In the upstairs of an old converted Cornish Methodist Chapel a young man sits on a stool and leans over a grey-painted light box placed on a small table. He is holding a surgical scalpel in his hand. The light box is a flat metal construction about six inches deep and a bit over two feet square. It has a plate glass top laid over a sheet of translucent acrylic plastic. This lets diffused light pass through from the circular fluorescent tube wired into the inside of the box.
To the left and right-hand sides of the box a steel rule, which spans the width of the whole device, is fixed. A mechanism is fitted to the sides that allows the steel rule to be moved up and down while remaining steady and perfectly horizontal. The box is held at an angle higher at the back being supported there by two steel legs.
The young man labours over strips of white paper. These are strips of photographic paper, but they have no pictures on them. Instead, they have, what looks like photographs of letters, rows and rows of black text. They vary in size and type. Some are bold, some are in italics and some like the headlines of a newspaper or the headings of leaflets. By moving the rule up and down and turning the paper round he selects parts of the text and meticulously cuts round each piece using the scalpel and the steel edge. He works quickly on the left-hand side of the box as he takes the pieces he has cut out and glues them to a piece of white board which is taped to the glass on the right. Scooping tiny amounts of a petroleum gum from a small circular tin with a spatula he applies this to the back of each piece and builds-up a page of black and white artwork; the page of a magazine. Using the top edge of the steel rule he lines up each piece of text and makes sure it is horizontal.
The place where the young man is working is a mezzanine floor and more like a shelf than a floor as it does not extend to even a quarter of the length of the building. A rickety staircase, built against the grey granite wall to its right and with no guard rail to its left, takes any potential visitors up to it from the ground floor. A printing company operates on the ground floor. The clanking and whirring sounds of machinery echo throughout the building all day and the thick stone walls ensure the air is cold even in the summer.
The artworker is small in stature and slightly built. He feels the cold, damp atmosphere of the old building so he keeps a small fan heater running aimed at his legs and keeps his black fleece jacket on. Although he lives in Cornwall he was not born or raised in the county. He moved from Essex to work on publicity and print production for a national charity based in a coastal town there. He left the charity to start his own graphic design and print business. As he works he wonders if he has done the right thing leaving a secure job to go it alone.
By the time he has finished the page he is working on it has a title at the top and three columns of text below. Some of these columns are broken up with sub-headings and yet each part has been separately cut from the original sheets of photographic paper. The columns are also interrupted by rectangular boxes drawn in black ink with a special draughtman’s drawing pen. The paper he cuts the text from is called phototypesetting and it is printed out in long strips from a machine designed to perform that particular task.
Later he will take the white board downstairs to a darkroom and put it where several other pages like the one he has just created are lying in a wire tray. The darkroom door is open now but soon it will be closed and no one allowed in while the owner of the print works photographs each of the pages on a special one metre high vertical device called a repro camera. Next to the darkroom is a small office housing the phototypesetting machine.
As the young man works he thinks about his wife at their home five miles away. Their two children will be at school now and she will be busying herself around the house. He sees her making cups of tea for the builders who are constructing the small office in the back garden. He worries that the builders will not be finished by the weekend as they promised they would.
He thinks about the computer that the printing supplies salesman had demonstrated two months before and the fact that, after thinking about it for what seems now to be a very scarily short space of time, he ordered one, and that it was soon to be delivered. He remembers the salesman showing him how to make up a page on the screen like the ones he was used to creating. But now he could do it by typing text into boxes and moving them into their place with a device called a mouse. He was urged to try it for himself and after some shaky attempts he learned how to do it. The computer worked by visual on-screen movements controlled by the mouse and not by a series of esoteric commands that had to be typed-in to get the computer to do what he wanted; something that he and many of his friends in the trade had never been able to master.
He learned how to select sections of text by ‘dragging’ across them and applying commands to particular words, lines, paragraphs or even whole pages, changing typefaces and styles. He learned how he could cut them from one box and paste them into another. He knew what cutting and pasting was, but it was so liberating to do it this way. He was amazed that the people who had made this computer seemed to understand what was needed to create graphic design on screen and do it in a very logical way. He was astonished by this. They must be designers he thought. They speak my language! Once the page had been put together it was transferred through a cable to a printing device connected to the computer. The page came out of the printer in the same way that a page might come out of a photocopier.
