What is something that you consider as a "lost art"?

Pizza makers tossing the pizza dough in the air and spinning it around as part of the process.

The art of letterwriting was the first thing that leapt to my mind when I saw your question. I wasn’t expecting to see it in your details. GQ.

Another is penmanship. And speaking of ships, there is certainly courtship.

@KrystaElyse I do too its the old snail mail that people forgot about

Drawing by hand.

Doing basic math in your head.

Writing out numbers (one, two…)

Home cooking.

@Mr_M Actually there is this pizza place right off OSU campus called flying pizza, the owner competes in pizza tossing contest pretty often and has won some world wide competitions.
And they still hand toss all their pizzas, its pretty cool.

@LKidKyle1985 , that’s awesome (and VERY hard to find).

I was also going to answer letter writing. Print media will have to be my second choice.

manual labor now robots do all the work

Yes, KrystaElyse and Jeruba, the loss of letters is so horrible, and its death occurred in my adult lifetime. I had many friends with whom I exchanged 20+ page letters regularly for years. Email is not the same.

I treasure letters that I have from my grandmother, father and sister, who are dead now.

Along with it, I mourn the loss of epistolary books like the charming 84 Charing Cross Road.

Cooking is one of my regrets too, cprevite. I have friends who raised their children without them ever getting a home cooked meal at home. They both worked, and they just took turns “picking up something for dinner” after the kids came.

I also agree about math ability. The other day a young checker in her 20s did math correctly in her head, and I was astounded. I realized how rare that has become so that I don’t even expect people to be able to add in their head.

yep if you are ever in Columbus, Cincinnati, or Dayton I recommend taking a look.

How about writing in general? I don’t know about you guys, but I’m so used to typing now that about a paragraph in when I’m writing and I’m getting a hand cramp!

subtlety

Keeping a written diary.

@essieness Reminds me of something else I mourn. The loss of professional editors. I find errors in books all the time now, which drives me nuts. News flash to publishers: spell check and grammar check just aren’t the same.

@AstroChuck my mama told me to keep a written diary and so i did and im glad i did

stamp collecting

@LKidKyle1985 what street is it on? Is it good? Just curious cause I have never heard of it…

Keeping secrets in the age of the Internet.

Sewing.

@madcapper well theres 2 in columbus, I recommend the one by campus cause its the busiest and that’s where the guy works who is the pizza tossing champ. Its on High Street, across from where they are building the new Ohio Union building. You can park in the parking garage there and walk right on over the street. Its a pizza by the slice kind of place, but you can get a whole pizza too if you want. but 2 slices seem to fill me up well enough. And Yeah its pretty good, new york style.

Alsooo, since we are talking about great campus pizza, try out adriotico’s pizza on 10th ave I think, and Hound Dogs pizza at high and dodridge. they are not hand tossed but still pretty awesome. If anyone wants to get some pizza in columbus hit me up.

Awesome man I have been down on Campus a lot more recently since my friend moved down there and now that I am moving just of Northwest Broadway I will pretty close my self so I will for sure check some of these out!

Deli related arts, like pickling, seasoning, rubbing, etc…

Collage

Puppet shows

Exploration on the planet has been taken over by satellites and Google Earth

DJing

Explaining mythology in the original manner. No disney crap. (I hated Hercules the movie)

@Marina, there are still plenty of professional editors out there looking for work, but they can’t get hired. So the art isn’t lost yet; it’s simply unemployed.

Paying women compliments (without them taking it the wrong way).
—And women accepting them graciously.—

@Bagardbilla, that was a regrettable casualty of the women’s movement.

@Jeruba I`m with you

Making keys. Remember when they used to clamp the original to a blank key, and grind the new key by hand (well, move the machine by hand)? It took skill. Now they just throw it in a machine, close the door and the machine does all the work. There is still one small hardware store nearby that does it the older way. I love to watch him work.

Typesetting!

Being neighborly.

The policy of the customer’s always right.

I used to publish club newsletters by making mechanicals on large sheets of index stock, ruled with lines in process blue so they would disappear when photographed, and measuring everything off with blue pencil and a T-square. I stuck my copy down with rubber cement, until (much later) I got a waxer; created headings using presstype (rub-off letters transferred from a waxed sheet to the page manually, one at a time); and actually clipped clip art with a pair of scissors or drew illustrations on a piece of paper and glued them down.

The copy itself was manually typed on a typewriter, and entire passages had to be retyped if errors could not be corrected by replacing two lines of text with an X-acto knife. I cleaned up paste-up lines with quantities of Wite-Out before carrying the boards to the print shop.

The printer shot and reduced my mechanical to the right size for the finished product and then ran off copies using paper offset plates.

