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Hard to Fool the Fingers - Paper & Printing through the Ages - By Susan Halas Untrimmed deckle edges on a stack of rag paper are uneven, wavy. A beginner's zip tour from rag to pulp, from wood block to digital file A basic knowledge of European and American paper and printing is useful for booksellers, collectors and those in related fields. It’s helpful to know what they look like and more importantly, what they feel like. There are many detailed books on this subject, but this brief article may help you get the feel for their historical sequence and a few of their distinguishing characteristics. That in turn could help you accurately date value things you may own or find. Remember, these comments apply mainly to the Western graphic arts and typography. They are not necessarily true for things of Asian or other origin. Before we consider the question: How was it printed? Let’s ask: What was it printed on? Paper Before there was paper there were animal skins such as vellum, vegetable fiber surfaces like papyrus. Ancient peoples marked clay tablets and stone tablets. But, for our purpose, let’s stick to roughly the last 300 or so years. During that period there were basically two kinds of paper in common use: Western paper making starts with mainly rag based papers made a sheet at a time and transitions in the mid-19^th century to mostly machine made wood pulp papers. Rag-Based Paper Rag-based papers, as the name implies, are made from the pulp that comes from cloth. They are strong and flexible and long lasting. They were the prevailing papers from the birth of Western papermaking to about the 1850s when wood pulp paper manufacturing was introduced. It’s not hard to identify a rag paper, it often has a watermark or chain line (hold it up to the light to check) and does not chip or discolor easily, though sometimes it does have spots of foxing. In a text weight antique paper it has a strong and flexible feeling. It may have a deckle, an uneven wavy untrimmed edge. Even today rag-based papers are still made and used for fine products like limited edition books, as the surface for artwork like watercolors, or to protect and conserve works of art and other delicate or fragile things. If it’s printed on rag-paper it generally indicates something made before 1850s, or made later and with an attempt to simulate the tradition and style of earlier periods. When it comes to setting value (no matter what the date) a rag paper is a good sign. It usually means expensive, long lasting, good quality, hand made.
Hard to Fool the Fingers - Paper & Printing through the Ages - By Susan Halas Holding an 18th century sheet of rag paper up to the light a watermark and chain lines are visible. Wood Pulp Paper From about the 1850s to now we see mostly wood pulp based paper. It comes in many grades and finishes but as almost anyone who has picked up an older book or newspaper knows, it can be brittle. It may chip and crack easily and can also yellow and discolor. That is because wood pulp has no long strong fibers holding it together as fabric does. Thus no matter how fancy looking or thick it started out, wood pulp paper eventually becomes fragile and hard to conserve. It can also cause significant damage. Wood pulp paper is highly acidic. That means the chemistry of the paper causes it to decay, and over time the acid in wood pulp paper can significantly damage anything else it touches. How often have you seen mat burn when fine art work was matted and backed with cheap mat board? The acid in the mat board and backing migrates into and literally destroys the value of the artwork it was meant to enhance. Beware!! Do not interleave your good collectibles with cheap acidic paper, it will degrade and damage your valuable items. Use only acid free rag paper for interleaving and other conservation purposes. How Was It Printed? Wood, Metal, Stone, Emulsion, Screen, Photomechanical, Digital Here at AE Monthly we’re mostly interested in books and how they were printed. Just about all the printing methods ever invented were at one time used for printing books, and though many have waned or been replaced by newer methods, it helps to know what they look like and generally what their dates might be. You need to know them all, if for no other reason than over the centuries there have been many clever and ingenious reproductions, facsimiles, and other kinds of copies that to the eye look very much like originals. It is easy to fool the eye. It’s hard to fool the fingers. Forget about fancy certificates, usually worthless anyway. The best guide to determining authenticity is not how it looks, but how it feels. This is especially true when buying fine prints, maps or photos. You want to touch the actual piece of paper. You want to examine the surface of the front and the back under a magnifying glass to be sure that it is what it purports to be. Be cautious about buying matted or framed works of art. It might be a great deal, but if you can not open the mat and see and touch the entire sheet, it could just as easily be a great fake. The difference is often in how it feels. That said here’s a quick intro to printing & graphic techniques for beginners.
