 Hello, everyone. Hello. My name is Lisa Dunseth, and on behalf of the staff of Book Arts and Special Collections here at the Library, I'd like to thank you all for coming and welcome you. I'd also like to remind you all to not miss the exhibition upstairs on the sixth floor in the Skylight Gallery, the Handbook Binders of California exhibition, couple housekeeping notes, no food or drink in the auditorium, and our tech guy has asked me to please remind everyone to silence their electronic devices. Right now, I'd like to introduce John McBride, who is the president of the Northern California chapter of the American Printing History Association, and he's going to get us started, so please welcome John. Thank you. So, just a correction, I'm just interim chair. It's been going on too long, and that's part of what we're going to speak about now, and I thought we'd do this at the very beginning of the program. Then there'll be chances to talk in the course of the afternoon because then we're going to have the really dramatic stuff with our wonderful speaker and the two people who introduce him. So welcome to the J. Benjamin Lieberman Lecture. It's the annual lecture of the American Printing Historical History Association. The Northern California chapter is honored to co-sponsor this or to host this with the library. They were very, very responsive, and I think we're going to have a really wonderful venue. Three years ago, the Lieberman Lecture came to San Francisco in the then-new rooms of the Book Club of California with Betsy Davids at the podium. And I might say she's here today, and I think it shows the great continuity of kind of our community that people continue to show up. These are not one-off events with circulating parties. And today we await David Pankow from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Thanks, of course, are due to Lisa and Lisa Dunsteth and Andrea Grimes of the Public Library for hosting the event. We are honored by the presence of Robert McCammon, president of the Association, who flew out from East Coast this very morning. I think he got up at 3 a.m. for the event. And as ever, we are cheered by the steady efforts of our program's chair, Kitty Marriott, who came up from Scripps. Now, she's having a holiday, so I think she's doing a very good thing. And her husband, Gary, is with her. So be sure to talk to them in the course of the afternoon if you haven't before. If you're not a member of AFA, we would welcome your joining. The local chapter, I think on the back of the program, there's an application for all of you, and we've got the specific citation. Now, as to the status of the local chapter, it has been somewhat quiescent over the last years. We've done a few keepsakes. We did something for the Huntington Talk a few years ago, and I think we did something for the opening of the Center for the Book. But the organization does need work, and so what we're planning then is on Saturday, August 10th, at the Center for the Book, we're going to have an organizational meeting at 6 to sort of get a few people in line to run things. And then I believe what Kitty and I have proposed is that we'll have the annual election in December, as I think the bylaw is prescribed. And that'll be out at the Center for the Book, and that's all available right there. Now, thanks to Grindelow-Quist of the City College of San Francisco, teacher at the Center for the Book, and I believe Master Printer Dink Works, we're going to have a very special thing at 7 o'clock that night. Robert Panetti, Bob Panetti, is 93 years old and was a key figure in the printing trades unions here in San Francisco over the decades. And in the 1960s and 70s, he created the training program that took the union typographers from hot to cold type. And he's been raring to talk about this, so we'll have something. And since I used to do something like that with an IBM Selector Composer, I promise that my IBM Selector Composer will be there. It's utterly inoperable, but it will show desktop polishing what it was in 1968 to probably about 1979. So that'll be our event at the Center. The details there will have a buffet. So then those of you who can manage it, come upstairs today and have a look at the Handbookbinder show, and we'll have a little bit of refreshment and a chance to talk to our speaker and the like. So it gives me now great pleasure to bring the national president here to the table or to the podium. And thank you very much, Robert, for making this attempt. I have met him occasionally, and I've been on the board phone cons, and he's a marvelous chair of the Association and very devoted. He's also, I believe, the proprietor of the Sherwin Beach Press in Chicago. So, Robert McCammon. Well, we're, as a national organization, we're very eager to have a presence out here in the Bay Area, which is such an important center for printing history and for current printing as well. I was just going to very briefly tell you about the activities of AFA since some of you may not be members. We, on a national level, have four main activities. Two are not-for-profit activities. One is this lecture, which we raise money for to pay for the best speaker we can find. We got a great one this year, but then we don't charge anybody to attend. The other thing that is like that is we sponsor an annual fellowship, where we give a grant of $2,000 or up to $2,000 to someone who is studying a topic in printing history. It allows them to do travel or acquire