The double invention of printing

Journal of Design History

Volumn 13, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 287-300

  Bryans, Dennis ^a  

^a SWINBURNE UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY   (Australia)

Author keywords

Design history; Direct transfer; Graphic design; History of technology; Indirect transfer; Lithography

Indexed keywords

EID: 17544383983     PISSN: 09524649     EISSN: 17417279     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/jdh/13.4.287     Document Type: Review

References (43)

1. George Sarton, Six Wings: Men of the Renaissance, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1957, p. 119.
2. William B. Ashworth, Jr. & Angus J. Carroll, 'Paper dinosaurs', Biblio: The Magazine for Collectors of Books, Manuscripts, and Ephemera, June 1997, vol. 2, no. 6, pp. 24-9
3. and Angus Carroll, 'Books and bones', ibid., pp. 30-1.
4. Michael Twyman, Early Lithographed Books: A Study of the Design and Production of Improper Books in the Age of the Hand Press, Farrand Press, London, 1990.
5. Twyman relies on Senefelder's manual for information about these projected works, both of which were intended for the use of J. M. Steiner, 'Director of the Royal Establishment for Schoolbooks', pp. 39-40.
6. Michael Twyman, Early Lithographed Music: A Study Based on the H. Barron Collection, Farrand Press, London, 1996.
7. M. F. Ashley Montagu, Preface, in George Sarton, Studies and Essays in the History of Science and Learning in Honour of George Sarton, 1944.
8. An exception to this statement is found in Ellen Mazur Thomson's The Origins of Graphic Design, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1997, p. 14, who refers to Frank Luther Mott's use of the term 'double invention' to describe 'the use of photography in print'.
9. Mott, in A History of American Magazines 1885-1905, Belknap Press, Harvard, Cambridge MA, 1957, describes his 'double revolution' as being 'First ... [providing a] ... copy for the picture in many cases without any need of a drawing or painting ... [and] second, not only was the artist eliminated but so was the engraver', Vol. II, p. 191. This is a view not directly comparable with Sarton's observation. It may, however, be found supportive of Sarton's more general construction.
10. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modem Europe, Cambridge, Michigan, 1993, pp. 23-4.
11. Small alterations to an engraved plate, however, were commonly carried out by beating out flat an area that required reengraving on the reverse side of a plate and then polishing the flattened area on the face of the plate until all unwanted marks were removed. The work of re-engraving the blank area on the plate was then carried out.
12. Eisenstein, op. cit. Sarton's argument distinguishing between xylography and copperplate engraving of diagrams, tables and maps is expanded and discussed more fully (see pp. 23-2).
13. Eisenstein especially refers the reader to Kepler's Tabularum Rudolphi (illustrated on p. 223), which was based upon Tycho Brahe's data 'compiled with the aid of Napier's logarithms'. (John Napier was a Scottish mathematician (1550-1617).
14. See also Stev Lindberg's 'Mobiles in Books', The Private Library, Third Series, vol. 2, no. 2, Summer 1979, pp. 49-82, for an interpretation more sympathetic to the importance of visual information in Tycho Brahe's library.
15. Eisenstein, op. cit., p. 24.
16. Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading, Flamingo, London, 1997, p. 191
17. cites James W. Thompson's Ancient Libraries, Archon Books, Hamden, CN, 1940, and the bibliographical detail gleaned from an ancient Egyptian 'House of Books', c.2000 BC, discovered at Edfu, which contained, among other volumes, a 'List of All Writings Engraved in Wood'. The Egyptians do not appear to have attempted to print from these 'engraved writings'.
18. George Sarton, in The History of Science, Vol. 1, From Homer to Omar Khayyam, Williams & Wilkins, Baltimore, MD, 1968 (reprint), p. 604, writes that the earliest surviving printed text is The Diamond Sutra, printed in China in May 868.
19. Other ancient Chinese texts printed from wood blocks to which Sarton refers are based on the research of Thomas Francis Carter, The Invention of Printing in China, Columbia University Press, New York, 1925.
