negative looked sharp when held up in front of the red lights it was put in the fix tray. The film was rinsed in water in a sink in the corner of the darkroom, and dried on clothslines streached across the room.  “Holes” or little spots were opaqued out using a thick black opaqueing ink.

Later in the 1960s, Eveready purchased a Brown 2000 camera and improved our darkroom.

Brown 2000

Photo-Mechanical Composition

Eveready used the Varityper to produce neat, camera-ready copy for offset printing. It looked like an oversized typewriter.

Varityper

The Varityper Headliner was used at Eveready
to set headlines and invitations in the 1960s.

In 1966, IBM released the Selectric Composer.  The Composer produced camera-ready justified copy. Characters were proportionally-spaced. It could hold 8,000 characters in its memory.

IBM Selectric Composer

Cathode Ray Tube Composition was used by our service bureaus. Service bureaus did typesetting and output either film or typeset on paper for pasteup and shooting negatives. Trudy at  Sisk, one of our service bureaus, used a Compugraphic. In the late 1960s, Prepared by a computer, a tape would be fed into a phototypesetter, which would imprint type from a strip of film onto paper, which would then be used for paste-up.

Compugraphic

Eveready also used D&T Typesetting and eventually Bailey Typesetting and Wolfestone. Along with several independent sorts.

Eveready has always had in in-house typesetter. Miss Evelyn held that position for many years. She used the Varityper and IBM typewriters. She was followed by Mary Ann who used the IBM Composer.

Laser Technology

In the late 1980s Eveready entered the computer typesetting world in a big way with our first Mac. We had a series of typesetters and Macs.

early Mac desktop

We purchased a series of complete Mac desktop systems … and had a series of Mac desktop typesetters, Cary “just slap it on the press” Woo, and later Lynn Phillips and my childhood friend Laurence Ralston.

Eveready Press Today

Typesetting, book design and production are our focus and our passion at Eveready Press. We love fonts, layout, and what we call the architecture of books.

We use state of the art Macs, a digital press, and computer-to-press offset printing.

In the evolving world of typesetting, we utilize Quark, PageMaker, and InDesign as well as Adobe Creative Suite and Acrobat.

We appreciate it when authors give us files in Word which they have edited, especially the spelling of proper names, and checking dates and facts. However, we have received book copy in all forms, from handwritten, to ancient typewriting.

Some data for this piece came from…

A Capsule History of Typesetting

By R. J. Brown

Editor-in-Chief

HistoryBuff.com

W.B.

Eveready Letter and Advertising Service had one of the first, if not the first, electric typewriter in Nashville. It was an IBM Executive Electric Typewriter.  Executives from some of Nashville’s leading companies such as Cain Sloan and Castner Knott sent letters to Eveready in the early 1950s to be typed by my Grandfather W.B. “Barry” Stevens. The proportional spacing and overall look was quite sharp and unique.  The official name of our company still includes the phrase “Letter Service”.

W.B. had learned to type and excel in business skills at Draughon’s Business College in the early 1900s. His mother had died as a result of his birth and his father shortly thereafter as a result of being kicked in the stomach by a mule.  He was raised on the family farm by his brother Burley Stevens , Burley’s wife Cora and W.B.’s older sister Zora. Burley was some 20 years older than W.B.

At sixteen he was given tuition money by brother Burley and a one way stage coach ticket from his birthplace, a farm near Liberty, Tennessee, to go to school in the big city – Nashville. At Draughon’s Business College W.B. was to learn typing, shorthand, business law, accounting and court reporter skills.

At that time lower Broadway where the stage coach debarked on First Avenue at the Cumberland River was a dusty, unpaved hubbub of commercial activity.  Burley had given young W.B a strong warning… “Proceed up Broadway to your school. Do not look to the left or to the right. Enroll in Draughon’s Business College and pay your tuition.” There were a string of raucous saloons lining lower Broad full of every big city temptation.  W.B. made it safely up Broad to Eighth Avenue and entered his new school.  We never knew if he looked to the left or to the right.

His first real job was as a court reporter.  He took down each word in shorthand and transcribed the day’s proceedings each evening on a typewriter.

He could type 80-100 words a minute with very high accuracy.

W.B. Stevens was our founder and steady guide for half a century.

CMS 

Jack

Jack Pardue came to work at Eveready in the 1950s. He was fresh out of the Army... had been in Korea fighting the North Koreans and Chi-Coms. He never said a word about Korea except that he didn't like anything about it.

