In Living Color

“The Stag, or Red Deer.” Thomas Bewick. A General History of Quadrupeds.  London, 1790.  

British engraver and natural history author Thomas Bewick invented wood engraving, which he introduced in this book, at the end of the eighteenth century.  With some technical modifications, by the 1820s, Bewick’s method of wood engraving proved to be an excellent method of reproducing illustrations on rotary presses. 

[Charles Knight.] One Hundred and Fifty Wood Cuts Selected from The Penny Magazine; Worked, by the Printing-Machine from the Original Blocks. 1835.  

As a byproduct of the successful Penny Magazine, Charles Knight issued this volume, whose title page incorporates a small woodcut of the Applegath and Cowper double-cylinder perfecting press. Because the whole point of the book was to exhibit quality woodcuts, this was the first “art book” produced on a printing machine rather than a handpress. The title emphasizes that the impressions of the woodcuts were made from the original woodblocks rather than from the stereotype plates used to print the same woodcuts in The Penny Magazine, so presumably the impressions are truer to the originals. 

The Penny Black. London, 1840.   

This is a facsimile of the first adhesive postage stamp, printed in England in 1840 by the steel engraving and printing process invented by Jacob Perkins, features a profile of Queen Victoria. Before Perkins’s method of reproducing steel engravings existed, printing the enormous number of very small, highly detailed images required for postage stamps was impossible, since only steel engravings could withstand hundreds of thousands of impressions. The Penny Black’s entire print run of 286,700 sheets contained a total of 68,808,000 stamps. 

Thomas Campbell. The Pleasures of Hope. London, 1821.  

The Pleasures of Hope was one of the first books illustrated with steel engravings. Each of the four steel engravings in Campbell’s book appears to have been engraved as if it were the title page. The small images credit R. Westall as artist and Charles Heath as engraver. In very small type at the foot of each page appears “Perkins, Fairman & Heath,” the name of Heath’s partnership with Jacob Perkins and Gideon Fairman. Perkins invented the first practical process for printing steel engravings. 

George Baxter. Baxter’s Gems of The Great Exhibition. London, 1851.  

Baxter invented the first commercially successful method of color printing. His highly labor-intensive process was done from blocks on iron handpresses, with some of the prints requiring as many as twenty impressions with exceptionally precise registration. Baxter’s Gems of The Great Exhibition were brilliantly color-printed images recording highlights of the Great Exhibition. Baxter is believed to have issued about four hundred different color prints, some of which sold in large numbers, most copies of which did not survive. Max Mitzman estimated that Baxter himself  or his employees printed “over twenty million prints during his career,” all on iron hand presses. 

Christmas Supplement to The Illustrated London News. 22 December 1855.  

Issued on a Saturday, this Christmas Supplement was the first issue of a newspaper or magazine printed in color. To accomplish the complicated color printing, George Leighton adapted Baxter’s process of printing from blocks. The registration of the color images is poor. 

Edmund Evans. The Art Album. London, 1861.   

The Gardener’s Daughter was one of sixteen images color printed by Edmund Evans, a licensee of George Baxter’s color-printing patent. Like other licensees, Evans was willing to compromise quality in order to speed up the process. 

The International Exhibition — The Nave (Looking West). Supplement to The Illustrated London News. 18 October 1862.  

This large color print by George Leighton exhibits remarkably accurate registration for a print mass-produced from a series of woodblocks.  

John Thomas Smith. Antiquities of Westminster. London. Thomas Besley. 1807.

Smith produced this experimental print ten years before Senefelder’s manual of lithography was published, marking the first lithographed illustration published in a book printed by letterpress. Smith’s original intention was to illustrate the whole edition with one plate produced by lithography; but after 300 copies of the lithograph were printed, the stone was ruined, and Smith decided to revert to etching on copper for the remaining copies.  

Jackson Gaskill. The Printing-Machine Manager’s Complete Practical Handbook. London, 1877.

Gaskill’s pocket-sized book was the first English manual exclusively on printing by machine and includes a guide to the progression of color printing by lithograph. It underwent only one edition.

Lithographie Artistique J. Minot & Cie. Imprimé sur la Nouvelle Presse Lithographique Marinoni. Paris, 1889.  

This small chromolithgraphed trade card was printed for artistic lithographers J. Minot & Cie in Paris, on Marinoni’s new lithographic press at the Palais de l’Exposition in 1889. Increasing demand for color printing drove demand for faster lithographic printing machines. By this date, printing machine manufacturers in Europe and the United States were producing lithographic printing machines to meet the increasing demand for color printing. 

Promotional Box. M. & R. Zocher, Papierhandlung & Buchdruckerei.

This small color-printed card box was issued by Max and Rudolf Zocher to advertise their business in Dresden circa 1885. It provides some small views of the operations of a mid-sized printing and bookbinding operation of the time. 

The Illustrated London News. 3 May 1856.  

Mechanizing the process of printing from heavy, thick slabs of limestone took decades after the invention of the first printing machines. This woodcut shows the Prince of Wales and Prince Alfred visiting the leading London lithographic establishment of Day and Son. As late as 1856, Day and Son had only flatbed lithographic handpresses in operation. 

Album de L’Industrie Française commerciale, manufacturière et agricole. Paris, 1865.  

By the 1860s, a few printing machine designers in France had developed lithographic printing machines that could be operated by steam or by hand-crank. This visually complicated lithographed cross-sectional view of his steam-powered lithography operation shows that Thedore Dupuy operated thirty manual lithographic presses and a dozen steam-powered presses, presumably of his own design. Dupuy printed all the plates in this little-known Album, a collection of lithographed industrial advertisements. 

Cette épreuve en Quatorze Couleurs été tirée publiquement au Palais L’Exposition Internationale de 1867 […] sur la Presse Chromo -Lithographique - Mécanique Th. Dupuy. Paris, 1867.   

This chromolithographed broadside was printed for demonstration purposes on Théodore Dupuy’s Presse Chromo-Lithographique-Mécanique during the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867. This very complicated chromolithograph, finely printed in fourteen colors, was clearly intended to prove the capabilities of his machine. The chief advantages of steam-powered lithographic presses were speed and the capability of controlling very precise registration, or calibration of each layer of the design, which was necessary to print this proof in fourteen colors.