Typewriter composition cuts journal costs, speeds publication

Expansion of typewriter composition and the shift from letter press to sheet-fed offset and web-offset printing are two major developments that are lowering costs and improving the efficiency of the overall publishing operation at the American Institute of Physics (AIP). In 1972, out of a total of 104 000 text pages published by AIP and its member societies, about 69 000 pages, or 66 percent, were typewriter composed. Typewriter composition of scientific articles was pioneered by S. A. Goudsmit, Editor-in-Chief of the American Physical Society, for Physical Review Letters. This weekly publication has been typewriter composed since 1958. Today, about 11 000 pages for Physical Review C and Physical Review D are typewriter composed at AIP's new publishing facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Another 8000 pages mainly for Applied Physics Letters and the Journal of Applied Physics are produced by our Publications Division Composition Section in New York City. A small fraction of the total is composed to AIP specifications by the authors themselves. Outside contractors handle the remaining typewriter composition including all of the Russian translation journals. The main justification for the switch from monotype to typewriter composition is the resulting savings of 20 to 30 percent in composition cost Depending upon the journal and the compositor used, these savings amount to as much as $10 per page. In addition, the close coupling of copy editing, composition, proofreading, and page makeup that is possible with an in-house typewriter composition operation has shortened publication time by as much as 2 weeks out of a total of 3 months. We will describe the AIP typewriter composition system from copy editing, through the composition of galleys, to page makeup and the production of final camera-ready copy for offset printing. Specially modified IBM Executive proportional-spacing electric typewriters, equipped with unique attachments, permit the use of a wide range of special characters and signs (italic, Greek, mathematical symbols, superscripts, etc.) needed to compose scientific articles.