Apparently this day is to celebrate crafters and artists and so on. But to me, paste-up will always mean old school newspapering.

I spent many happy hours in paste-up watching people who should have been surgeons wield scalpels around sticky pieces of slippery paper, cutting long columns to align on pasteboard, cutting headlines separately, leaving precisely sized boxes for photos to be added in the next stage of the process.

The true artistry happened when stories came in too long or too short.

Too short was relatively easy; you would cut the paragraphs apart and “air them out” by adding teeny, barely noticeable spaces between them.

Sometimes too long was easy, too—if the reporter and editor had done their jobs well, you could just end the story at the last sentence that fit.

But sometimes, things didn’t work out that well. I once watched a woman cut a story apart, scoot all the paragraphs closer together a teeny bit, then cut out a parenthetical phrase to save two lines, and then space all the remaining words on the third line so you couldn’t tell anything had happened. It really was an amazing bit of work. And much like my job, when she was done, the true accomplishment was that you couldn’t tell she had done anything.

Coming from the perspective of someone who can’t write a thank-you note without ruining two sheets of paper on test runs, I remain in awe of those folks. I don’t know what happened to them when scanning and desktop printing technology made them obsolete—I was long out of newspapers by then.

I hope at least some of them went back to school and became brain surgeons. That kind of dexterous precision should not go to waste!