materials or something they wouldn't otherwise be able to afford. Then we have the two pay-as-you-go activities. One is our wonderful journal called Printing History, of which David was the illustrious editor for many years in its heyday. And you receive two copies of that for your membership. And then the other pay-as-you-go event is our annual conference, which will be this year on October 18th and 19th in New York City. It's going to be headquartered at the Grolier Club, so the number of chairs we have is going to be limited. So if you're thinking about going, be sure to make your reservations early. So we hope you'll consider joining, and let me now introduce Kitty Marriott, who will tell you all about our programs. Thank you. I'd like to thank John McBride and Kathleen Birch for organizing this meeting today. When I called them up and said I'd really like to revive the San Francisco Northern California chapter, they were all for it, and so that's why we're going to have our reorganization meeting on the 10th, and we will get cranking again. We are honored that David Pankow agreed to give the 2013 Lieberman lecture, which commemorates J. Ben Lieberman, founder and first president of the American Printing History Association. David Pankow has long been involved with AFA. He has served on the Board of Trustees and acted as editor of the journal Printing History. In 1998, AFA published his seminal book on American Proprietary Types. I thought that David would be the perfect speaker to whet your thirst for our upcoming annual conference on October 18th and 19th, 2013. The conference is titled, Seeing Color, Printing Color, and will be held in New York at the Grolier Club. David's talk today will focus on the rivalry that developed during the 20th century between letterpress and offset lithography, and how each process tried to capture the market for commercial color printing. I recommend that you read the exhibit catalog that he published at RIT in 1997 with the delicious title, Tempting the Palate, a Survey of Color Printing Processes. David Pankow has recently retired as curator of the Melbert B. Kerry Junior Graphic Arts Collection at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York. The Kerry Collection is a comprehensive library of original resources on printing and bookmaking history, graphic arts processes, and typographic exemplars. He selected material for three to four exhibitions per year and arranged for their description and display. He also taught graduate courses in the School of Print Media on various topics, including the history of the book and contemporary publishing. He assisted individual students in their research, acted as advisor for graduate theses as well as lectured to undergraduate and graduate classes on various aspects in the graphic arts. David retired this month as director of RIT's University Press, a position he has held since the year 2000. He was responsible for setting strategic directions for the press, supervising and approving acquisition of content, and building funding support for publishing projects. David began his distinguished career as a conservation and technical specialist at the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, the New York Public Library from 1972 to 1979. He received his BA and MA from Brooklyn College and his MLS from Columbia University. In 1998 he did sabbatical research at the Technische Hochschule in Darmstadt, Germany. He carried out extensive research on the archives of the Schtempel and Klingsport type foundries to discover what kind of influence European typefaces had on American typographers and printers. David C.V. has an extensive list of articles and books on printing history with great titles such as, Haven't I Seen Your Face Before? The Controversy over Rudolf Koch's Eve Type and Dungeons and Dragons Blood, The Evolution of Early 20th Century Plate Making Processes. We can't wait to hear what he will say about the transition period from letter press color printing to offset printing. David? Thank you very much, Kitty, for that wonderful and detailed introduction. Thank you, Lisa, for generously making this space available for this lecture this afternoon. I should tell you that I met Ben Lieberman early in my career as a librarian. I don't know if anybody else ever had that great pleasure of meeting Ben, but he was one of the most dynamic and enthusiastic advocates for printing, for letter press printing, and for one of his favorite topics, which was the freedom of the press. He had an original Albion press that had once belonged to William Morris and had been used in the printing of the Kelmscott Chaucer. It's known as the Kelmscott Gaudi Press because that press was later purchased by Fred Gaudi. And then I think you need to know that in a later home that press was used by Melbert Carey as one of the principal printing pieces of equipment for Carey's own private press, Melbert Carey's own private press called the Press of the Willy Whale. After Melbert Carey died in 1941, that press was given to his pressman, the man who helped him produce many of the books that were produced at the Press of the Willy Whale, George Van Vecten. And Ben Lieberman acquired the press from George Van Vecten. So I feel very connected in my career as well as personally with Ben Lieberman who was, as I said before, a really great gentleman. And early in my career I was invited to his house for one of those sessions where he gathered people interested