Paste Up Day – a day to celebrate the old method of preparing a publication for print. #PasteUpDay

Paste Up Day

Newspapers and publications before the electronic age of sending a pdf to the printers, used a paste up method to prepare pages for print. The classifieds were flowed around advertisements. Below is an example of a paste up board with pages being pasted up.

Duck, Duck, PIN!

Celebrated annually on May 7th. I am not sure how or when this holiday was started. But here is some more info about this practice.

You had to print everything yourself and paste it up. The advertisements were printed in the four colors (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black plate pieces).

Usually a wax or a glue stick was used to adhere the pasted up documents. Items were printed to size and printed on a laser printer and then trimmed down tight to fit the column inches of the publication.

When I worked at Star Publications, the classifieds were pasted up, along with the advertisement on the page. I had to help paste up and flow the classifieds around the advertisements. At The Knoxville Journal, they pasted up the legal notifications.

Today, the paste up process is done on a computer and the files sent electronically usually a a portable document file known as a PDF. Most publications use either Quark Xpress or InDesign for this process. Not to mention, it is now straight to plate, instead of a big camera shooting film of the pages.

First Published May 7, 2019. Last updated or republished May 7, 2020.