Don't Let Romance Fade, Fade, Fade Away

An aesthete from the Fogg writes in: "What's wrong? Have you changed printers? Or is it lack of money?...Tell your readers what's wrong."

Well, readers, nothing's wrong except that the Crimson has moved into the twentieth century. Over the summer we converted to a photo-offset printing process. There are advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are that our pictures come out much clearer, our layout is more flexible, and we save a lot of money. We can now print any piece of junk that strikes our fancy (see right) simply by sticking it on a layout sheet and sending it out to Lowell, where the paper is now printed.

If we want to see our words neatly printed and justified, we must first type them on machines that produce long printed tapes (such as the one above) which we then feed into a computer which produces neat columns of type (like the one you're reading), which we then paste onto the layout sheet along with the junk (see right again).

There are disadvantages. The typography is not quite as sharp, and, because we no longer print on our own web-fed flat-bed letterpress, our deadlines are slightly earlier. We hope to avoid the slanted columns and chopped-off letters of most offset college papers by maintaining a professional shop to do our paste-up, but if, like our Fogg friend, you've noticed some problems, please bear with us.

Finally, if this kind of technical talk excites you, or even if it doesn't but you like to write, or even if you don't like to write but like free beer and pretzels, or if you want to see and touch one of the few remaining web-fed flat-bed letter presses in existence (even if it now stands idle), then come to a Crimson fall competition meeting tonight or tomorrow at 7:30 p.m.