Text 1: Thirty-two pages by Friday, by Carys Morgan

An original contemporary blog.

Our community magazine is produced by eight volunteers around a table in the library meeting room. At least, that was the arrangement until Monday, when we arrived carrying two boxes of photographs and found a notice on the door announcing an electrical inspection. The librarian offered us a corner beside the children's shelves, but every conversation had to stop whenever story time began.

We were already behind. Our main article was meant to be an interview with the retiring postmistress, who had cancelled twice because of illness. When she finally spoke to Rhys on the telephone, his recorder ran out of power after six minutes. He reconstructed the rest from notes written on the back of an envelope, including one sentence that none of us could read.

Tuesday brought a more alarming discovery. The only complete version of the magazine was on Lowri's laptop, and its charging cable was locked inside the meeting room. An older copy existed online, but it was missing four finished pages and contained the original, much longer headline for the gardening article. When the laptop eventually came back to life, we found that two photographs from the winter concert looked sharp on screen but became dark, shapeless blocks when printed.

By Thursday evening we thought we were finished. Then the printing company telephoned to say that we had set every page to the wrong size. Unless we altered the layout, the outer words of several captions would be cut off. Three of us worked past midnight moving text and shrinking photographs.

The magazines arrived on Friday afternoon, still warm from the press. Unfortunately, the first bundle contained pages 17 to 24 twice and no pages 9 to 16. The corrected copies reached us just as the volunteers who delivered the magazine were preparing to go home.

Text 2: The first annual paper of the Westborough Society, by Arthur Bell

An original magazine essay written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this essay, published in 1887, the writer recalls helping a local society to produce its first annual paper.

We resolved in September that our society should publish an annual paper before Christmas. Since seven gentlemen had promised articles and Mr Lacey owned a printing press, success appeared certain. We did not then appreciate the distance between promising an article and delivering one.

On the first day of December, only the treasurer's account had arrived. Contributions followed in a disorderly flood: a history of the town written in faint pencil, a poem without a title and twelve pages on mushrooms where two had been requested. Our secretary mislaid the final page of the chairman's article and discovered it a week later inside the minute book.

Mr Lacey's press occupied a shed behind his house. It was a handsome machine, though the roof above it admitted rain and the stove filled the room with smoke whenever the wind turned east. We began setting the type by hand, only to find that we possessed too few examples of the letter 'e' for the chairman's speech. Completed pages had to be taken apart so that their letters could be used again.

Miss Vale supplied an excellent drawing of the old bridge, but she had made it wider than the page. We attempted to reduce it by copying the picture and produced a bridge with one arch larger than all the others. While this matter was being debated, the leather strap driving the press snapped. A saddler repaired it, but two working evenings were lost.

Printing continued until the morning on which the papers were due to be distributed. Some sheets were stacked before the ink was dry, so the treasurer's figures appeared backwards across the chairman's face on the opposite page. We carried the least smudged copies to the society's meeting through steady rain, hiding them beneath our coats. The members applauded the publication warmly, although several held it at arm's length to avoid the wet ink.

Explain briefly the challenges each group had to overcome while producing its publication. Refer clearly to both texts in your response.