Hard to Fool the Fingers - Paper & Printing through the Ages - By Susan Halas The lighter indented area in corner of a plate mark goes all the way around the image. Wood (Relief) The first widespread Western printing was done on wood. It was a relief method in which the parts that were meant to print remained intact and the parts that did not print were cut away. The ink was then rolled on the remaining high surface, a single sheet of paper was carefully laid on top and pressure was applied from above. Printing this way using wood blocks is called relief printing. In Europe, before the invention of movable type, it was the way words and pictures were first printed together. Unless you’re interests lie in this very early period and you have a substantial budget too, you’re not going to be seeing many examples of this form, though you may encounter some nice contemporary woodblock art prints. One of the best indicators of relief printing, whether it is wood, linoleum or even stamped with a potato is the thickness and feel of the ink. The way the ink lies on the paper is the clue; it almost always has a barely perceptible raised feeling to it and a certain gloss, shine or tack that is the signature of the relief method. Metal Historically metal comes next. There are many variations of printing using movable metal type and metal plate illustrations. The invention of movable metal type started roughly about 1450 and kept going right up to the present with many variations and improvements. Even though metal type was followed by photo mechanical and then digital type setting in the 20^th century, there are still many small presses that employ hand set metal or antique wood fonts. Metal type printed by “letterpress” has a certain feel to it. You can run your fingers over the paper and you can feel the indent where the type pressed into the paper. If it doesn’t have that “feel” no matter what it looks like it isn’t letterpress. Intaglio The family of printing techniques using metal plate (copper, zinc, steel, etc.) is called “intaglio.” This family includes engraving, etching, dry point, aquatint, and many others. When it comes to making pictures, especially pictures with very many lines or fine detail such as maps, metal plate had many advantages over wood. Though engraving and etching start earlier, the heyday of metal plate processes was the 18^th and early 19^th century In relief (wood) the ink lies on top of the high surface. In the intaglio processes, the ink is forced low into the lines, the plate is wiped to remove excess ink from areas that are supposed to be light, and the pressure of the rollers forces the paper into the depressions and pulls the ink out of the low areas. Images made by this method typically have “plate mark” and a “plate tone.” The plate mark is an uncolored indent all the way around the edge of the image that shows the extent of the metal plate. The plate tone is the coloration of the lighter areas which are almost never bright white. They are almost always some shade of grey. When you’re looking at the sheet printed by metal plate in a book or loose – most often a map or an illustration – you’ll want to look for the characteristic bite or burr in the line, for the grey scale in the plate tone, and for the indent of the plate. You’ll want to avoid things that are too bright or white, so closely trimmed that you can’t see a plate mark, or most commonly - printed on a much later paper, which is a certain indication of a reproduction. It is also not unknown to have a false plate mark. Remember that this class of metal plate printing continues to the present day. It is used by printers and artists. There were and still are many small presses using hand set type, so there are many modern examples of books made entirely by letter press and/or illustrated with images made by metal plate which are both modern and genuine.
Hard to Fool the Fingers - Paper & Printing through the Ages - By Susan Halas Halftone dot patterns (magnified) indicate a 20th century photo mechanical printing process was used Don’t forget – Wood engraving Wood engraving was done with a fine scribe on the end grain of box wood. It was the great illustrative technique of mid to late 19th century. There are endless examples still available almost always on cheap wood pulp paper. Before there were photos in magazines wood engraving thrived. Wood engraving is often interesting, sometimes valuable and mostly found in publications that enjoyed a substantial circulation in their day. This is a format that comes in, is used widely, and then mostly goes away by the early 20^th century. There are a few, but not many practitioners of this form today. Stone Lithography Stone lithography was invented in 1796 and flourished in the 19^th century. It is best known for the large and colorful posters, especially by European artists, but it was also used for art and illustration where intense highly saturated color was desired. Stone lithography is a resist process, the artist draws on the stone with a crayon or similar waxy substance, then a liquid wash is applied that eats away all the parts of the stone block that are not covered by the drawing. The covered portion remains higher and the uncovered parts are very slightly lower. Unlike metal plate, prints made from stone do not have plate marks, and they are very good at showing tonal range. It’s hard to make a tonal range in metal. Metal plate artists used many kinds of cross hatch and devised other techniques like aquatint to simulate tone, but with the advent of stone lithography tone and color became, if not easy, at least possible and fluid transitions were soon the norm. Don’t confuse stone litho with offset litho Do not confuse 19^th and 20^th century stone lithography with the present day technique called “photo lithography” or ”offset printing” or “photo-offset” and other camera based printing techniques which employ half-tone dots to reproduce images. The names sound similar and they have some similarities but there are important differences. The most important difference is quantity. Stone lithography is a one sheet at a time process and the press runs are seldom big. Photo- lithography can, did and still does easily run editions in the millions. Emulsion (Photography -Film) The camera has a long history and during its earlier periods there were photos on glass and metal. But photography using film with the image printed on papers with emulsions starts in the 1880s and keeps going until the end of the 20^th century, when this format was largely replaced by digital computer generated imagery that does not use film and prints on papers that are not emulsion based. In the