Tea at Trianon: Early Modern Book Illustration

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, June 23, 2017

Early Modern Book Illustration

From The Collation:

Before the invention of lithography in the 1790s, two basic techniques for mechanically reproducing illustrations existed: relief printing and intaglio printing. In relief printing, the lines that carry the ink stand up higher than the surrounding surface. The image is created by cutting away the parts you don’t want, inking the block, then pressing a sheet of paper onto the inked block. It takes relatively little pressure to transfer the ink to the paper, so relief prints are made using a common press, the same press used for the text of a book.

Relief blocks and moveable type use the same press, so they can be printed at the same time, making it simple to include image and text on the same page. Most early modern relief prints are woodcuts, though metal cuts were also made. In intaglio printing, the lines that carry the ink are cut into the surrounding surface. ¹ Engraved lines are cut into the metal plate by a sharp tool. Etched lines are cut into the plate by acid eating away at metal exposed by scratching through a protective layer of varnish. The image is created by incising lines on a metal plate, forcing ink into the incised lines, wiping the surrounding surface clean, then pressing a dampened sheet of paper onto the plate under such high pressure that the paper is squeezed into the incised lines, where it picks up the ink. Because of the enormous pressure needed, intaglio plates have to be printed on a rolling press. In other words, if you see an intaglio print on the same page as the letterpress text of a book, that page has gone through two printing presses: a common press for the text (with a gap left where the illustration should go), then a rolling press for the image. (Read more.)