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Over the past half-century, the industry has undergone the profoundest of conversions. It began the period as a labour-intensive, craft-based, strictly-unionised, and mechanical business and has transmogrified into a computerised, automated, electronic, and capital-intensive pursuit. Sadly the ‘personality’ of the industry has changed as well to become blander and harsher with less panache and pride.

Technical research to propel the transition has been a continuum from the beginning of the last century, but commercial awakening to the imminence and inevitability of upheaval arguably stirred in the middle 1950s. Several trends started to take shape at that time with the switch from letterpress to offset lithographic printing, the slow emergence of press controls as a tentative step towards automation, the quickening research into electronic scanning for colour reproduction, the nascent displacement of hot-metal by photographic composition, and the earliest rumblings of computerised typesetting.

Just a symmetrical glance back over 50 years to 1957 indicates the modest, yet trenchant, events taking place in typographic composition. New techniques were exclusively exercised to show their practical potential for general application, as exemplified by the limited issue of a Christmas book by Sir Allen and Richard Lane for friends. It was entitled Private Angelo and set in Garamond on an Intertype Fotosetter and printed by offset lithography at McCorquodale & Co.

Of equal importance were vanguard investments in the new technology by the Printing Department of the Glasgow Corporation with an Intertype Fotosetter
in 1956 and by Photoprint Plates of Basildon with a Monophoto Filmsetter in the following year: a metamorphosis had commenced which accelerated bewilderingly on occasion.

Lawrence Wallis held international pre-press marketing positions and was a respected author and print historian.