A Companion to the History of the Book by Simon Eliot & Jonathan Rose

Author:Simon Eliot & Jonathan Rose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2011-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

Color

After some experiments in the incunable period, it became unusual to find color in books because it was difficult to justify the added expense. After 1800, color printing became more widespread, mainly driven by the demands of the advertising industry, but there was also an increase in the use of color in books. Text printed in color was generally limited to the occasional two-color title page, although there were exceptions, such as the version of the New Testament produced by De la Rue and Giles Balne in 1829 which was printed throughout in gold on special porcelain-coated paper. Illustrations printed in color were much more common, although the vast majority were still in black only. The best-known developments in this area are probably those of Savage, Baxter, and Knight, in the first half of the nineteenth century, although they were by no means the first to experiment with printing images in color.

William Savage’s book, Practical Hints on Decorative Printing, was published in two parts in 1818 and 1823. Savage used oil-less inks to print a series of wood-engraved blocks, each in a different color, to build up a full-color image.

The book is a virtuoso performance. One of the plates, “Ode to Mercy”, was printed from as many as twenty-nine different wood-blocks and is a masterpiece of technical skill if not in conception. Savage’s major contribution was to refine and extend the technique used by John Baptist Jackson in the eighteenth century by introducing rich colours and a great many more workings. (Twyman 1970a: 38)

Baxter’s method was similar to that used by Savage, using a series of woodblocks to print different colors in order to produce the effect of full color. Unlike Savage, Baxter used oil-based inks and an intaglio key plate for the black working, which was usually a complete picture in its own right.

Charles Knight’s career began at around the same time as that of Baxter. In 1832, he founded the Penny Magazine and this was followed by numerous books, often issued in parts, and all of these early works were illustrated with woodcuts. In 1838, Knight patented a method of color printing which he termed “illuminated printing.” Like Baxter, Knight used oil-based inks, although his process differed in that he printed the colors first, from metal plates, with the black added last from a woodblock. The key to his idea was to apply four colors to a single sheet during the course of a single pass through the press. The sheet of paper remained stationary in the press until all the colors had been applied. This was achieved by fitting the press with a revolving frame in the place of the usual platen. Each color was printed on top of the preceding one whilst the ink was still wet, meaning that further colors could be created by mixing the inks together. In the field of lithographic printing, Godefroy Engelmann in the 1830s pioneered a similar method, called chromolithography, of building up color images using different stones to print different colors.

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