reproduction of drawings in early printing

Roxxsmom

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I'm curious how (in the days before photographic transfer of images) they were able to get drawings into printed books. I've found plenty of resources about the invention of printing and how typesetting worked, but I've got less information how they got drawings into books. Engravings or etchings on metal plates, I assume, that was then stamped onto the page. But how did they reproduce drawings that had been made by hand and put them in books? Or did they? I know there were changes in technology in the 19th 20th century, when they developed photography and color printing (I'm not sure exactly how that worked either, but it was different from just stamping an ink smeared press on a page by then, I assume), but how did it work with earlier printed books and pamphlets, like in the 16th-18th centuries? And I'm assuming that early printed books were in black and white?
 
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Siri Kirpal

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I assume it was with tracing paper. You trace the image in pencil, then flip the paper and lay it down, and get a reverse rendering by drawing on top of the tracing. You need the reverse image for most printing processes. (You can get the right facing version by repeating the process, flipping the tracing again.)

What that does is lay a layer of graffite (spelling is incorrect, but am unable to bring up the correct one) from which you can make your engraving or woodcut or etching or whatever.

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Siri Kirpal (BA in Art)
 

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I was wondering more about how they transferred the traced image onto the type face or block or whatever it was. I read that the earliest presses in Europe were wood blocks used to recreate scenes from the Bible and so on, and of course they had backwards versions carved on them. But did they just carve the drawing into the wood? And how did they get the ink to transfer from the grooves carved in the wood block to the paper without smearing?

According to wikipedia, Lithography was invented in the late 1700s, but was it all about carving crude outlines of sketches into wood blocks before then?
 
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Alessandra Kelley

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Book illustration did not take off until the development of wood engraving in the late eighteenth century.

Earlier books and broadsheets tended to have small numbers of either crude woodcut illustrations or lavish metal engraving prints. (I have seen some one-off early printed books with hand-drawn illuminations. )

On the whole pictures were less common, early on.

There are at least two different kinds of printing, one that prints ink from raised lines like the potato prints and linoleum prints kids make in primary school, and one that prints ink from incised lines, such as the engraved metal plates they used to use to print dollar bills with.

Printing is not my art so I'm a little vague on the details and I do not know the terminology, but I believe the two techniques use entirely different sorts of ink and printing methods.
 

Alessandra Kelley

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I was wondering more about how they transferred the traced image onto the type face or block or whatever it was. I read that the earliest presses in Europe were wood blocks used to recreate scenes from the Bible and so on, and of course they had backwards versions carved on them. But did they just carve the drawing into the wood? And how did they get the ink to transfer from the grooves carved in the wood block to the paper without smearing?

According to wikipedia, Lithography was invented in the late 1700s, but was it all about carving crude outlines of sketches into wood blocks before then?

The artists drew directly onto the wood, metal, or stone which was to be used as a printing plate, and then they or a different specialist artist carved the lines.

And I checked the terminology: the two kinds of printing are relief printing, where ink on raised lined is simply pressed onto paper, and intaglio printing, where the printed lines are incised, usually in metal; ink is applied to the whole plate and then wiped off, leaving some in the lines; and high pressure printing presses are needed to force the ink onto the paper.

Wood engraving and woodcuts are a kind of relief printing. Intaglio printing generally requires metal sheets or plates.
 

Alessandra Kelley

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The other thing to remember was that until the development of wood pulp paper in the 1850s, paper was a luxury good.

Laws were passed in England and the colonies and the early US to encourage the saving of linen and cotton rags to make paper. (For example, England passed a law in 1666 that all burial shrouds and burial garments should be made of wool. This had the double effect of encouraging the native wool industry and making paper easier to produce, rather than having to rely on Belgian and other imported linens.)

Tracing paper was not a thing until some time in the early nineteenth century (although I have seen medieval recipes for oiling paper to make it translucent, not really the same thing).

It really was cheaper and easier to just draw the image straight onto a wood block and carve from that.
 

benbenberi

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If the print was intended to reproduce an existing work, e.g. a copy of a portrait or some other painting, I believe the print artists often used a grid to assist the accuracy of the copy.

