One of the Several Batteries of Presses Necessary to Print “The Ladies’ Home Journal”
Many magazines, however, have more pages than this. Then it is necessary to print on separate presses the various sections, or signatures as they are called, which, when combined, will make up a complete magazine. If only a few thousand were printed, these signatures could be collected together by hand, and then fed into the wire-stitching machine, also by hand. This method of collecting the sections and binding them together was the one used until editions became so large that mechanical methods became necessary.
Now, however, the various sections which go to make up the magazine are piled in certain troughs of a binding machine, which, with seeming human intelligence, clasps one copy of each section in turn, and combining them with a copy of the cover sheet, conducts them all, properly collated, into the wire-stitching device, from which they are ejected into orderly piles. Some magazines are bound together in a different manner, however, and are not stitched with wire, but have the inside pages and the cover glued together, and an ingenious binding machine has been perfected which does this automatically.
A Group of Folding Machines which Automatically Grasp the Flat Sheet and Fold it up to the Size of the Magazine
Another marvel of the periodical of our day is the printing of some of the pages in the full colors of the original paintings. To get this result, it is necessary to print the sheet in four colors and to have each printing in exactly the correct spot on the sheet (a variation of only a hundredth of an inch being detrimental). The process would normally be quite slow—too slow, in fact, for the tremendous quantities necessary for the large editions of the modern magazine. Both of these objections have been overcome, however, by arranging four small cylinders, each printing its designated color—yellow, red, blue or black—so that as the sheet of paper travels around a larger cylinder it is brought into contact with the four printing cylinders in rapid succession.
Many magazines print two colors for covers and inside pages, instead of full four-color printings. Presses of a nature somewhat similar to those explained above are used.
So much for the principal mechanical problems and their solutions, in producing millions of magazines of a high quality each week. But there must be some force that keeps this maze of machinery constantly at work, so that all the parts properly co-ordinate. A slip-up at one spot might cause such a delay as would result if, for instance, hundreds of thousands of the inside pages were printed and ready for binding, but lacked the printed covers. To prevent any such calamity in the work rooms, there is usually prepared a daily schedule which plots out what operation, on each issue of the magazine, is to be completed that day; and if by chance any operation is not up to the schedule, immediate steps are taken to speed up the work until the production has been brought back to where it should be.