in printing history, people interested in letterpress printing to gather and share stories. And the culmination of the evening was the opportunity to pull a print on that very same press, which had affixed to its very top a small model of the Liberty Bell. And prior to the printing events on that night, Ben Lieberman would always ring that bell to signify that freedom of the press endures in the United States and endures through the activities of printers who carry on letterpress printing and other forms of printing using their equipment throughout the country. So there's my little introduction and an expression of gratitude to, as I said, a really great man, Ben Lieberman. Can you all hear me? Do I need to talk louder? Do I need to put the lavalier mic on? Are we okay? Okay. The early 20th century was a period in which many advances were made in the graphic arts. It was the age of photo mechanics. New processes were introduced and flourished while others once popular faded away. It was a period in which photographers, printers, and a new craft of plate makers enthusiastically and sometimes brashly took on the problems of printing color images economically and accurately and sometimes with a little creative leeway. It was a period in which letterpress, the most dominant printing process for over four centuries, was forced to confront a new rival, offset lithography. I know it's ambitious to cram all of this into one talk, but you've had your lunch, you're comfortable, and you're sitting in a beautiful location. Besides, what else is there to do in San Francisco on a July afternoon? An earnest desire to produce multiple credible copies of a memorable color image, a work of art, a beautiful natural vista, or a famous personage perhaps has driven printers for almost six centuries to experiment with a wide variety of color processes. Some turned out to be torturously slow, hindered by time consuming hand work or inconsistent materials or a simple lack of knowledge. Others were simply too expensive for wide consumption. Gradually, however, developments in printing technology and a greater understanding of color theory led to steady improvements in economy and speed. In essence, a color copy of a work of art can be reproduced on paper by one of three basic methods or a combination thereof. The first method might be called color for color matching. In this case, each color hue in an original image is reproduced with a custom ink that is mixed to exactly match the source color. Depending on the complexity and color range of the original, a large number of inks may be required. The second method I would call color on color over printing. In this method, transparent or semi-opaque inks are printed alone and or combined by means of over printing to simulate the full color gamut of the original. And the third method might be called halftone color modulation. Here, a color original is photographed through filters to produce three halftone plates that print amplitude or frequency modulated patterns of yellow, red, and blue dots that appear to merge into a full color representation of the original when viewed at a sufficient distance. A minimum of three plates is required with a black plate, usually added for detail and gray balance. In addition, there are four principal requirements for good color printing. Stable, light fast pigments and or dies, a consistent registration of multiple plates, enough colors to achieve reasonable color accuracy, but not so many as to hinder the economy of production and pleasing tone reproduction. To these may be added one more consideration that varies with the purpose for which the final printed image will be used. And that is fidelity to the original. Research into the color light spectrum has been conducted as early as the 17th century by Isaac Newton and others. The concept that this spectrum could somehow be reduced or separated into a few primary colors, capable of mimicking the full spectrum when arranged in various proportions, soon attracted the interest of printers. In time, an ink set of yellow, red, and blue was shown to be capable of capturing a reasonable range of color values. By the 18th century, printers such as Jacob Christof Leblon, Jan Leadmeral, and Gautier Diagotti were achieving beautiful results using three color mesotint plates, with a fourth black plate sometimes added as well. Making accurate separations and then printing in color with mesotint, however, was extremely laborious and far from economical. Subsequently, color images in the 18th century were largely produced by hand coloring or tinting black and white engravings or etchings, just as woodcuts had been hand colored in earlier centuries. The invention of lithography by Alois Senefelder in the 1790s and the tonal possibilities of working with the grain of the stone reanimated the interest in true color printing, but this time using as many spot colors as necessary, combined with toning techniques to reproduce each color, value, and hue in the source art. The development of multi-stone chromolithography was so successful that it dominated all other color printing processes for the rest of the century. In brief, a lithographic artist studied the original artwork to be reproduced and then prepared a series of printing plates, first stone and later metal, each of which carried a specific color ink. The tonal values of each color were built up on each plate through hand stippling or even by using the grain of the plate