I have seen a number of prints that are actually reverse images of the original, so sometimes they goofed on that score.
 

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I went on a guided tour of a fascinating exhibit of old prints at the National Gallery here in DC about a year ago. I wish I could recall more details, but the process was more of less as has been described. You carved the image directly into the wood or metal, either in relief or intaglio. It was inked, the excess wiped away, and the paper pressed hard into it to pick up the ink. There was a process by which one, two, or even three layers of color could be added by more or less the same process, but obviously that was time-consuming and technically difficult (you had to press ink to paper several times and make all the lines and colors fit together properly).

And as these artists did their work, they had to carve it into the medium as a mirror image. I was impressed by the skill necessary to work with the metal or wood and to work in mirror-image.
 

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There are at least two different kinds of printing, one that prints ink from raised lines like the potato prints and linoleum prints kids make in primary school, and one that prints ink from incised lines, such as the engraved metal plates they used to use to print dollar bills with.
.

Aha, that's what I was wondering about. I imagined that prints of drawings were done with raised lines, the way type face is (just roll the type or raised lines in ink, then stamp them onto the page, rinse, repeat). Yet reading up on it, it seems like the method where there are incised lines that are filled with ink was more common. The latter seems like it would be easier re carving/etching a line drawing onto a wood block or plate, then making prints. But I can't visualize how they'd get the ink onto the paper from grooves without also getting it all over.

I'm asking because I have a situation in my story where a character hands someone in authority a charcoal sketch he'd made of another person (the antagonist), and I was wondering if it would be practical for a society that has printing technology on par with maybe the later 1600s/early 1700s to be able to print up and distribute pictures based on this sketch? I didn't realize wood pulp paper wasn't invented in the western world until 1850s, though. I remember reading somewhere that they actually invented the first toilet paper in ancient China, though that would obviously be something only wealthy people had. They had a method for making paper out of bark back in the han dynasty, I think. So I figured there was some wiggle room (in a fantasy world) for when less expensive paper might have become widely available. The character's a life research student at a university, so he's expected to make sketches of things he sees under his magnifying lens. I figured he'd have paper of some kind, even if it was rather expensive.

I remember a friend had an inexpensive paper making kit, so I was thinking it wasn't that hard to make. I don't remember what all she had to put in it, however. Rags, I'm guessing.
 
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benbenberi

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It would certainly be plausible for someone to print and distribute a sketch-based picture as you describe. From the 16c on print was a popular medium, not elite/exclusive -- in cities at least printed broadsheets, pictures, and pamphlets were extremely common and inexpensive. Public announcements were often printed up by Authorities. A lot of other sorts of things, many of them illustrated, were also printed by a lot of sources. All rag paper, of course, not wood pulp. But it was binding that was the expensive part of book-making, and that doesn't come into play with a single sheet.
 

Alessandra Kelley

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I neglected to mention one kind of print, stone lithography. This was invented in 1796 and involved polished blocks of limestone drawn on with waxy or oily crayons. Then an oil-repellent solution was applied to the rest of the stone and oily ink used to print images.

It's how those prints that look like charcoal or crayon drawings were made.

The fancier print technologies were not developed until the nineteenth century, roughly, but that does not mean that people couldn't produce quick or good prints earlier.

If nothing else, consider Japanese woodblock prints, which used simple printing technology to brilliant effect.

The Japanese printmakers produced topical prints commenting on issues of the day, caricatures and illustrated poetry and souvenir sheets for plays and actors, at a pretty fast and efficient pace.
 
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Roxxsmom

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It would certainly be plausible for someone to print and distribute a sketch-based picture as you describe. From the 16c on print was a popular medium, not elite/exclusive -- in cities at least printed broadsheets, pictures, and pamphlets were extremely common and inexpensive. Public announcements were often printed up by Authorities. A lot of other sorts of things, many of them illustrated, were also printed by a lot of sources. All rag paper, of course, not wood pulp. But it was binding that was the expensive part of book-making, and that doesn't come into play with a single sheet.

Thanks. Good to know.

