| 9. Art and Ads In addition to directing the layout process. David and Oliver have other vital functions. Advertisers send us 'colour seperations' of their page advertisements. These have to be logged in to ensure we have everything ready for an issue, and tagged with a page number so the printer will know where to put them. It takes a long time! Oliver , of course, is ZZAP's illustrator. He does the covers and so on (see 'On the Cover' this ish). His finished colour work, together with any colour editorial pages, have to be sent to an outside 'scanning house'. Their function is to take the 'base layout sheet' containing any text in position and marked boxes showing where the transparency pictures or Oliver's original paintings are supposed to go, and combine this base with the colour seperations of the colour pictures. Full colour is achieved by printing seperate black and white images. There are four colours used - black, magenta, cyan and yellow, and each layer requires its own piece of black and white film containing the information for the four printing plates. Each plate is then inked with its 'process colour'. From the combination of these four, any colour can be produced. A mono page has only piece of film to print from, but a colour page, obviously, has to have four which will be printed over each other for the final effect. This outside 'repro house sends the finished colour films direct to the printer to meet up with the mono film coming from ZZAP! Towers. |
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10. Printing When the due date arrives, all the film has to be sent to the printing company - in ZZAP’s case, Redwood Web offset in Trowbridge near Bath. They take all our various films and ‘plan’ them together in sets of 8 pages, four along the bottom and, head-to-head, four along the top. These 8 page sections are then exposed onto a photo-sensitive plate. The plates are then loaded onto the Web printing machine, ine, 8 on the top roller, another 8 on the bottom roller, to print the 16-page section. These 16 are printed simultaneously with another 16-page mono section and the whole is folded and roughly trimmed to make a complete 32-page section ready for collating and stitch ing with the rest of the mag. The offset web machine is as big as an old steam locomotive, and prints some 30,000 copies an hour. To run it up to full speed takes approximately an hour, during which time numerous adjustments have to be made to ensure all the dots on the four-colour plates are in correct register and the ink balance is correct. So even before the printing run really gets under way, some two skips-full of waste paper are produced! When the printing and binding is finished, the printer delivers all the copies to a carrier employed by our distributor, COMAG, and they then deliver bundles of the magazine to all the various wholesale houses throughout the country. The wholesaler, in turn, breaks down the bundles into smaller ones and delivers them to the newsagents. hopefully all in time for the on sale date! Meanwhile, back at ZZAP! Towers, work is well under way on the following issue of ZZAP! 64. |
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