I fondly remember a class trip to our local rag. It was in the middle of town, a four-story building (with wooden floors, IIRC) and a basement that held the tall presses that extended up into a first floor atrium.
They composed most of the text in Linotypes, with open gas flames heating up the lead pots for the type slugs; one of the wonders of the mechanical age.
They'd take a blocked-up page (with text and halftone blocks) and emboss a sheet of heavy paper with it. Then, they'd curve the paper to a radius of about two feet in a molding jig, fill it with hot lead, and get out a curved plate for the giant press cylinders. Of course, they'd make dozens of plates for a single issue, and a single press would print something like 16 pages at a time on the wide paper stock.
And then the presses themselves...mechanical leviathans, running hundreds of copies a minute, the printed paper flying through live flame drying its ink in an instant, and then on the slitting, folding, and collating mechanisms, which were actually the most fascinatingly complex part.
It was geek heaven, in its day.
As my namesake believed, printer's ink was the elixir of the Reformation.
Seeing these wondrous behemoths silenced and cut up for scrap metal is indeed quite sad. It’s not sad though to see the cessation of the steady stream of lies that poured forth from them at the end.