itself. When all the stones, often six or more, with their individual colors were printed in succession and in register, the result was a full color image. And if you look at the image on the screen here, you can see at the bottom there is a color bar showing you all the inks that were used to produce that particular image. It might be a little hard to read from where you are, but they're yellow, dark red, black, dark blue, light blue, pink, gold, buff, and light red, all together ten colors for that one image. So as you can see from this product label, the chromolithographic process was capable of producing extraordinarily bright and vivid color. For that reason, and because it was technically easier to achieve than any relief process, chromolithography became the most important mass-market color printing process of the late 19th century. Chromolithography and its application in American color printing history have been well documented in books like Peter Marzio's The Democratic Art Pictures for a 19th century America, 1840 to 1900, published in 1979. And Jay Last's The Color Explosion, 19th century American lithography, published in 2005. Despite its virtues as a color printing process and its wide use in advertising and the reproduction of works of art, chromolithography was not a practical book illustration process. The reason was simple. Almost all books from 1455 on, and most of the illustrations contained therein were printed letterpress, that is from relief surfaces. Though relief plates for color printing, usually employing multiple wood engravings, could be made, most publishers considered them unduly expensive and time-consuming to produce. Black and white wood engravings, however, were very common, and this very beautiful image by Timothy Cole appeared, I think, in 1904, which is fairly late for a wood engraving to appear in an American publication, but there was a transition period. Now I'm going to give you a very brief technical description of the half-tone process. The invention of the camera in the 19th century and the ongoing development of light-sensitive emulsions began to have a dramatic effect on how images were produced, not only as prints for individual enjoyment, but also in publications for mass consumption. Though many early experiments in photomechanical printing were actually focused on producing plates for intaglio or lithographic processes, the greatest effort was concentrating on producing relief photo-engravings of lineart that could be printed on the same presses, along with letterpress type for a newspaper, a magazine, or a book. The popular hand-cut wood engraving of the 19th century coexisted with and then was replaced by photomechanically produced lineart. In fact, this slide shows a 19th century intaglio steel engraving that was photographed and then reproduced in relief by a photo-engraving. And this slide shows how artwork drawn in the style of a wood engraving could be reproduced in relief with a photo-engraving. It was a significant achievement to reproduce lineart photomechanically, but an even more important triumph came with the development of the black-and-white half-tone. The objective, of course, was to produce a photorealistic image of an original with a full range of tonal values and which was also quick, economical, and reliable. The answer lay in the development of the tool called the half-tone screen, the principles of which were embodied in the early work of Fox Talbot and other pioneers of photography. Artists, of course, had long realized that a full range of tonal values could be rendered by breaking up an image into regular or irregular patterns of lines, dots, or grain that, when viewed at a sufficient distance, coalesced into an accurate representation of the original. Instead of doing this laboriously, by hand, the half-tone screen did it photomechanically. Early half-tone screens were made from sheets of glass on which many closely spaced parallel lines were engraved. A typical screen ranged from 60 lines per inch all the way up to around 200 lines per inch. The finer the screen, the more detail and nuance it was able to capture on a negative. A half-tone negative was created when continuous tone artwork was photographed with a process camera that interposed the half-tone screen between the lens and a piece of film. The resulting negative was then exposed to a metal plate coated with light-sensitive bichromated gelatin. After the hardened half-tone image on the plate was made acid resistant, the plate was etched with nitric acid, leaving only the image now broken up into a pattern of variously sized lines and dots standing up in relief. The half-tone plate was mounted on a block of wood to make it type high. It was now ready to be printed on any letterpress machine. When carefully printed with a kiss impression, each dot stood out sharply on the paper surface. On coated papers, a slight halo effect can sometimes be observed under magnification around each dot, one of the signature ways of telling whether or not you're looking at a relief half-tone. Small widely spaced lines and dots represented highlight areas while large closely spaced dots simulated shadow areas. The introduction of color to half-tones began to appear in the 1890s. These were often crudely done and consisted of one to three shaded or solid tint blocks overprinted by a black and white half-tone. The plate maker calculated color values and prepared the tints so as to approximate the colors of the