Jack running our Harris LUH 14 X 20
not his usual Multi.

I remember those first days Jack came on board... skinny, lanky, and wearing a clean white Tee shirt, he was determined to learn how to be a pressman. He was taught to run the Multi-graph 1240, which became his main press.  This was a small duplicator, not a true "press" in printing terminology, however Jack was able to print up to three-color jobs in register on this small press.

If you want to picture Jack, just think of of Andy Griffith in one of the peak seasons of the Andy Griffith show. He was tall, had wavy hair and of course in later years had the shock of gray hair. He spoke slowly and deliberately. Everything with Jack was thought out, decent and in order.

He became part of the Eveready family. He got to know customers. He did whatever he could to do a good job as pressman, and also, in delivery or in good customer relations to further the success of Eveready Printing.

Gardner Smith was in charge of producing a monthly two color newsletter for Cheekwood-Botanical Garden & Museum of Art.  She and Jack became friends over the years so that she would bring in the copy and say "Jack, what accent color should we run this month?" or just "Well run whatever Jack likes." She never complained about his choice.

In the over 50 years Jack worked at Eveready, he hardly ever took a sick day, took short reasonable vacations, and worked at his slow but sure pace every day. In July of 2003 Jack spoke pleasantly in everyday conversation with Priscilla, then after eating lunch sitting at his press and by his table with his thermos and his coffee... there he passed away. Priscilla went back into the shop to speak to him, saw him slumped over, came back and got me. I immediately started CPR. She called 911. The paramedics were there within minutes, but he was already gone.

"The Lord bless you and keep you; The Lord make His face shine upon you, and be gracious to you; The Lord lift up His countenance upon you, and give you peace." I prayed in my head as I gave him CPR. I knew he wasn't coming back.

He loved his wife Peggy and his son Michael, was a member of the non-denominational Christian community church in his Ridgetop home, and a was great friend to me and my family.

CMS

The Atomic Sandwich

Eveready Printing dates back to 1928.  For this account I will only harken back to the mid 1950s.

My father Charlie Stevens and I often used to come to Eveready on Saturday.  I came to help him. My job was to clean up... basically to sweep the shop and take out the trash. He worked on paperwork and paying bills and together we did a little paste up work, that sort of thing, to finish up the week.

As the day wound on closer to lunchtime I got hungrier and hungrier and once in a while, not every time, as a special treat, my Dad  would order an Atomic Sandwich from Melfi's.

Melfi's in the 1950s

Melfi's was a wonderful Italian restaurant a couple of blocks up from Eveready on Division Street. Melfi’s was probably the source of some of the first pizza in Nashville… although there was a little place down in the Arcade which was one of the very first pizza places in Nashville…a guy actually threw the pizza pie dough up in the air, and it featured a very authentic oregano/basil base to the tomato sauce.  Anyway, if my dad was feeling effusive and generous, he would order an Atomic Sandwich for our lunch.

The Atomic Sandwich was a true Italian work of art, consisting of home-baked Italian bread, probably 18 inches long and, as I remember it, tender yet crusty, sweet and fresh… then inside the sandwich were layers and layers of Italian meats and cheeses, a homemade mayonnaise sauce, sweet peppers, onions, lettuce, tomatoes and anchovies. The masterpiece came wrapped in aluminum foil with black olives on toothpicks as eyes and a pepperoncini pepper as a tail.  Half a sandwich, or probably less than half for me, with a Coke was and entire meal.

This special lunch made my work absolutely worth it. I cleaned the shop using that absorbent granular sweeping substance you throw on floors and then sweep... it takes up all the dirt. Then you sweep all the dirt plus granules into a pile and use a dustpan and pick up the debris and throw it away. I also emptied all the trash cans. My dad taught me to work and I loved it!  Later I learned paste up, darkroom work and all the pre-press steps necessary to get a job ready for making metal plates and printing.

CMS

Welcome to Eveready Press

Most of us have at one time or another thought, "I should write a book." Modern advances have made the art of book making accessible to a greater number of authors.

We are independent publishers, which means an author or entity comes to us with a manuscript or idea for manuscript. We construct a proposal based on the client's desires and vision and we are (hopefully) hired on to do any and all parts necessary to bring that vision to fruition.

This blog is dedicated to sharing information about the creative and production processes involved with self publishing a book. Our website, eveready-usa.com is home to even more information including many of our titles.