Paste Up – A method of printing that you pasted what you wanted on a special grid paper so it can get a picture taken of it, then a negative taken. From there a plate was made to go onto the printing press to print it. #PasteUp

Paste Up

I have had experience in paste up in two companies I worked for Star Publications (in Michigan) and The Knoxville Journal (in Tennessee).

I wished I had a picture of the paste up tables The Knoxville Journal had. They were handmade.

At Star Publications once the ads were done on deadline day, all of the graphic designers had to help do the paste up of the classifieds. We used glue sticks.

We also used a light blue highlighter to mark the filler classifieds, as the Star Publications had multiple publications, and used the classifieds from the other papers for filler. That way if a paid ad came in, we knew we could pull those. That blue was non-reproductive, meaning when the camera would take a picture to make a negative, it would not show up.

When I worked at The Knoxville Journal, only the legals were pasted up. The rest was paginated and a pdf was sent to the press. The lady in the legals department, had paste-up boards and did it there. She used wax to stick them to the special paste up grid paper. Boy did they look dirty and nasty, but the camera never picked that up, only the printed copy.

There is even a holiday for paste up on May 7th called Paste Up Day.

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