LOL ok just kidding but before there was lasers there was stamps! Lots and lots of leather stamps.
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Flashed a memory of school days.
We had an offset printing class and had to use all these metal stamps for the various fonts and sizing of letters.
The back of the class had the stamps lined up in trays like you showed and there was no punishment strong enough if you tipped a tray.
As a side note, everyone wondered why we needed that class since the school office has several Ditto Machines.
Some of you may need to search that one.
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Ahh, the smell of freshly dittoed papers! 
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Letterpress. Woe to the eejit who dropped a tray of set type. Also to the eejit (sometimes me) who put a paper-holder pin where a letter was. With the GF, laser trumps pin, thank goodness.
Someone should write a book on all the great inventions that were just a bit late to the table: I knew a woman who had a room full of machinery that she could create high quality letterset fonts in thousands of fonts for really impressive documents for the time, (just a couple years before Adobe illustrator made her thousands of dollars in equipment just so much junk) or the plotter that you could type and it would use a pen to create really nice looking lettering for your hand drafted drawings. or the spiral slide rule that was the equal of a sixty foot slide rule to get just that extra decimal point in your calculations. I am sure there are more like that.
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A friend worked for a company that had a great thing that was perfect for its time but is now utter junk: a vector CRT that went from 0-20kv in something like 50-millivolt steps. Originally made for NASA, then used in the financial industry for making really detailed slides.
Anyone remember slides?
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Now they call them flip-flops
I know - you mean the physical power point stuff…
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