This takes me back to my days of print buying. I’ve seen the mechanism that does this in action, but this is only the second time I’ve gotten a copy of the Times that has one.
Looks like it was partially fed through a shredder, but that’s not what happened at all.
When a big-volume publication like the New York Times is printed every day, it’s done on something called a “web press.” Nothing to do with the World Wide Web we know and hate, but rather from the analog era. The paper is fed into the printing press from long rolls. Like this:
A web press in action.Notice how there’s one long sheet going through all the different units. Each one applies a different color ink, to both sides of the sheet at the same time.
Unlike a sheet-fed press, which churns out just one printed sheet of whatever size at a time, these long rolls of a are cut and folded as they come off the end. Then they’re collated with the other sections of your newspaper, or magazine, trimmed to final size, and packaged up for delivery.
But what happens when you get to the end of a roll? It’s expensive and time consuming to stop one of these beasts. Just look at how many rollers it has to be threaded through! So enter the “flying paster,” or “splicer.”
It’s a mechanism that automatically and very very quickly takes the end of one roll and pastes it onto the front of the next roll — on the fly, as the name implies. It makes quite the sound. And this way a print run of millions can go on uninterruptedly, with one roll of paper being slapped and pasted on to the next.
Thanks for listening to my Ted Talk.