What’s “typesetting?”

OK, so I bought a book at a local shop about graphic design to figure out how to make our Oblivion album covers, particularly our maiden release, Live in New York. But the first thing the book mentioned was typography and I had no idea what it was. It seemed like “typesetting” required machines and technology outside my reach (it hadn’t yet occurred to me that someone with talent was required to figure out what the type looked like), so I asked my friend David Reitman, a magazine editor at Screw Magazine, who suggested I go over the Columbia University Spectator, the campus newspaper. The editor was happy to help, they’d just put in a super expensive, computer based typesetting machine, but it could only do the “body copy” (the text) and not the “headlines” (the big titles at the top) which required a Typositor.

Back to David. He introduced me to Screw’s art director Steven Heller who immediately revved up his Typositor, picked out a typeface based on my description of the album, and set M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P-I-F-R-E—M-C-D-O-W-E-L-L L-I-V-E-I-N-N-E-W-Y-O-R-K and handed me the strips. (It was 15 minutes for him, but his kindness —and coolness— was unforgettable for me. 25 years later, after he’d become the most prolific author of great graphic design books, I re-introduced myself over the phone, and he became one of my favorite later life people).

Over the next few years we cadged types anywhere we could, like from our jobs (I got fired from one of Ralph Ginzburg’s newspapers for setting my own type on his machines). By the end we found enough pennies to actually pay for typesetting occasionally. Where was Photoshop when we needed it?