Anyone with the good fortune to possess a complete run of Medieval English Theatre has on their shelves an almost complete history of desktop publishing. At the beginning it was produced on a manual typewriter with a ribbon. The text was painstakingly justified by counting the number of letters in each line and inserting double spaces accordingly. There were no italics, and no bold, and you produced underlining by going back and hitting the ‘underline’ key the requisite number of times. Typos were to be avoided, but small ones could be disguised with Tippex. Notes were photographed and then reduced to half size and pasted, physically, into the text (which is why for so long they were at the end of the article instead of at the bottom of the page). Blackand- white figures were glued in; photographs were screened by the printers, then also glued in. Image printing was by offset litho; the rest was essentially photocopied and reduced onto A4 from A3 sheets which were themselves made up of two A4 sheets carefully overlapped and stuck together – in the right order. You learned a lot about rectos and versos and imposition: ‘Page 1 is on the right hand side of page 92, and next, back-to-back with it, comes page 2 on the left hand side of page 91’. The covers were in black and red or gold (with a separate plate for each colour) on Kaskad ‘Lapwing Brown’ paper; the artwork came from photocopied woodcuts or engravings, and the typography was Letraset. It was all very handicraft.

In 1983, judging from the results, we acquired a Silver Reed Electronic Memory typewriter. This had a tiny horizontal window above the keyboard which showed (part of) the line you had just typed so you could correct it before moving on to the next line, when it had gone for ever. I think it was self-justifying. It also had a daisy-wheel printer which let you do two different sizes of typeface, and bold but not italic. The spokes kept breaking off. Contributions, of course, arrived by mail in hard copy and had to be laboriously retyped.

In 1991 we dipped a toe into full-blown word processing with a dedicated programme called Vuwriter developed at Manchester.