Re: Hermathena and Cicero

On 28 May 2010, at 04:55, Deborah Taylor-Pearce wrote:

> Bagford opens his published essay of 1707 with an assessment of the
> role of the Chinese in the origins of European printing, later gives a
> fascinating summary description of itinerant printers who carried
> their print shops on their backs, and ends up with a suggestive  
> mention of
>
> 	"Printing with Plates of Pewter, Brass, or Iron, either
> 	Graved or Eat with *Aqua fortis*"
>
> ... which is where it becomes my turn to get a bit cheeky! (I thought
> I might challenge Conrad to next try his hand at "taking off the
> Impressions ... by the Smoak of a Lamp ..."! ;-)

I can help with this. "Graving", or as we would say today Engraving,  
is the process of directly cutting a design into a surface using a  
thin, hard, sharp cutting tool. As mentioned elsewhere either by  
Deborah or Bagford, the first early-modern European craft-workers to  
do this were goldsmiths, silversmiths etc. For example, a rich man  
might order a suit of armour to be decorated with chased patterns  
engraved into the metal.

Now, suppose you need to assess how well you are doing in your  
cutting; or maybe you need to show your customer, without dragging a  
cuirass through the streets. You could take an oil-lamp or a candle,  
which would be ever to hand in any case, and let the flame play over  
the engraved surface, until the latter has picked up a coating of  
carbon-black. You can then take an impression from that surface by  
placing a sheet of paper, vellum or cloth onto it, holding it firmly  
in place so that it slippeth not, and rubbing the back with something  
hard and smooth, such as a burnishing tool. It I had to do this  
today, I'd grab a spoon from the kitchen drawer.

These "intaglio" decorations were sometimes made more visible by  
rubbing into the incisions a black substance that would dry hard and  
waterproof. I can't remember how the substance was made up, but we  
call the result "niello" work. You can see how this prefigures the  
art of intaglio printing, where what is rubbed into the incisions is  
ink, and its fate is not to harden in place, but to be pulled out  
onto a paper surface by passing the plate, paper and padding over the  
paper through the rollers of a "star capstan" press.

There is another way in which the art of the engraver rehearses a  
technique that would later be used in the production of metal types  
for printing, and that is through the use of punches. Suppose what I  
want to get around the rim of a silver goblet is an engraved band of  
small flowers, and it would be best were they all to look the same.  
The canny way is to take a bar of steel, engrave the design on one  
end of it "in relief" i.e. poking out, harden the bar and then, using  
the bar as a punch (for that is what you have made), hammer an  
impression of the design onto the silver cup, and repeat as many  
times as needed.

Letterpress printing relied on the use of a punch to stamp a letter  
design into a brass matrix, which was then "justified" i.e.. adjusted  
with files and so on to flatten the deformed surface of the matrix;  
and this matrix was what was then placed at the bottom of the mould  
into which the molten type-metal was poured.

If you are cutting a letter design at 9pt into a metal punch, it is  
of course difficult to see from the three dimensional end of the  
thing you are cutting into how well you are doing. But you can place  
the end of the punch from time to time in the smoke of a candle or  
lamp, impress the end on a piece of paper, and see how you are doing.

The reference to Aqua Fortis implies not engraving direct, but  
etching: aqua fortis is acid. The metal surface is coated with an  
acid-resistant varnish; the varnish is cut through with a metal  
point; the plate is dipped in acid, and it is the acid that "cuts"  
the lines in the plate.


> Of course, I can't read even Bagford's brief account of "Specimens of
> the Antient Printing" without encountering more difficulty with early
> print nomenclature.
>
> This time it's the English word "list" -- apparently something used to
> make playing cards, which process Bagford believes is done "after the
> same manner as those for the Books [first] printed at *Harlem*."
> ...
>
> I'm hoping that "list" is still a familiar term to those working
> within the graphic arts today. If not, perhaps those of you with
> hands-on experience in the print shop can glean from Bagford's
> description (better than I) what he's talking about ???

I enjoyed reading Bagford's description of playing-card  
manufacture... It is thought that playing with "court cards" was,  
like chess, another Asian pastime that came into Europe via Muslim  
contacts. Long before texts could be printed using moveable type, it  
was possible to print texts and pictures from carved woodblocks; in  
the British Library we have as evidence of this the beautiful Diamond  
Sutra printed from woodblocks in 868 CE in China.

What Bagford is describing is a process whereby the designs for a set  
of playing cards have been carved onto woodblocks, and are then  
printed onto stout paper by the Chinese method. The pattern is carved  
onto the block "in relief", using not needle-pointed burins, but what  
are in effect small chisels and gouges. Cutting removes wood: the  
remaining raised part of the plank is what carries the image. The  
printing ink is painted or dabbed onto the block; the paper is placed  
onto the surface; a satisfactory impression is obtained by rubbing  
the back of the paper without causing it to slip and blur the  
impression. The "list" is therefore logically that which is taken  
into or wrapped around the hand of the printer to do this rubbing with.

I can imagine a strip of cloth wrapped around the hand serving well  
for this process. It would leave the fingers of that hand free for  
other work e.g. placing and removing the paper.

To confuse matters, there was later invented (by Thomas Bewick) an  
improvement on this process of relief woodblock printing that he  
called "wood engraving". One might think that this was an intaglio  
printing technique; not so. It is a version of woodblock relief  
printing refined by cutting not on the plank of the wood, where the  
grain runs across and can disrupt accurate image preparation, but on  
the end-grain, so that the wood fibres are orthogonal to the imaging  
surface of the block. The favoured wood has long been that of the  
boxwood tree. Very fine, hard and sharp burins are used with names  
such as "graver" and "spitsticker". I have done this myself, some  
decade back.

The wood-engraved image is finer in detail than woodcut is, and the  
endgrain can be used to make a very large number of impressions: a  
million copies or more is not impossible. This was the favoured  
imaging technique for the Victorian illustrated newspapers and  
magazines, until the photo-etched zinc plate "process engraving"  
technique came along and allowed the flowing pen lines of Aubrey  
Beardsley et al. to be transferred photographically to a raised  
printing surface. I've done that, too.

Going back to the playing cards: Bagford indicates that once the line- 
work was printed and dried on the paper, the colouring was done with  
brushes and by hand, but semi-automated by the use of cardboard  
stencils.

Conrad
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