period from the late 19^th century to the end of the 20^th century the most important thing to know about photos printed on paper is that they have an emulsion on one side which is the surface that displays the image and if they are genuine photos there are no half tone dots. Lots of things that purport to be original photos (and original other things too) are really photomechanical reproductions that have half tone dots. Use magnification to view the sheet. If you see an all over dot pattern chances are very very good it is a photomechanical reproduction. One reason real photos are collectible is because the usually are made in limited numbers and as a category they have a definite starting and ending period of about 100 years. Of all the printing technologies photos are the most sensitive to sunlight. This is especially true of color photos of the mid and later 20^th century. These will fade, color shift and degrade rapidly if hung or displayed in a bright light. If you collect photography, keep it in a dark, cool, temperature stable place and only put it on display for short periods of time.
Hard to Fool the Fingers - Paper & Printing through the Ages - By Susan Halas Screen printing is often used for posters because it's fast, cheap, colorful and bold. Here come the Dots Photo mechanical (Photo Lithography, offset printing, half tones) During the very late 19^th century and all through the 20^th and 21^st century -- up until quite recently-- almost all printing was done by photo mechanical means. During this era increasingly complex and high speed presses and film based cameras were developed to print books, newspapers, magazines and everything else in bigger, faster and cheaper press runs. On the graphic side the half tone dominated the reproduction of images. Half tones are an ingenious way of simulating graduations of tone by means of dots. The dots are the giveaway that it’s printed by photo offset. When you see the dots in an image you know right away the image is almost certainly 20^th century and it’s made by a photo mechanical method. Caveat There are lots of quality small press run books printed by photo offset and there is some exceptionally high quality printing of photographs and art work done by this method using half tones. It doesn’t mean they’re not nice books, and it doesn’t mean they are not rare, scarce and valuable books, prints or maps. But if you see the dots it does mean that they may well be modern reproductions of older works. Screen Printing You’re not going to see much screen printing of books, but you may see some screen printing of posters and ephemera. Most especially you’ll see sought after screen printing during the mid-20^th century when a lot of the posters, t-shirts and other items associated with popular culture were made by this process. Some of these things have become expensive and hard-to-find. If you ripped a vivid poster for a Grateful Dead concert off a telephone pole in San Francisco or waved a printed banner during a Viet Nam era anti-war rally, chances are good it was a screen print. Screen printing in the mid-20^th century was often short run. . It was the technique of choice for the underground because it was cheap, easy and most often done in the garage after hours. More recent screen printing is an entirely different animal. It can be done in vast quantities and on practically any surface.
Hard to Fool the Fingers - Paper & Printing through the Ages - By Susan Halas 19th century lithography did tone very well. Digital In the last few years we have seen an increasing shift to digital technology. All of digital printing methods have the computer as a common ancestor and most of them are so recent as to be of unknown value or durability. We now have a whole range of POD (print on demand) products which will make a copy of a book one copy at a time using digital technology and printers. Will these books hold up? Who knows? Does anybody remember the early fax print outs, the ones where the printing came on a photo sensitive roll of paper? Can you still read them or have they become faded and almost invisible with the passage of just a decade or two? All of mine have. Is a giclee print really a limited edition process or is it just an updated way to make a reproduction but one without dots that’s printed in small quantities by an ink jet printer? Is it stable? Will it fade? Who knows? Is an e-book really a book? No, it’s a digital file and if you can’t tell the difference between a book and a digital file perhaps you’re reading the wrong article. What’s coming next? I don’t know. My crystal ball is cloudy. I do know that all the prior printing technologies had early phases, modifications and variants and that I expect the ones we are working with today will also change and evolve, perhaps rapidly. You will have to decide yourself if the newest, latest and greatest inventions of the digital age are going to last or if they are just blips on the historical timeline of communication using words and pictures. Feeling a little confused? You should, this isn’t easy stuff and it isn’t always intuitive. If you want to learn more about these various printing processes there’s a vast bibliography of printed material available. But for a real beginner I found a great many short informative videos on www.youtube.com Locate the subject by typing in the key word (such as etching, or engraving) then pick the videos that explain the process. Even if the clips are modern representations of older methods seeing how it's done makes it easier to understand. ----------------- Susan Halas was a printmaking major in college and a printing broker in an earlier incarnation. She still owns a beat up copy of “Graphics Master” by Dean Phillip Lem which is a good basic guide in the later part of the 20^th century. For purposes of a basic understanding of modern offset printing any edition is good. Have a comment or suggestion? Reach her at wailukusue@gmail.com

