Not glue. Hot wax. You can put down and pull up hot wax easily. Basically you have photo blue grid layout boards. Photo type setting, border tape and various photographic techniques. Mask mode in Photoshop is red because of rubylith which was a red film you would cut around a photograph and since red light does not expose B&W film, one could make the background white. All the layout just had to last long enough to expose the negative to which was then used to make the off-set printing plate.

I grew up in a graphic arts photography studio in the pre-computer graphic arts days. My father had an 1942 ATF camera, which was about 14 feet long and you were the "mechanism" in the darkroom placing the film on a vacuum board, exposing the film and running it through a processor for positive film or the usual three trays for negative film. The camera was originally made for WWII to enlarge surveillance photographs and had very little lens distortion.

Photo typesetting was expensive. Many times the way to fix spelling errors was to copy the type setting on to positive film then find the missing letters and with hot wax and an exacto knife, fix the error. I think it was cost of photo type setting that pushed graphic artists to get a mac and an early laser printer. Photo type setting was vastly better quality, but we would have the graphic artist print all their type out at 200% then reduce that down to 50% with the stat camera to get the resolution up.

As a teenager, it was always a rite of passage, especially with the girls, that you got your forearm hot waxed. Fun times...

We used to use a rubber and solvent based glue called cow gum. Good, because it was re-positionable and didn’t mark the paper. Bad because after a couple of hours the solvent would get you high and give you a cracking headache.

My dad is a graphic designer who spent quite a bit of his career working pre-computer. One story he told was of a colleague who seemed to always make his columns of typeset text perfectly fit The space available. Turned out he’d just fold anything extra underneath, not caring that the last bits were missing.

>hot wax

Yeah, I actually knew that. We were using this tech at student papers in the late 1970s, early 80s. (And I was also the production director for a student group that had some offset presses and did poster design. The typesetting tech for that was more primitive than the newspaper had; you manually cranked the right letter in position and exposed it.

There were computer typesetting systems before Pagemaker (e.g. Quadex) though they were dedicated systems. Pagemaker replaced them.