original or what he imagined the color original might have been. Photographic landscapes were popular victims of the new mania for relief-printed color and they were frequently mangled by photo engravers into some approximation of the original scenes. Nevertheless, the notion of real places and people recorded by the camera and printed in color was enormously popular. In fact, the practice of color-tinting black and white photographs continued well into the century, as we'll see in a later example. But a color-tinted half-tone was not a fully accurate record of an original. The principles of color separation had been known since the days of Leblon, but not until the invention of photomechanical half-toning techniques could they be applied more easily to full color reproduction. During the last years of the 19th century, color researchers finally worked out a system in which three color filters-blue violet, green, and red-orange-could be used to produce a set of screened negatives for an image such that each of that image's component primary colors-red, blue, and yellow-could be recorded on specially sensitized film. In order to prevent multicolored dots from piling up on each other during printing, the half-tone screen was positioned at a different angle for each color separation. The purpose was to get as many color dots as possible to lie next to each other, instead of on top of each other. Shadow areas, of course, were created when the dots were large and therefore overprinted. The color-tinted half-tone had barely made an impression on the public when the first genuinely trichromatic or three-color half-tones began to appear in the 1890s, inaugurating once and for all the age of photographic realism or at least the illusion of it. This slide shows the first true three-color half-tone made by William Kurtz in 1893. You may wonder why this image looks so peculiar under magnification. That's because Kurtz was using single-line screens, which generate an effective but distracting color grid. Though early examples often exhibited this kind of unpleasant screeniness and clumsiness, the immediate popularity of three-color half-tone illustrations soon forced the chromolithographic industry into decline. The most effective color and tone reproduction was achieved when the so-called cross-line screen was applied to color printing. Invented in the 1880s by Frederick and Max Levy of Philadelphia, a cross-line screen was nothing more than two systems of parallel opaque lines engraved on glass plates, crossed at right angles to each other, and then sealed between the glasses. Cross-line screens produced true dots, and when they were angled and carefully calculated waves, the color dots tended to arrange themselves into rosette patterns. It is astonishing to consider that each half-tone dot is in effect a miniature printing plate. Even a coarse screen ruling of 60 lines per inch suitable only for newspaper printing contains 3,600 separate dots, and 150-line half-tone contains 22,500 dots in a single square inch. Some of the three-color half-tone work of the period is superb, though generally it lacks enough dynamic range in the shadow end. Without a black plate to add detail, true grays, and strong shadow blacks, most three-color half-tones seem oddly color balanced and seem soft. However, within a short time, most color half-tones did begin to incorporate a black plate. The improvement was dramatic. This 1905 ad for the Quadri quality photo engraving firm made the case for printing four colors since the black plate added the kind of sharp detail that might be important to an ophthalmologist. In a surprisingly short period of time, 10 years or so, photo engravers were producing color-balanced half-tone plates with excellent detail. It was up to the printer to print them and register. The first decades of the 20th century were good to letterpress printers. Relief printing was by far the dominant process for producing newspapers, magazines, and books in both black and white and color. Though the foundry type industry had suffered some setbacks with the introduction of the linotype and monotype composition systems, it found a new niche in manufacturing advertising and specialty phases, including scripts. Text was still printed in relief. In the meantime, printing press manufacturers spurred on by the high-volume needs of publishers who were developing high-speed sheet-fed and roll-fed rotary presses in single two-color and finally four-color configurations. High-volume printing was made possible by the development of specially formulated color inks that could be laid down wet one after the other without stopping to let each color dry. The typical order was to print the yellow plate first, followed by the red, then the blue, and finally the black. Paper mills were producing a variety of grades for every printing purpose, ranging from newsprint up to high-quality calendars and coated grades suitable for finely screened illustrations. Paper stock was configured for sheet-fed as well as rotary presses, and the volume of printing increased dramatically. Thanks to the camera, halftone color printing was used not only for art and illustration, but was also employed in the service of documentation and its sly cousin persuasion. Inevitably, there is a tension between artists, plate makers, and printers over issues ranging from the authority or primacy of an original work of art to the fidelity of color, to the reproduction of tonal values, and