Techno crass.

Even though its business end is a razor blade, you can't call an X-acto knife cutting-edge technology. But that -- plus a six-pack of Michelob -- was all we had to work with to get out the first issue of this magazine after I became its editor.

There we were, one night at the end of March halfway through the fourth quarter of the 20th century in a glass-and-chrome, three-story suburban office building that looked like post offices would have had the Nixon "Imperial Presidency" style stuck. What we were doing was slicing words into letters, then putting them, one by one, in proper order. Had Johann Gutenberg, taking a break from getting his Bible on press 537 years ago, stumbled in, he would have felt right at home.

Back then -- my then, 13 years ago, not his -- this is how we did it: You wrote the story on a typewriter, edited it with a pencil, sent it to a typesetter who keyed or scanned it into a machine that spit out columns of type on sheets of slick paper. When you got these back, you slid them through a machine that smeared hot wax on the back, cut each column to fit the page, then stuck them -- plus headlines set separately -- on pieces of cardboard slightly thicker than what shirts come folded on from the laundry.

The pasted-up boards were called "mechanicals," each one a two-page spread. We packed them off to the printer, who'd shoot black-and-white negatives. These, plus photographs separated into four pieces of film for the hues - black, magenta, cyan and yellow - the press lays down to mix all others and the film that advertisers supplied, were stripped together into pages and flats of pages. The printer "burned" their images into plates that, on press, pushed ink on paper, kissing it with color.

That magazine, I recall, was the 1987 Economic Almanac issue. Over the years, the Almanac, published in May, mutated into the Business Handbook, what you're reading, which comes out the first of the year. Not only did we have a new editor but a new publisher, who had come down from Raleigh to run the show. Time in grade, we were both junior to Kim Walker, the art director, who'd been in the job about six months.

The usual drill was, when the galley proofs came back from the typesetter, we would proofread and send them back for corrections. But this time, we didn't catch a handful of typos and mistakes until the type was on the boards, which the printer was scheduled to pick up first thing the next morning. If we wanted to get them right...