Hard to Fool the Fingers - Paper & Printing through the Ages

- By Susan Halas

Untrimmed deckle edges on a stack of rag paper are uneven, wavy.

A beginner's zip tour from rag to pulp, from wood block to digital file

A basic knowledge of European and American paper and printing is useful for booksellers, collectors and those in related fields. It’s helpful to know what they look like and more importantly, what they feel like.

There are many detailed books on this subject, but this brief article may help you get the feel for their historical sequence and a few of their distinguishing characteristics. That in turn could help you accurately date value things you may own or find. Remember, these comments apply mainly to the Western graphic arts and typography. They are not necessarily true for things of Asian or other origin.

Before we consider the question: How was it printed? Let’s ask: What was it printed on?

Paper

Before there was paper there were animal skins such as vellum, vegetable fiber surfaces like papyrus. Ancient peoples marked clay tablets and stone tablets. But, for our purpose, let’s stick to roughly the last 300 or so years. During that period there were basically two kinds of paper in common use: Western paper making starts with mainly rag based papers made a sheet at a time and transitions in the mid-19^th century to mostly machine made wood pulp papers.

Rag-Based Paper

Rag-based papers, as the name implies, are made from the pulp that comes from cloth. They are strong and flexible and long lasting. They were the prevailing papers from the birth of Western papermaking to about the 1850s when wood pulp paper manufacturing was introduced.

It’s not hard to identify a rag paper, it often has a watermark or chain line (hold it up to the light to check) and does not chip or discolor easily, though sometimes it does have spots of foxing. In a text weight antique paper it has a strong and flexible feeling. It may have a deckle, an uneven wavy untrimmed edge.

Even today rag-based papers are still made and used for fine products like limited edition books, as the surface for artwork like watercolors, or to protect and conserve works of art and other delicate or fragile things.

If it’s printed on rag-paper it generally indicates something made before 1850s, or made later and with an attempt to simulate the tradition and style of earlier periods. When it comes to setting value (no matter what the date) a rag paper is a good sign. It usually means expensive, long lasting, good quality, hand made.

