COLLATING

I was allowed to do various jobs in my parent's newspaper office in the 60s. One of them was making pads of invoices, receipts, etc. The pages (several hundred of them) were printed on a manual press and cut on the monster guillotine cutter. I was forbidden to go near that machine. Not a problem!

Then the little pieces of printed paper were turned over to me. There should have been a note on top of the stack saying: "Warning! Do not attempt this job if you have heart problems." The job wasn't stressful. It was the mistakes! I had to collate those things. I'd put the white page #500 on top of the yellow page #500 on top of the pink page #500, then a set of 499s and a set of 498s and so on. It's bad to get half the stack wrong and have to un-collate and re-collate them! I learned right fast that an ounce of prevention is truly worth a pound of cure.
Sometimes I perforated them on a foot pedal machine that only punched maybe 15 to 20 sheets at a time. Then I got to help glue them. (I wasn't trusted with this job alone.) We stacked them on a platform and screwed down a heavy wood clamp then painted gobs of glue on one side of the stack. The next day, the glue was dry and we separated the pads. Voila!

Nowadays it's all automated.