The Entertainer was the first local newspaper in English (preceded only by the Talismán - a monthly magazine started by Vic Nicolas). It was printed variously at La Voz de Almería and La Crónica from its inception in 1985. The earliest copies were taken, each page in its folder, to the girls at the printers who would type everything out again into a ticker-tape device for printing on an old and dreadful King-Press. Mistakes were easy and often - since who can type out pages of stuff in a foreign language? Later we were able to make our own pages on a light-box in our office in Mojácar with the technique of cut and paste - as in this picture here. The completed page would be photographed on a giant camera called a Repro-master and the negatives, retouched (again on the light-box) would be taken to the printers. Later still, we acquired a Macintosh and were able to do desktop publishing, retiring both the camera and the light-box - a large glassed table with tracing paper and some light bulbs behind for a strong yet defused light to work on. You can see what a page looked like before it was filmed and touched up.
Not many copies of the 720 weeks of The Entertainer survive. I was visiting the hemeroteca (the library) of the Diputación in Almería earlier this week (a place full of fascinating archives, including Almería's first ever newspaper, from 1823). The librarian gave me a list of missing numbers of both The Entertainer and its sister publication Entertainer en Español. I told him that when the paper passed from my control, the back issues were tossed into the trash. Anyhow, if anyone has any old editions, please let me know.
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