I was running into some information re the history of paper and printing that seems strangely contradictory about the timing of its invention and its cost. Sources generally agreed with the statement about paper being expensive before they invented wood pulp paper in the 1850s (I guess it was made from recycled rags before, and obviously cloth was pretty expensive too, before weaving mills got established). But then I read some stuff about paper in ancient china, and it said the technology came to the middle East, where they improved on it and sent it to Europe, but the invention of the printing press in the late 15th century increased the demand for cheap paper.

Hard to piece it all together. I know that reading became more common as a leisure activity in the 1700s, and I'm assuming that more affordable paper and binding were behind that. But what drove the availability of cheaper paper if it wasn't the invention of wood pulp paper in the mid 19th century? Greater availability of cloth rags because of the beginnings of the textile industry?
 

Alessandra Kelley

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It's not clear to me that a greater availability of cloth rags drove the paper industry so much as the increased demand for paper drove the entire logistics of the vast European linen industry.

Cheap is a relative term. The wood pulp drek invented in the 1850s made paper truly cheap (and consigned untold millions of books to crispy, brittle brown doom, although no one knew it at the time), but in the early Renaissance when the new paper technology made paper only 20% the cost of animal-skin parchment, that was reckoned a pretty good bargain.

Chinese paper seems to have been made of fibers abundant in China but rare in Europe. In Europe most paper was made of linen, since cotton was an extremely rare and expensive luxury fabric until the invention of the cotton gin made it super cheap and abundant.

Linen paper involves an extraordinarily complex process to make.

Unlike cotton, linen is not naturally white. Grassy linen fibers go through a complex months-long process involving long fermentation just to make them able to be woven into fabric. Woven linen fabric used to be bleached white with solutions of buttermilk and exposure to the sun.

It's a long, painstaking process, but was kept up for millennia because linen and wool were pretty much all Europe had to make fabric of.

The rise of European papermaking put a tremendous call on linen rags. Ragpicking, the skill of finding and selecting and sorting grades of old linen (and glass and other recyclables) was a respected profession. It almost seems like ensuring a steady supply of old linen became a matter for government regulation. As I mentioned earlier, countries passed all sorts of laws to make sure the supply of linen remained available for papermaking.

Paper mills needed lots of clean, fresh water and lots and lots and lots of linen rags very carefully sorted as to fineness and condition, since the presence of a single mismatched rag could spoil a whole batch of paper. The rags were fermented to soften them and beaten to a careful pulp with hammers. One rag of too coarse a texture or too little aged, and there would be fibers and threads in the paper and it would be spoilt. If one beat the pulp until the coarse rag was pulped, the rest of the pulp would be overbeaten and have the integrity and cohesion of mashed potatoes.

Papermaking involved a huge number of highly skilled workers, from ragpickers to rag sorters to rag retters (fermentation) and beaters and washers and the sheetformers: the vatman and coucher and layer working in teams of three to actually mold the paper. After that the paper was loft-dried, sized, and smoothed, again by specialists.

Sure, paper was less expensive than books on actual animal skin, but there's no way that process could get truly cheap. Even the introduction of relatively abundant naturally white cotton to the process around 1800 didn't particularly reduce the cost of paper. That didn't happen until the wood pulp process was developed.
 

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Cheap is a relative term.

Precisely. Rag paper of the early modern period was certainly more expensive than wood-pulp paper of the 19-20c, and it could not be produced in equivalent volume for any price. However, printing in the early modern period was also artisanal, not industrial, so demand and supply were generally well-scaled to each other. A large print run might be several hundred copies of a broadsheet or other ephemera -- but the printed items were sold cheap enough that anyone who was not absolutely destitute could afford them.

The Wikipedia article on Chapbooks has some relevant information and links.
 

Roxxsmom

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Thanks for all the info.

This stuff is so cool, and as a non historical writer who still likes things to at least be plausible behind the scenes of my stories, I just think it's fun to learn about these things. I've made a couple of passing reference to the costs of books and paper in my world, and have tried to show how characters treat both with respect, even though they have printing presses. But how they are made hasn't been a focus.

