That was great! Once again as has happened so many times before on this forum, something I never thought about before hits me. Like making the info fit into 192 pages.
Ode to the 192 Page Book
by millions now living are dead 27 Replies latest jw friends
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cantleave
Yeah you made my day with that one!
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Dogpatch
Belbab is right. The main reason is the size of the presses' cylinders and how many pages you can fit on the printing plates. The older MAN presses like I used to run printed 64 pages for each turn of the two black ink cylinders, back to back (2-up, one page on top of the other, upside down). This was the case for decades.
The bindery then had them sewn together (6 signatures) and then cut in half to make two books. It took 6 "runs" of signatures to complete the printing of a 192-page book. We seldom printed less than a million books at a time so it could take days to print a book, or weeks in the case of a Bible which had something like 23 signatures sewn together.
Here I am checking for problems in the printing (I was floor overseer of all Bibles at that time in 1977).
That was one of the 60 MAN presses the Society used at that time in all the branches (40 in Brooklyn) and cost in the beginning about $250,000 each and went up over a $million each later. At the very end of the print cycle the sheets were folded, 2-up.
It might take us weeks to print a million Bibles. The AID book was really a pain and was a shorter run of course. It was printed on Bible paper (which is actually cigarette paper) as was Make Sure. We printed enough books in ONE DAY, EVERY DAY, to make a stack twice as tall as the Empire State Building. (What a waste of trees!)
This is what the full press looked like:
Then Knorr got a bug up his arse in the early 70s and commisioned the Wood-Hoe company to build a two-story press with three GIGANTIC cylinders (much bigger than newspapers use) that had magnetic nylon plates that just snapped on these huge cylinders. Each revolution of the two black ink cylinders printed 4 COMPLETE 192-page books! (It could not be used for magazines or Bibles).
Here is my assistant James cleaning the plates (I was finally assigned to get the press running by factory overseer Max Larsen, as several mechanics gave up on it.) It ran okay but it looked like rubber-stamp printing, very poor quality. I finally got it printing and Max said print 200,000 copies, which all looked like crap. Plus the press sent them all (signatures) in a super-fast stream upstairs to be glued and bound together by a huge bindery machine above.
This press was so huge that when we cranked it over the entire concrete building swayed so bad the Machine Shop below had to shut down their lathes as the tolerances jumped around. It (press) was on the sixth floor. Plus if the bindery jammed and some dufus Bethelite hit the "STOP" button, it shut down the entire press and a 70 inch wide sheet of paper ripped apart with a huge SNAP and we had to re-thread the paper through all the rollers for 20 minutes. What a nightmare.
This press was commissioned to print 100,000 complete TRUTH books in one day's shift. They are 1/2 inch thick with cover, so you got 50,000 inches = 4,167 feet tall stack of books just from that press alone. Mind-boggling.
The story is fascinating because the cylinders had never been tried/tested before by Wood-Hoe. Knorr was in a hurry because 1975 was so close! This press would help complete the "preaching of the world" before the end came in 1975.
A couple of years later, It was sold and the story was buried by Reg Doer, the businessman who bought and sold Society equipment.
There were so many humorous incidents with the mechanics trying to figure out what was wrong with the cylinders (duh, they were so heavy and were made of concentric rings of magnetic-then-non magnetic rings laminated together - it must be atomic physics!) that the temperature variations between the two type of rings, coupled with no air-conditioning in the buildings to help stabilize them, not to SPEAK of the massive size of these cylinders (about 4 1/2 feet in diameter and 72" long) would change tolerances between the cylinders and the paper a lot, hence the look of a rubber stamp print job. You have to read the humor I got out of the whole incident HERE. http://www.randallwatters.org/Bethel/toons/convert1.htm
...but I learned a lot about cost of printing (The Truth book sold for 25 cents, cost 5 cents to make) and so on.
We emptied railroad cars full of huge paper rolls every day.
Randy
more at http://www.randallwatters.org
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Lady Lee
my gawd Randy I might have seen you while I was on a Bethel tour. I remember the brother so proudly talking about the presses and showing us where the Bibles were printed.
It's a small world after all. It's a small world after all
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Mickey mouse
Excellent!
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SirNose586
Nice poem!
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steve2
Poem's great and Randy's info very interesting. If I remember correctly, the so-called "Truth"book, released in 1968?, was the very first 192-pager. It replaced the 400-odd-pager study book "Let God Be True". Now, say what you like about the Watchtower Society, the "Truth" book was like a breath of fresh air when it first came out: The writing was succinct and vivid. Before then, we then young people had to struggle with long-winded, argument ridden tomes that sent most of us to sleep before chapter's end.192-pagers might have been simplistic but they were significantly better than the paradise-peddling tortured prose of the older publications.
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nicolaou
Now c'mon, this deserves a bump!
