Buy me a cup of coffee, and I’ll tell you the story of how Merrill was such a great place to work, but Macmillan was just the opposite. After three years there, I’d had enough. And I did what any enterprising fool might try — I started my own business. The idea was to do production work for textbook publishers.
As soon as I got started, I discovered a problem that I knew lots of publishers were going to run into, and I developed an effective solution.
Here’s what happened: the managing editor of music at Macmillan was producing a new music program. This involved developing a textbook for each grade, K-8, and a teacher’s edition for each grade. She had 18 full-color texts to produce — over 3,000 pages in six weeks.
Macmillan’s art director wanted to turn the project into a holiday; she wanted to have the music notation set in Naples, Italy. (Bear in mind that, at the time, it was pretty expensive to set music notation anywhere — New York or Naples.) The managing editor was thinking of budget and timeline, so she asked me for options.
Desktop publishing was new then, and much of what we do every day today wasn’t even possible. You certainly couldn’t set music notation. There wasn’t a font for it. But I knew Adobe Systems was developing one, and they agreed to let me beta test it.
I told the managing editor that we could set the type, line art, and music notation in position. And we could do it for far less than the Italian expedition the art director wanted to go on.
Then it occurred to me: since we were using a Linotronic imagesetter, we could not only set the pages, we could separate them. That is, rather than set the pages and print them as positives on rc-paper, we could image them as film negatives separated by color. It seemed to me that this would require only a little more work on our part, and we could make a much bigger profit.
There were three printers involved in this project, and each doubted our ability to produce intermediate films with the new-fangled equipment we were using. (And none of them wanted us to take away this profitable part of their work.) Each printer sent us comps and asked us to produce films to match. And that’s when we discovered a problem: a real show-stopper of a problem.
When we made proofs of our initial set of films, our colors were way off. If we couldn’t get the color right, we wouldn’t be producing film. We needed to be able to calibrate the imagesetter, but how?
I set about writing the software that would allow us to calibrate the imagesetter, and it worked. When we proofed our next set of films, the colors matched, and we got the job.
The desktop publishing revolution was in full swing. It struck me that anyone else who wanted to do color work with a PostScript imagesetter was going to need calibration software. So I developed a commercial version.
It was an effective solution to a widespread problem, and it was a hit.
