Back before we used computers to lay out the text of a book, magazine, or newspaper, publishers used various methods to manually lay out text before sending it to the printers. The NY Times and other newspapers used what was known as the "hot metal" method of laying out each page. (I thought I had a video of this, but do not.)
Some magazine publishers used that process, which got its name from how the lead type was recycled after it was used, but others would print out the text, and then get out an exacto knife and rubber cement and lay out each page one block of text or one title at a time.
If they had to correct a flaw, they would trim and move the words and sentence fragments one at a time.
This brings back memories of school. While this technique is before my time, I am old enough to remember using similar tricks to lay out titles on dioramas and for science fair projects.
In fact, it brings back all sorts of memories. Does anyone else remember having to learn how to use dry transfer?
I started just when real pasteup was coming to an end. I think I did a year (maybe two at some of the smaller, less wealthy publications) of pasteup before switching entirely to desktop on an old Mac classic. I still teach the basics of this whenever I do talks just so people can understand the evolution of the dtp metaphors used by the industry.
We used wax instead of rubber cement in the newsrooms of the 80s. Much easier to move articles and snippets around.
When I studied journalism and wrote pieces, I would write and then cut my written work up and lay it out on another piece of paper, not for layout purposes but to rearrange the content more logically. Additional work could be scribbled in and deletions just scribbled out. The whole thing might get cut up and laid out a second time until “what I want” was achieved. The result was copied afresh. It worked.
I have a single copy of an old, out of print workbook from the 80s I’m using in class. I photocopied the pages. Then, because it’s a different size and shape than standard copier paper, I cut and pasted those pages to make new masters. The next time I used the book I scanned the pages as images and cut them up in Photoshop. That let me not only move elements around, but resize them individually.
As an old fogey, literal cut-and-paste was my automatic go to, but it didn’t take me long to remember we have better ways nowadays.