I've been back and forth about fabrics and materials for a long time. Climate permitting, there's no reason my society has to have all the same fibers and materials at their disposal as historical Europe (or any other place). I've had this sort of "European" feel and bias to my world building, so my people are mostly going around in linen and wool (only the wealthy class can afford silk and cotton), but then I began to wonder why they have to have the same things as Europe did.

Out of curiosity, was cotton used widely as a fabric anywhere before the invention of the cotton gin? It's been domesticated in warm climes since antiquity, hasn't it? Another fabric that can be used to make clothes is hemp, isn't it? And what about jute? They made ropes and sacks out of it, but what about clothing. I'm guessing it would be rough and scratchy, but would it suffice for outerwear?

For that matter, with fantasy (or SF), one can make up plants and animals to use as sources of material, though I have a preference for their still having costs and limitations.
 
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The thing to search for in terms of the period between the hand-illuminated manuscript and the illustrated printed book is inncanabula

And printed illustrated books weren't rare; they were fairly common.

People who read books expected them to be both decorated and illustrated as so very many mss. were.

Keep in mind that by the 1400s in Europe workshops were mass producing, assembly line style, manuscripts, particularly those of really popular texts.

By the time of the Really Famous and Popular printed books printed in England and in English by Caxton, the two "best sellers" Caxton's Malory and Chaucer were illustrated with block prints.

That is, an image was carved into a specially prepared and surfaced block of wood (today they're blocks of chip board covered with linoleoum like stuff).

The block was inked thoroughly, then a sheet of paper was placed over it, fixed in place, and a roller was used to carefully disperse the ink onto the paper.

In some cases, this was used exactly like stamps are used today, where a series of wood cuts was carefully placed to create a "scene" or image.

In many cases these illustrations were hand colored before being bound into a book for a wealthy patron.

Then in the mid 1500s, especially in Holland and Belgium, and a bit later, Italy, intaglio printing, a sort of cross between engraving and printing, that used a dedicated press just for illustrations.

(Today, a lot of the really best examples of intaglio illustrations in books are not on public display because they're pornographic/erotic).

The next step was engraving and etching (with acid) on plates;this started to quickly replace intaglio in the late 1500s because it produced better quality results, faster and cheaper. The most famous instances of these are those of William Blake. These were easier to mass produce, but they too were frequently hand colored.

Asia, especially Japan, was way way ahead of Europe in terms of printing illustrations.

You can make paper of spinach and lettuce with just a little linen or cotton or papyrus added for fiber.

In Russia in the middle ages, birch bark was used for paper, particularly for things like letters or journals.

And rice makes all kinds of amazing paper.
 
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Alessandra Kelley

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Out of curiosity, was cotton used widely as a fabric anywhere before the invention of the cotton gin? It's been domesticated in warm climes since antiquity, hasn't it? Another fabric that can be used to make clothes is hemp, isn't it? And what about jute? They made ropes and sacks out of it, but what about clothing. I'm guessing it would be rough and scratchy, but would it suffice for outerwear?

Oh sure, cotton was a big deal in India and Mesopotamia as long as 3000 years ago. It was also worn in China. PreColombian Native Americans, especially in South America, cultivated regular white cotton and cotton that grew naturally in colors that never faded (but the Europeans wiped out the colored cultivars for fear of cross-pollination tainting their pure white variety).

The word itself comes from Spanish Arabic, "al-qutn" (in spanish it is still "algodon"), which should tell you how important the fiber was in the European Islamic world.

Flax from which linen is made needs a cool temperate climate (although flax grown for its oil can tolerate warmer temperatures), so in many places cotton was the only game in town. Even in transitional areas, picking seeds out of cotton bolls by hand is no more a nuisance than taking most of a year to make flax fibers usable.
 
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Roxxsmom

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Cool, so it's not unrealistic to have cotton cloth in a pre-industrial society, if it has access to the right climate to grow it and has access to the labor needed to hand-pick seeds.

People spent a lot of time combing and carding wool in the old days too. All textile production was pretty labor intensive when you think about it.