Computerized desktop publishing made those skills a lost art in short order.

@Jeruba The closest that I can come up with compared to that is developing film in a dark room.

I’ll never forget those days in high school. What a sense of accomplishment, developing your own work!

@jonsblond, is that a lost art? Don’t people do that any more? Say it isn’t so!

@Jeruba I always said I wanted a dark room. Now all that I need is a printer and memory card! Easy, yes. Fulfilling, maybe not so much.

Shaking the polaroids after you take a picture. They discontinued that film :(

baking ~ seems like nowadays everything comes in a box, and very few people bake stuff from scratch anymore
reading maps ~ between mapquest and GPS, soon no one will be able to read maps anymore
prose/grammar/spelling~ spell/grammar check has destroyed these
penmanship ~ with most people using keyboards 90% of the time, handwriting is going down the tubes!

Bushido,

unfortunately

@TaoSan – Samurai warriors! Sweet.

Yip, gotta admire them. Although many of them were corrupt, fat and lazy bureaucrats ;)

If you’re into that culture, I may suggest “Musashi”, by Elji Yoshikawa. Pretty heavy, between 1000 and 1400 pages depending on but soooo captivating.

At the time I read it I was 20, and really into kick-boxing. After reading Musashi it appeared barbaric and I changed to classical Japanese Bushido schools.

Lead typesetting, Pantone markers, shoemaker…

@Jeruba: Here’s a few words for you then:
Lettraset
Rubylith
Chartpak
Stat Camera
Embosser
Hot Press & Cold Press paper
Pica ruler

At MassArt, we were the last graduating class to learn everything by hand as you describe.

Illustration required knowing how to draw. You needed a steady hand, a good eye, patience in spades, and attention to detail. You got messy.

Two weeks before we graduated, they installed their first lab full of Apple ll and Quark 1.0.

We were dinosaurs within the year.

Making your own clothes because it was less expensive than buying them.
Having a perfectly lovely—and affordable—wedding reception in the church hall.
Live music and school dances and wedding receptions. Dancing at school dances and wedding receptions
Wood carving
Needlepoint

@cprevite & jeruba—tissued colored mark-ups on artboard. Progs and knowing how to tell RREU from RRED film. Overnighting the same to a publication

Lost art? Using turn signals while making turns in the city.

Stained Glass
Bread making by hand

The art of really dedicating yourself to a relationship and being willing to work at it, and not just running off and looking for something “better” at the first sign of trouble.

@cprevite & @AlfredaPrufrock, I never formally studied the art of page composition, but I learned from others and by doing. I still have (and use) a pica ruler, and my mental measure for small distances is still in points and picas. There’s also a thick sheaf of Letraset transfer type in a drawer in my husband’s room and a burnishing stick on his desk. What a thrill it was to make crisp headings that looked like real print! My waxer is still in the closet, and I have a couple of rolls of Letraset border tape in a drawer along with several Selectric II type balls so I could make real italics and switch from Prestige Elite to Letter Gothic. As jonsblond says about photography—it was more satisfying somehow. On the other hand, I haven’t had a case of paste-up back from 16 hours of bending over a drafting table for about 20 years.

Today “CRC” still means “camera-ready copy” to me, “B/B” means back-to-back, and “TK” (as in “art TK”) means “to come.”

Do you know where your proportion wheel is?

Real animated films. You know, the kind with hand drawn cells. Now everything is computer generated.

@Jeruba I too would never give up my pica ruler.

@Jeruba Now you’re just talking dirty to me.

I miss my IBM Selectric. Such a satisfying sound and feel.

Home canning.

Hope to give it a try this season.

@Jeruba, not my proportion wheel, but I do know where my loup is. I Have a really nice foldable brass loup.

@blondesjon I hear ya on the canning. My dad used to have a garden and made pickles and my mom made jelly. There’s something nice about eating food that you (or your family) grew.

@AlfredaPrufrock, I never did anything fine enough to call tor a loupe. You must have been doing real printing.

I still have my loupe but I only use the one in Aperture nowadays.

It’s good to know you can still buy a loupe.

@Blondesjon funny you should mention that, my mom did a ton of canning this fall. The kitchen smelled of peaches and raspberries for weeks afterward. :-)

Another lost art is looking a people when your walking along the sidewalk. Actually, eye contact in general. Also, saying thank you.

I must add listening to a new album from begining to end. With MP3s and shuffle always on. We are missing put the whole “concept” or “flow” of the album the artist had intended.

@ckinyc: That’s a really good point. I do miss that – and reading all the liner notes.

Blacksmithing!

And it’s cool to see a lot of old textile arts making a comeback too.