Hard to Fool the Fingers - Paper & Printing through the Ages

- By Susan Halas

Holding an 18th century sheet of rag paper up to the light a watermark and chain lines are visible.

Wood Pulp Paper

From about the 1850s to now we see mostly wood pulp based paper. It comes in many grades and finishes but as almost anyone who has picked up an older book or newspaper knows, it can be brittle. It may chip and crack easily and can also yellow and discolor. That is because wood pulp has no long strong fibers holding it together as fabric does. Thus no matter how fancy looking or thick it started out, wood pulp paper eventually becomes fragile and hard to conserve. It can also cause significant damage.

Wood pulp paper is highly acidic. That means the chemistry of the paper causes it to decay, and over time the acid in wood pulp paper can significantly damage anything else it touches.

How often have you seen mat burn when fine art work was matted and backed with cheap mat board? The acid in the mat board and backing migrates into and literally destroys the value of the artwork it was meant to enhance.

Beware!! Do not interleave your good collectibles with cheap acidic paper, it will degrade and damage your valuable items. Use only acid free rag paper for interleaving and other conservation purposes.

How Was It Printed?

Wood, Metal, Stone, Emulsion, Screen, Photomechanical, Digital

Here at AE Monthly we’re mostly interested in books and how they were printed. Just about all the printing methods ever invented were at one time used for printing books, and though many have waned or been replaced by newer methods, it helps to know what they look like and generally what their dates might be.

You need to know them all, if for no other reason than over the centuries there have been many clever and ingenious reproductions, facsimiles, and other kinds of copies that to the eye look very much like originals. It is easy to fool the eye. It’s hard to fool the fingers. Forget about fancy certificates, usually worthless anyway. The best guide to determining authenticity is not how it looks, but how it feels.

This is especially true when buying fine prints, maps or photos. You want to touch the actual piece of paper. You want to examine the surface of the front and the back under a magnifying glass to be sure that it is what it purports to be.

Be cautious about buying matted or framed works of art. It might be a great deal, but if you can not open the mat and see and touch the entire sheet, it could just as easily be a great fake. The difference is often in how it feels.

That said here’s a quick intro to printing & graphic techniques for beginners.

Hard to Fool the Fingers - Paper & Printing through the Ages

- By Susan Halas

The lighter indented area in corner of a plate mark goes all the way around the image.

Wood (Relief)

The first widespread Western printing was done on wood. It was a relief method in which the parts that were meant to print remained intact and the parts that did not print were cut away. The ink was then rolled on the remaining high surface, a single sheet of paper was carefully laid on top and pressure was applied from above. Printing this way using wood blocks is called relief printing.

In Europe, before the invention of movable type, it was the way words and pictures were first printed together. Unless you’re interests lie in this very early period and you have a substantial budget too, you’re not going to be seeing many examples of this form, though you may encounter some nice contemporary woodblock art prints.

One of the best indicators of relief printing, whether it is wood, linoleum or even stamped with a potato is the thickness and feel of the ink. The way the ink lies on the paper is the clue; it almost always has a barely perceptible raised feeling to it and a certain gloss, shine or tack that is the signature of the relief method.

Metal

Historically metal comes next. There are many variations of printing using movable metal type and metal plate illustrations. The invention of movable metal type started roughly about 1450 and kept going right up to the present with many variations and improvements. Even though metal type was followed by photo mechanical and then digital type setting in the 20^th century, there are still many small presses that employ hand set metal or antique wood fonts.

Metal type printed by “letterpress” has a certain feel to it. You can run your fingers over the paper and you can feel the indent where the type pressed into the paper. If it doesn’t have that “feel” no matter what it looks like it isn’t letterpress.

Intaglio

The family of printing techniques using metal plate (copper, zinc, steel, etc.) is called “intaglio.” This family includes engraving, etching, dry point, aquatint, and many others. When it comes to making pictures, especially pictures with very many lines or fine detail such as maps, metal plate had many advantages over wood.

