Re: Hermathena and Cicero

On 9 May 2010, at 23:29, Deborah Taylor-Pearce wrote:

> and Watson notes that the plates were retouched for this 2nd printing
> by a different press.
>
> Based on what you've already said, I assume that it would be extremely
> difficult -- if not impossible -- to "retouch" bronze plates?

Retouching and revision of plates was quite common, especially for  
cartography.

Here again, the ductility of copper is an advantage. One could erase  
a feature by crushing the metal, filling the gaps, re-burnishing.  
Indeed the whole principle of mezzotint printing is that one uses a  
toothed rocker tool to place tiny pits all over a plate, then  
applying pressure with a burnisher to crush some of the pits so created.

Incidentally, bronze was used for experiments in early letterpress  
(moveable type) printing in Korea, before Gutenberg invented his  
implementation with alloys of lead and tin (whether Gutenberg used  
antimony as in later type metal, I can't recall).

Conrad
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