Woah...that brings back some memories. In a whole different timeline 22 years ago I was printing them for literal months. We did all European versions and it was 8 weeks of nothing but IKEA catalogs. They were highly optimized so for a language change we only had to switch the black cylinders. The whole IT was bonkers for the time we used SGI workstations for pre press and had like 100 bonded dial up connections for the mass of data. The pages came as TIF files and a catalogue was around 300GB. We were a rotogravure shop and did around 13m/s of 3-4 meters paper in width and around 4-5 kilometers in length. I think a whole run was 50 metric tons of paper. Good times but incredibly boring if the machine was dialed in.
And that they were set by linotype! Whenever I get annoyed at Jekyll or ruby or GitHub pages or whatever not building and needing maintenance, I think back and am suddenly grateful that my problem isn't of sorting funny shaped pieces of metal into exactly the right order.