Though engraving and etching start earlier, the heyday of metal plate processes was the 18^th and early 19^th century

In relief (wood) the ink lies on top of the high surface. In the intaglio processes, the ink is forced low into the lines, the plate is wiped to remove excess ink from areas that are supposed to be light, and the pressure of the rollers forces the paper into the depressions and pulls the ink out of the low areas.

Images made by this method typically have “plate mark” and a “plate tone.” The plate mark is an uncolored indent all the way around the edge of the image that shows the extent of the metal plate. The plate tone is the coloration of the lighter areas which are almost never bright white. They are almost always some shade of grey.

When you’re looking at the sheet printed by metal plate in a book or loose – most often a map or an illustration – you’ll want to look for the characteristic bite or burr in the line, for the grey scale in the plate tone, and for the indent of the plate.

You’ll want to avoid things that are too bright or white, so closely trimmed that you can’t see a plate mark, or most commonly - printed on a much later paper, which is a certain indication of a reproduction. It is also not unknown to have a false plate mark.

Remember that this class of metal plate printing continues to the present day. It is used by printers and artists. There were and still are many small presses using hand set type, so there are many modern examples of books made entirely by letter press and/or illustrated with images made by metal plate which are both modern and genuine.

Hard to Fool the Fingers - Paper & Printing through the Ages

- By Susan Halas

Halftone dot patterns (magnified) indicate a 20th century photo mechanical printing process was used

Don’t forget – Wood engraving

Wood engraving was done with a fine scribe on the end grain of box wood. It was the great illustrative technique of mid to late 19th century. There are endless examples still available almost always on cheap wood pulp paper. Before there were photos in magazines wood engraving thrived. Wood engraving is often interesting, sometimes valuable and mostly found in publications that enjoyed a substantial circulation in their day. This is a format that comes in, is used widely, and then mostly goes away by the early 20^th century. There are a few, but not many practitioners of this form today.

Stone Lithography

Stone lithography was invented in 1796 and flourished in the 19^th century. It is best known for the large and colorful posters, especially by European artists, but it was also used for art and illustration where intense highly saturated color was desired.

Stone lithography is a resist process, the artist draws on the stone with a crayon or similar waxy substance, then a liquid wash is applied that eats away all the parts of the stone block that are not covered by the drawing. The covered portion remains higher and the uncovered parts are very slightly lower. Unlike metal plate, prints made from stone do not have plate marks, and they are very good at showing tonal range.

It’s hard to make a tonal range in metal. Metal plate artists used many kinds of cross hatch and devised other techniques like aquatint to simulate tone, but with the advent of stone lithography tone and color became, if not easy, at least possible and fluid transitions were soon the norm.

Don’t confuse stone litho with offset litho

Do not confuse 19^th and 20^th century stone lithography with the present day technique called “photo lithography” or ”offset printing” or “photo-offset” and other camera based printing techniques which employ half-tone dots to reproduce images.

The names sound similar and they have some similarities but there are important differences. The most important difference is quantity. Stone lithography is a one sheet at a time process and the press runs are seldom big. Photo- lithography can, did and still does easily run editions in the millions.

Emulsion (Photography -Film)

The camera has a long history and during its earlier periods there were photos on glass and metal. But photography using film with the image printed on papers with emulsions starts in the 1880s and keeps going until the end of the 20^th century, when this format was largely replaced by digital computer generated imagery that does not use film and prints on papers that are not emulsion based.

In the period from the late 19^th century to the end of the 20^th century the most important thing to know about photos printed on paper is that they have an emulsion on one side which is the surface that displays the image and if they are genuine photos there are no half tone dots.

Lots of things that purport to be original photos (and original other things too) are really photomechanical reproductions that have half tone dots. Use magnification to view the sheet. If you see an all over dot pattern chances are very very good it is a photomechanical reproduction.

One reason real photos are collectible is because the usually are made in limited numbers and as a category they have a definite starting and ending period of about 100 years.