While remembering his amazement, he hears the darkroom door slam shut down below. He knows that the company owner will be photographing the white boards he left in there. Inside the darkened room there will now be only one red lightbulb to illuminate everything. He imagines the owner moving about in there, lifting the lid on the top of the repro camera and placing a sheet of photographic film under it. He sees him placing one of the white boards under the glass surface of the platform at the base and then pressing some buttons on the control panel along front edge of the camera hood. He has done it himself many times; waiting for the timer to ping, removing the sheet of film and taking it to a small sink on the other side of the darkroom and washing it with water from a short piece of rubber hose connected to a tap. The artworker wonders what the owner thinks about the process as the water runs across the surface of the film and parts of it begin to disappear revealing a negative image. Does he still find it fascinating or does he now regard it as outdated? He knows that the owner will dry the negative, hanging it up on a wire line stretched across the room by attaching it with clothes pegs. And he knows that the process will be repeated several times as the other white boards are photographed.
The young man brings his mind back to the page in front of him on the lightbox and carries on working. The line of text at the top is the title of a magazine. He searches at the bottom of the strip of phototypesetting looking for one small line of text. He finds it and reads ‘Issue 26, February 1986’. He cuts round it, glues it in place just below the magazine title. It doesn’t look right to his artistic eye. He lifts it up, re-positions it and, using the steel rule, ensures it is horizontal. Scanning the whole page, he is pleased with the overall look. He takes a piece of plain white paper and places it over the board he has been working on and, while holding the two sheets of material still with his left hand, he rubs his right hand over them all while applying pressure. This satisfies him that all the pieces of photographic paper are fully stuck to the board. Having completed this piece of artwork he takes it down the shaky stairs aiming to put it in the darkroom tray. As he crosses the factory floor he passes the print machine minder who is switching off the machine he has been running for the last hour. A loud silence settles over the whole building when it stops. The silence provides the minder with the opportunity to speak normally instead of shouting and he jumps at the chance. He blurts out any banter that comes into his mind. "Well, that’s another job jobbed", he says. "And there’s another one here", says the young man holding up the sheet of artwork.
"Another job jobbed" is a well-used, banal saying that many in the print trade repeat. Any piece of printing work from a few hundred business cards to a menu for the local Chinese take away to a 16-page magazine is called a "job".
The print machine minder takes the pile of printed sheets out of the machine he had been running and carelessly lets them drop onto another higher pile stacked on a wooden pallet on the floor next to the machine. The young artworker could see that this man didn’t want to be there. And he was right. The machine minder wanted to be outdoors. He had applied for a job as a gardener at a nearby Edwardian manor house where a massive restoration project was underway and he had become anxious waiting to hear if he had been successful.
The young man stood by the darkroom door and, realising that the owner would be in there for at least half an hour, he placed the white board on a nearby table and picked up a newspaper that was there. He could hear the owner operating the old, noisy vacuum pump on the plate maker. On, and then off. On, and then off. On and then off for a few minutes each time as all the plates were processed using the negatives he had made.
While waiting he reads the story on the front of the newspaper about a strike happening in London. He reads how powerful printing trade unions had tightly controlled working practices in all the main newspapers for years but were now losing their grip. Rupert Murdoch, owner of several newspaper titles, was one of many battling with the unions. The proprietors wanted to introduce new technology that threatened to put 90% of the old-fashioned typesetters and artworkers out of work. It was estimated that around 6,000 people would lose their jobs. And that was just in London. The technology would obviously be introduced worldwide
Two weeks later young man would move out of the old chapel and start working from home. The new contacts he had been cultivating brought promises of new work coming in. He would not witness the machine minder leaving to take up his new post as a gardener. He would not witness the owner of the company close it down and go back to his managerial job in Telford. Only two years before, the owner had left that position to follow his dream of running his own business. But the dream was in ruins now because the speed of change had caught him off-guard and found him unable to invest in modernisation.
His old work partners would not witness the young man facing the challenge of learning how to use the equipment he would soon be installing in his office at home. The new workplace was light, airy, warm and decorated in a contemporary fashion. They would not be aware of his thoughts as he grappled with adapting his way of working to the new technology he had bought into.
They will not see the young man switch on his new computer each day and begin to engage with the operating system and the software tutorials. They will not know that he experiences trepidation and self-doubt as he questions himself about whether he has done the right thing.