20. For details of the printing of The Diamond Sutra see Chapter 8, pp. 39-48; see also 'The invention of movable type in China', Chapter 22, pp. 159-68
21. and 'The expansion of movable type in Korea', Chapter 23, pp. 169-79.
22. Manguel, op. cit., p. 172, shows an illustration of a seventeenth-century Russian broadside in which the text and image appear to have been cut from a single wood block. In recent times examples of block books may be found. In the twentieth century the invention of lino cutting permitted book artists to combine image and text in imitation of the traditional wood block.
23. James Leith, 'Ephemera: civic education through images', in Robert Darnton & Daniel Roche (eds.), Revolution in Print: The Press in France 1775-1800, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1989, p. 270.
24. Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775-1800, Harvard, Cambridge, MA, 1979, p. 242.
25. Charles Coulston Gillespie, A Diderot Pictorial Encyclopedia of Trades and Industry: Manufacturing and the Technical Arts in Plates Selected from L'Encyclopédie, Dover, New York, 1959 (second printing), Introduction, p. xxii.
26. Sarton, Six Wings, p. 117. A further comment of interest may be found in Manguel's A History of Reading. In a chapter entitled 'Picture reading', Manguel writes of the value of illustration in the acquisition of knowledge before the advent of printed books in a. passage where the biblia pauperum is discussed at length. See pp. 101-4 and an illustration of the Heidelberg Biblia Pauperum showing with graphic symbolism the Annunciation and four prophets who predicted the birth of Christ.
27. Edward E. Tufte, Envisioning Information, Graphics Press, Cheshire, CN, 1990.
28. Edward E. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Graphics Press, Cheshire, CN, 1990 (1983).
29. Tufte, Envisioning Information, pp. 19-21.
30. The increasingly-sophisticated use of engraving to visualise and demonstrate sequential data in the texts of books is apparent in Scheiner's De Maculis Solaribus and Rosa Ursinasive Sol, and is a point well illustrated and described by Tufte. His presentation of the educative possibilities of visual information demonstrates well the effectiveness of engravings and direct image transfer for this purpose. For example, Tufte cites an engraving illustrating Edmond Halley's paper 'An Historical Account of the Trade Winds and Monsoons, Observable in the Seas Between and Near the Tropicks; With an Attempt to Assign the Phisical Cause of Said Winds' (1686), Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, p. 23.
31. Eisenstein, op. cit., p. 140.
32. Block printing inks in Japan, for example, were water-based inks. Simple ingredients such as rice paste to bind powdered pigments permitted sophisticated polychrome effects to be achieved from as many as eight to ten wood blocks.
33. C H. Bloy, A History of Printing ink, Balls And Rollers: 1440-1850, Evelyn Adams & MacKay Ltd., London, 1967, p. 86.
34. E. S. Lumsden, The Art of Etching, Dover, New York, 1962 (reprint of original published by Seeley Service & Co., 1924).
35. T. S. Barber, Art and Practice of Printing, New Era, London, n.d., Vol. 4 (6 vols).
36. Senefelder departed from this usual method by attempting to press an image on to a wood block indirectly and, as it turned out, unsuccessfully.
37. S. H. Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing, Penguin Books, third edn., 1974, p. 278. The same information about Ged's process is to be found in Rudolph Ackermann's Repository of the Arts, vol. 1, no.1, January1809.
38. Details of Foulis' and Tilloch's stereotype patent of 1784, which expired in 1798, are also given (p. 7.) A detailed treatment of the progress of stereotyping in England is contained in George A. Kubler's The Era of Earl Stanhope, Stereotyper 1750-1825, Brooklyn Eagle Press, New York, 1938.
39. David Bindman, William Blake: His Art and Times, Thames & Hudson, Wisbeck, 1982.
40. See pp. 90-3 for examples of the relief etchings referred to made by William Blake.
41. Richard T. Godfrey, Printmaking in Britain: A General History from its Beginnings to the Present Day, Phaidon, Oxford, 1978, fig. 8.
42. John Ford, Ackermann 1783-1983: The Business of Art, Arthur Ackermann Publishing Limited, London, 1983, p. 36.
43. Estelle Jussim, Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts: Photographic Technologies in the Nineteenth Century, R. R. Bowker & Company, New York, 1983, p. 340.