Of all the printing technologies photos are the most sensitive to sunlight. This is especially true of color photos of the mid and later 20^th century. These will fade, color shift and degrade rapidly if hung or displayed in a bright light. If you collect photography, keep it in a dark, cool, temperature stable place and only put it on display for short periods of time.

Hard to Fool the Fingers - Paper & Printing through the Ages

- By Susan Halas

Screen printing is often used for posters because it's fast, cheap, colorful and bold.

Here come the Dots

Photo mechanical (Photo Lithography, offset printing, half tones)

During the very late 19^th century and all through the 20^th and 21^st century -- up until quite recently-- almost all printing was done by photo mechanical means. During this era increasingly complex and high speed presses and film based cameras were developed to print books, newspapers, magazines and everything else in bigger, faster and cheaper press runs.

On the graphic side the half tone dominated the reproduction of images. Half tones are an ingenious way of simulating graduations of tone by means of dots. The dots are the giveaway that it’s printed by photo offset.

When you see the dots in an image you know right away the image is almost certainly 20^th century and it’s made by a photo mechanical method.

Caveat

There are lots of quality small press run books printed by photo offset and there is some exceptionally high quality printing of photographs and art work done by this method using half tones. It doesn’t mean they’re not nice books, and it doesn’t mean they are not rare, scarce and valuable books, prints or maps. But if you see the dots it does mean that they may well be modern reproductions of older works.

Screen Printing

You’re not going to see much screen printing of books, but you may see some screen printing of posters and ephemera. Most especially you’ll see sought after screen printing during the mid-20^th century when a lot of the posters, t-shirts and other items associated with popular culture were made by this process.

Some of these things have become expensive and hard-to-find. If you ripped a vivid poster for a Grateful Dead concert off a telephone pole in San Francisco or waved a printed banner during a Viet Nam era anti-war rally, chances are good it was a screen print. Screen printing in the mid-20^th century was often short run. . It was the technique of choice for the underground because it was cheap, easy and most often done in the garage after hours. More recent screen printing is an entirely different animal. It can be done in vast quantities and on practically any surface.

Hard to Fool the Fingers - Paper & Printing through the Ages

- By Susan Halas

19th century lithography did tone very well.

Digital

In the last few years we have seen an increasing shift to digital technology. All of digital printing methods have the computer as a common ancestor and most of them are so recent as to be of unknown value or durability. We now have a whole range of POD (print on demand) products which will make a copy of a book one copy at a time using digital technology and printers.

Will these books hold up? Who knows? Does anybody remember the early fax print outs, the ones where the printing came on a photo sensitive roll of paper? Can you still read them or have they become faded and almost invisible with the passage of just a decade or two? All of mine have.

Is a giclee print really a limited edition process or is it just an updated way to make a reproduction but one without dots that’s printed in small quantities by an ink jet printer? Is it stable? Will it fade? Who knows?

Is an e-book really a book? No, it’s a digital file and if you can’t tell the difference between a book and a digital file perhaps you’re reading the wrong article.

What’s coming next? I don’t know. My crystal ball is cloudy.

I do know that all the prior printing technologies had early phases, modifications and variants and that I expect the ones we are working with today will also change and evolve, perhaps rapidly. You will have to decide yourself if the newest, latest and greatest inventions of the digital age are going to last or if they are just blips on the historical timeline of communication using words and pictures.

Feeling a little confused? You should, this isn’t easy stuff and it isn’t always intuitive. If you want to learn more about these various printing processes there’s a vast bibliography of printed material available.

But for a real beginner I found a great many short informative videos on www.youtube.com Locate the subject by typing in the key word (such as etching, or engraving) then pick the videos that explain the process. Even if the clips are modern representations of older methods seeing how it's done makes it easier to understand.

-----------------

Susan Halas was a printmaking major in college and a printing broker in an earlier incarnation. She still owns a beat up copy of “Graphics Master” by Dean Phillip Lem which is a good basic guide in the later part of the 20^th century. For purposes of a basic understanding of modern offset printing any edition is good.

Have a comment or suggestion? Reach her at wailukusue@gmail.com