finally to the limits of any reproductive process for capturing a full spectrum of visible color as well as all the detail from shadows to highlights. As far as some artists are concerned, the printer is a mere mechanic who cheerfully and infuriatingly engages in the process of reduction or takes unreasonable liberties with the original. He is an efficiency expert who seeks to summarize a richly varied palette by means of the fewest possible numbers of inks, ingeniously arranged and manipulated to trick the eye into perceiving more, but more of what exactly? Accuracy, beauty, detail, mood, emotion, desire? For example, I don't have to tell anyone in this room how important the fruit and produce industries have been to the economies of California and the Northwest. Even as these states' fertile soils and ideal climates produced abundant prize-winning crops, an incredibly effective marketing campaign and printing industry developed around producing such mouthwatering color images that California products and Washington state products became famous far and wide. I'm sure everyone has seen many examples of the chromolithographic fruit labels produced during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Labels that are stunningly enticing and persuasive, even though they are not photorealistic, that is no camera was used. By contrast, consider this image printed from a modern letterpress half-tone plate that appeared in a 1927 advertising campaign for California asparagus. Perhaps the camera was used, perhaps not, but either way I don't think the resulting half-tone was flattering to the asparagus. And down the lower right-hand corner I even included what asparagus actually looks like because I took a picture of it in my grocery store. My purpose here is not to suggest that the printing of appealing color images degraded during the early 20th century, far from it, only that between concept and realization, many factors influenced the color reproduction process, in particular the role of the photo engraver and his ability to create and manipulate microscopic dots on printing plates for better or for worse cannot be underestimated. Though that image of the asparagus was hardly a home run for the artist and photo engraver who happened to have made it, self-congratulation in the letterpress universe was widespread and nowhere was this more evident than in the photo engraving industry. Photo engravers almost from the beginning saw themselves as a new generation of craftsmen whose knowledge of art, color science, chemistry, and technology bordered on the sublime. They were the agents who deconstructed an original image into its component parts and built it back up again with a series of printing plates that captured what the camera saw and were then enhanced and worked over by the artful application of acid and graver. In a way a photo engraver refined the color and tonal properties of a set of color halftone plates to much the same purpose as a chromolithography worked over his stones or plates. In 1927 photo engravers celebrated themselves by publishing a 9x12 870 page book called Achievement edited by Louis Flater, one of the industry's most able and energetic spokesmen. 235 different photo engraving firms participated along with 80 printing establishments. There were 380 pages of contributed inserts alone. 457 of the 649 full page illustrations and achievement were printed in two or more colors while helpful captions and essays provided throughout explanations of process and technique. Nothing like it had ever been published before. It is dense, ponderous, confusingly assembled and altogether fascinating. In essay after essay the skill, artistly and frankly intervention of the photo engraver is extolled. For example, consider this statement. The art of photo engraving is concerned primarily with a reproduction of art yet the various necessary processes open themselves wide to the personal interpretations of the men engaged in the work. As you can see, even the ads that photo engravers published about themselves communicated the sense of craft carried out by rugged but sensitive naked men. Maybe the heat got to them. Here's another example of how important photo engravers thought they were to the creative process. To be literal in the reproduction of a painting or a product is not enough. Had that been all that was necessary, no mastermind would have been involved in its creation. To glorify it is perhaps permissible, but the spark in its inception must be caught and imprisoned in its reproduction so that it impresses, conveys a message and gets the favorable reaction of the observer. And forget about typography. According to the photo engraver, it's the picture that tells the story. Photo engraving has enabled the advertiser, one essay says in achievement, to show his product with uncanny realism. Coal type alone, no matter how beautiful the typography cannot give the reader such a vivid visual impression of what the product looks like or how it works. There is no question that color reproduction in this period was part science, part alchemy, and part bravado. Image after image in achievement shows the degree to which photo engravers reworked photographs and artwork in ways that defy description and indeed even reality. For that reason, some of the best work during this period as exemplified in achievement is often what least attempts to be photorealistic and ironically actually harkens back to the days of chromolithography. That