Paste up

Paste up refers to a method of creating or laying out publication pages that predates the use of the now-standard computerized page design desktop publishing programs. Completed, or camera-ready, pages are known as mechanicals or mechanical art. In the offset lithography process, the mechanicals would be photographed with a stat camera to create a same-size film negative for each printing plate required.

Paste up relied on phototypesetting, a process that would generate "cold type" on photographic paper that usually took the form of long columns of text. These printouts were often a single column in a scroll of narrow (3-inch or 4-inch) paper that was as deep as the length of the story.

A professional known variously as a paste-up artist, layout artist, mechanical artist, production artist, or compositor would cut the type into sections and arrange it carefully across multiple columns. For example, a 15 inch strip could be cut into 3 5-inch sections. Headlines and other typographic elements were often created and supplied separately by the typesetter, leaving it to the paste up artist to determine their final position on the page.

Paste

Paste is a term for any very thick viscous fluid. It may refer to:

Adhesives

Food

Computing

Other uses

Wheatpaste

Wheat paste (also known as flour paste, or simply paste) is a gel or liquid adhesive made from wheat flour or starch and water. It has been used since antiquity for various arts and crafts such as book binding, découpage, collage, papier-mâché, and adhering paper posters and notices to walls. Closely resembling wallpaper paste, a crude wheat flour paste can be made by mixing roughly equal portions of flour and water and heating until the mixture thickens.

A critical difference among wheat pastes is the division between those made from flour and those made from starch. Vegetable flours contain both gluten and starch. Over time the gluten in a flour paste cross-links, making it very difficult to release the adhesive. Using only starch, a fine quality, fully reversible paste can be produced. The latter is the standard adhesive for paper conservation.

Besides wheat, other vegetables also are processed into flours and starches from which pastes can be made: characteristics (e.g. strength, reversibility) vary with the plant species, manufacturer's processing, and recipe of the end-user.

Paste (story)

"Paste" is a 5,800-word short story by Henry James first published in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly in December, 1899. James included the story in his collection, The Soft Side, published by Macmillan the following year. James conceived the story as a clever reversal of Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace".

Plot summary

After the death of her aunt, the protagonist Charlotte and her cousin, her aunt’s stepson Arthur Prime, find a tin of imitation jewelry which includes a string of pearls. Charlotte is immediately fascinated with the pearls, and wonders if they could be a gift from when her aunt was an actress. Arthur disputes this and is insulted at the thought of some gentleman other than his father giving his stepmother such a gift. Charlotte quickly apologizes and agrees that the pearls could be nothing more than paste. With Arthur’s enthusiastic approval, she keeps the jewelry for the memory of her aunt.

When Charlotte returns to her governess' job, her friend, Mrs. Guy, asks her if she has anything to add color to her dress for an upcoming party. When Charlotte shows Mrs. Guy the jewelry, she too becomes fascinated with the string of pearls, insisting that they are genuine. Mrs. Guy wears the string to the party; and when Charlotte finds out that everyone believed that they were real, she insists that they must be returned to her cousin. Mrs. Guy claims that it was Arthur's foolishness to have given away the necklace, and that Charlotte should have no guilt in keeping it.