My own newspaper - How I got into typography
I was born in a family of journalists. My grandfather Erwin Akeret edited his own newspaper Weinländer Tagblatt which he herited from his father. In the beginning, my grandparents house at the Wülflingerstrasse 235 in Winterthur had not only a big garden, but also an office and even the paper was printed there, at least before I was born. In the 20th Century, there were many small newspaper which brought local news, but mainly defended a position of a party, the peasants party in the case of my grandfather. With his comments in the newspaper, he was elected to the swiss parliament in 1955 and stayed there for 28 years.
As the office of the newspaper was in the house, it was easy for me as a child to assist. My grandfather had a black-and-white instant Polaroid camera which allowed him to take photographs at local events . For remote pictures, there was a strange machine with a rotating cylinder that transmitted photographs over the phone. It took probably half an hour, but there were not many pictures in newspapers that time.
At the time I was a teenager, the printshop was not in my grandfathers house any more. The paper was then printed in the shop from his brother who had another local newspaper. The print shop had a bog rotative press, but more impressive where the linotype machines. The linotype was a very big typewriter (more than 2m height), which included a lead melting device, a magazine of letter matrices and a keyboard that does not ressemble at all a computer keyboard. The typist reads from th e article on paper and presses the keyboards. The matrices fall into an assembly chain. When one line is full, some magic space bands fill in the spaces and justify the text mechanically. The assembly is sent to the mould and one line in lead is created. The matrices then go up and are automatically sorted into the magazine because the have a teeth code on them. It was very impressive.
This was the age I wanted to become a journalist and have my own local newspaper. I started with a one-pager every week in 1976 and made 276 editions until 1984. The first editions were written with the typewriter, but with a 3 column layout from the beginning. The titles were written by hand. The journal was photocopied at an university institute in the neighbourhood and had about 20 copies starting and about 150 at the best moments. It was the newspaper that got me into typography. At some time, the xerox machine at the institute could not only copy, but also reduce, later enlarge. So I enlarged the typewriting and made titles.
We are in the early eighties and computers were rare and certainly not related to typography. Most of them had only a textual terminal and the printers where typewriters or matrix printers of text only. But there were two forms of accessible typesetting: The IBM ball-head typewriter and letraset. The IBM revolutionised typewriter with a ball-head that could be changed. So it was possible not only to have different fonts, normal, italic and bold variants, but also proportional fonts, and a one-line memory allowed to write justified text. You had to be disciplined, because there was no display and you could not see the line before it was printed as a whole. Letraset on the other side were precut letters on a transparent, that you could transfer to the paper with a pencil. It needed some dexterity to get it plain and it was terribly expensive.