is artwork for advertisements that is built up from flat colors or provided with tonal gradations through the use of mechanical tint overlays applied by means of Bende or Bourges' tint systems. These images have a vividness and punch that jumps off the page. Here, the sharply defined dot or edge of a letterpress plate on a coated plate on a coated paper makes a satisfying and brashly unequivocal statement. Highly worked technical drawings for machinery or advertisements for products like automobiles also benefited from the letterpress effects on smooth papers and these are some examples. The viewer can almost reach out and touch the gleaming metal finishes or feel the sensation of speed. In fact, so successful was painted artwork for automobile advertising that it was preferred over photographs by car manufacturers well into the 1970s. As we saw earlier, the versatility of photo engraving also enabled artists and letterpress plate makers to closely mimic the effects of earlier techniques and printing processes including wood engraving, mesotent and stone lithography and these are some additional examples. As for more photorealistic representations of paintings or real life scenes letterpress halftones in color from this period would never meet present day reproduction standards. Nevertheless, the best of them have a credible if-quaint appeal as in this copy of a famous painting by Charles Barquet. Or consider this image made in 1927 of a canoe camping excursion. Though the original photograph was black and white this version with colors added by the photo engraver at the plate making stage is charming. If not entirely true to life. In this case, the suggestion of reality is enough to enjoy the bucolic outdoor scene. That even in 1927 photo engravers were still colorizing black and white photographs demonstrates the degree to which the development of practical color photography lagged behind the technology of actually printing color. Elaborate multi-filter cameras made studio and still life color photography possible under carefully controlled conditions. But active outdoor scenes and proper exposures were much more difficult to manage in the early years of the century. Reliable single exposure color film and reasonably portable equipment did not enter the market until the 1930s. Any attempt to photograph people or places in an outside environment was an adventure into the unknown. For that reason, advertising and magazine photographers often recreated outdoor scenes with carefully posed props and models inside their studios. Sometimes they ventured to their rooftops. The noted advertising and magazine photographer Leger and Hiller was perhaps the greatest practitioner of tableau studio photography. His preference for the controllable conditions inside his studio was definitely reinforced by an incident he recalled in an unpublished biography called 50 Years Behind the Lens. Experimenting with a new color camera, Hiller set out to photograph a cover image on assignment for the American magazine. Hiller writes, The subject chosen was to be a baseball player and his best girl, semi-close-up. On the roof of my studio, I set up a plain background painted emerald green, eight by eight feet. The girl had on screaming red clothes. The baseball player with his mitt had on what he should have on. It was the most brilliantly lighted day New York had ever known in 92 in the shade. At high noon, we got the models in place. Between them and the background, I placed a flash pan holding four ounces of magnesium powder. On both sides of them, a little further away, six ounces each, and above the camera, another six ounces. All were wired to go off simultaneously. Having given the proper warnings, I got the models together in a tender embrace and letter fly. It wasn't that anyone was hurt, but we had a little trouble. We had a little trouble to find our things. The background, for instance. I managed to grab the end of the tripod while the camera was hopping away, so everything was hunky-dory. I sent the separation negatives to the developer with dispatch, and in the course of time, received the finished print with the suggestion that I use a trifle more light. I don't know if Hiller was forever discouraged from attempting outdoor photography again, but he became famous for the outdoor work he did inside his studio, where he constructed such life-like sets of photographers to this day marvel at his ingenuity, even if his taste was sometimes questionable. If you don't mind a slight digression, I thought I'd show you this series of images that documents the creation of an African safari setting for a Canadian club whiskey ad. This first slide, you see the initial sketch. Hiller was a very, very good illustrator, but for freelance work as well. Here he is standing up in his studio with his chief workman laying out the sketch of the rhinoceros that is to be built on the floor of the studio. And here you see the maquette for the rhinoceros, not the maquette, but actually a full-size skeletal structure for the rhinoceros being constructed. And here the workman is filling in the gaps and trying to make it as realistic and life-like as possible. Now they bring in foliage and landscaping. I don't know if that tree is actually the kind of trees you might find on the African plain, but nevertheless Lagerin Hiller did try for as much verisimilitude as he could. And then the models are posed. And there you see the cowardly hunter cowering behind the