Hey, check out this photo from Clinker John. It’s this week’s New Yorker cover chillin’ with Kevin’s Taco Bulls in the Kentucky factory where my beloved New Yorker magazine is printed and where John works. Here’s a brief description of what he does to get that sweet sweet rag into my hands each week (I love this “How it Works” kinda thing!)…

“A loose description of what I do is roll storage. What that involves is receiving in rolls of paper, ranging from 1-6000 pounds in various widths and weights. When the job starts running, we check what size it requires, how much, and take it to the appropriate press. There, it leaves my hands, but the printing plates are loaded(4-5 per version, depending on ink/color orders), and ran through. From there, it is moved to the manufacturing side of our building where it is set up on a binding line. NEWY usually takes at least three lines, since it starts production on Friday and we try and get it out by no later than Monday at noon. All the pieces are laid out, and then run through a stitcher/stapler or a cover press when it is square-bound. Newsstand copies are run first, since they have the half-cover overlay, and then mail is run, west coast generally first, then work our way eastward. Office copies and customer copies are run after we think we have all the jinks worked out. Then loaded on appropriate truck, and either moved to a distribution site(newsstand copies) or entered into the mail stream. 1 CSR, 1 roll storage guy, 1 pre-lim/plate maker, 1 ink services, 1 roll tender, 2 book packers, 1 pressman, 1 color tech, 1 hoist driver(at least), 2-3 line feeders, 1 line tech, 1 trimmer tech, 1 backend(catches finished books, puts them on correct loads), 1 shipping hoist driver(at least), and a USPS clerk to check and make sure our loads are going out right and not messed up. A few others here and there(QC, handwork, label-prep, etc.) but that is roughly it. A lot more people involved than what I thought when I started working there 12 years ago. Bigger the book, more people involved at line-feeder stage, but pretty stable manpower before there. On an average week, NEWY takes 130000 pounds of paper 5 times over for the insides of the magazine and 40-50000 pounds for the cover and makes around 1.2 million copies on the high side. We also run a whole lot of other magazines(all WWE magazines, Vanity Fair, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Game Informer, Bon Appettit to name a few), so it never gets old. Always something to read.”

Thanks John!