Illustration Processes to 1900 (July 2013)

Illustration Processes to 1900 (I-20), Rare Book School, taught by Terry Belanger, 22-27 July 2013

first thing to ask: date? is it printed on both sides? is the caption letterpress or freeform?

sock impression: on damp paper; kiss impression: on dry paper

letter press -- ~200 sq in of printing space, about 200lb of pressure, so ~1lb per sq in (not much at all)

Relief

can't tell if a relief print is printed from wood or from metal (eletrotype)

if sheet is printed on both sides, 90% certain it's relief

don't get large areas of dead black in intaglio the way you do with relief

Hand press period

Woodcuts

fast to print (about 100x faster to print than intaglio)

don't wear out

ink is such in, so you can stack sheets while wet

done on plank side of wood

occasionally find pen corrections, since labor was cheap and materials were expensive (reverse of today)

C19

Wood engravings

done on endgrain, which is much harder; you an use a burin

advantage over intaglio: can be printed with the text

Civil War Artist by Taylor Morrison, good description of process of making a wood engraving

bolted together smaller pieces of boxwood to make large enough image

Bewick manner -- popularized wood engraving

• vignette: no edges -- not rectangle or oval
• Bewick known for his vignetes; see pg 13 in workbook for a passage from Jane Eyre that mentions Bewick
• many imitators
• large Bewick block collection at the Newberry
• Bewick manner uses white lines when you can, since it's easier

Facsimile -- copy what an artist gives you

Interpretive -- interpret what an artist gives you

White-line

Stereotype/electrotypes

stereotype begins around 1810; eletrotypes in 1840s

copper-faced woodblock made from original wood engraving; can't tell the different between a printing done from copper face or from original woodblock

plaster in wood engraving means its a stereotype

Intaglio

if there are flowing lines, it's intaglio

offsetting tells you two plates were in the same place at the same time long enough to offset, but doesn't necessarily indicate from the same shop

pentimento: an alteration that's been rubbed out (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentimento)

difference between litho and intaglio: you can find hairs where ink is wicked in intaglio under high magnification

Hand-press period

Copper engravings

can only do about ~100 impressions, not enough for a book run; by 19C, could get ~1500 copies from copper by beating it first to make it stronger

under pressure of rolling press, lines of copperplate squash together

• refurbishers could touch them up; were paid by the hour (unusual for book trade, because it was such skilled labor)

at about 1000 impressions, it's cheaper to duplicate the plate

Pallaioulo -- Battle of the Nudes (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Nudes_(engraving))

game of collecting Italian Renaissance prints was over by the end of the 18c -- very rare

copper was very expensive in handpress period

chalcography -- John Evelyn term for copperplate engraving

Chalgographic Museum

Etchings

pure etching virtually unknown in handpress period

speed: map engraver in Ordinate Survey Office expected to do 2x2 inches a day engraved; with etchings, a simple 7x10" plate could be done in ~1hour

engraving gives you a better line; etching, the acid eats out a globe under the surface, which causes it to cave in and deteriorate faster

easier to start with an etched line, then go over lines so the etching doesn't show; this was very common in all periods (almost all engravings have some etching on them)

Ivins claims engravings (the term) should be used for sculptural framing prints; etchings is for prints in books or generally smaller, more ephemeral

Etchings on an ungrounded plate

Line engravings

line engravings are opposed to mezzotints, stipple engravings and aquatints, which are all tonal engravings

steel-faced copper plates show up in 1870s, can get many more impressions

copperplate engraving after 1880 was for able to be done for a mass market (because of steel face), but it was too late -- photographic methods were becoming available

Mezzotints

can only get ~200 from a plate; not used in books but as framing prints, because rubbing destroys them easily

Prince Rupert is fabled to have invented it (in John Evelyn's Sculptura, or the History of Chalcography), though Siegen did

first known is a large plate of an executioner; it made its way to England as the "Little executioner" (smaller image just of executioner's haed), which is in Evelyn's book -- famous image

Stipple engravings

done through a ground; never done directly to the plate

shows up at the end of 18c, disappears with litho

can be hard to distinguish from chal manner litho

Aquatints

white islands surrounded by black sea indicates aquatint

painting the ground onto the plate; can do multiple bites with the acid to get a "terraced" visual effect (patches of uniform darkness, patches of uniform medium gray, etc.; see pg 21)

no color aquatints; only hand-colored

aquatint often used to give differentiation in print destined for hand-colored tone; can use only a few colors to get many colors because of aquatint shading effects

C19

Steel engravings

magazines needed many plates to reproduce; would # different copies at the bottom

doctor blade, could force ink into small, very thin lines

can produce lines so thin they aren't visible to the naked eye

takes 10x longer, but you get 100x as many copies (up to 100k)

ruling machine; could make many even lines quickly, of different thicknesses; enabled heavy use of line shading in steel engravings

steel engraving with no plate mark in a book means that a big plate was laid out in a sheet, then printed before the letterpress; so the sheet went through a press 4x (2x on each side)