tree while an African native is actually the person who saves the day. And so this whole scene is photographed in the studio. And there you see the final ad in which the two celebrate afterwards and the white hunter says, I'll never forget how Almighty Good Canadian Club tasted after that escape. Okay, in 1927 the photo-engraving industry was brimming with confidence and profit. Letterpress dominated every aspect of the graphic arts and photo-engravers felt so confident in their place in the supply chain that they began to assert more and more control over wages, working hours, and overtime. For example, one of the essay writers for achievement could not have been more blunt when he declared, the photo-engraving industry works eight hours. Night work is never as good as day work. Overtime is costly and reduces quality almost every time, period. Nevertheless, alarms were sounding. As far back as 1912 articles were appearing in graphic arts journals that warned about the competition from new processes. One article in the printing art noted that photo-engravers are too prone to lie back and wait for the other fellow to show them. We continue along these lines. We will wake up some of these days to the fact that these new processes have made serious inroads on our business which we shall not be able to overcome. Even an article in achievement called Progress and Letterpress Printing Cautioned Against Complacency. It said, the Letterpress printers have sat dormant and self-satisfied and as a result have already experienced that their former business has slipped away from them and farmed as hundreds of thousands of dollars are being spent annually for lithographic offset and rotrogravier printing. Whereas in many cases the well-known method of Letterpress Printing would have brought a better return to the advertiser. The other fellow has proven himself a formidable competitor. The Letterpress printer is taking his licking daily and is wondering where it is all going to end. Well who was this other fellow and what was this other process that seemed most to threaten the photo engraving industry. In fact while the direct lithography industry had been beaten back by the success of relief color printing it had not gone away altogether. Nor had it been idle when it came to technological innovation. As early as the 1860s lithographers had successfully used photomechanical techniques to transfer printable single color images to stone plates. The later discovery that zinc and aluminum plates could be given grain surfaces that provided them with the same properties as lithographic stone encouraged the industry to explore the possibility of introducing halftone techniques and printing on rotary presses as well as continuing with tried and trued stippling techniques well into the 20th century as you can see in this charming ad for Kodak. However the most significant advance in lithography came with the discovery sometime around 1904 that an impression from a lithographic zinc plate could be transferred to an intermediary semi-flexible rubber surface wrapped around a cylinder and then offset from that surface onto the press sheet. The most remarkable advantage of the offset principle over letterpress was immediately evident. In letterpress the relief surfaces of the metal plate even the tiniest dots must be brought into perfect contact with the paper in order to transfer a clear and clean impression with the right amount of ink. In offset the printing image is transferred to a flexible and compressible rubber blanket that conforms perfectly to paper surfaces even those of uneven texture and is transferred without distortion. Within a few years offset lithographers had despite numerous challenges adapted the half tone plate making techniques used by photo engravers to their own needs including three and four color half tones. There was one significant difference in how plates were prepared for the two processes. In letterpress the retouching and color correcting processes were carried out directly on the photo engraved printing plates whereas in offset lithography the retouching was usually done on intermediary positive films from which the final half tone negatives were made for each color which do you think was easier. From the first development of the offset principle in 1904 through the 1920s the lithographic printing industry gradually found many markets in which it could compete and in fact it had certain advantages. Lithographic plates were cheaper and easier to prepare make ready on the press which was more efficient and even small print runs could be profitable. Photo engravers and letterpress printers prided themselves on producing half tones with sharp crisply printed dots because the ink roller of a letterpress machine applied inks directly to the plates the image was transferred directly to the paper and was strong and bright. Unfortunately letterpress images could also look a bit too finished and harsh. The offset image by contrast was disparaged by the letterpress industry as soft and mushy because the ink film was split during its journey from roller to plate to blanket to paper offset lithographers had a harder time maintaining adequate densities especially in shadow areas. On the other hand offset was capable of printing with high detail on a wide variety of papers including those with a significant tooth or texture. On such papers the softer dot was actually preferred by many clients because it gave half tone images a warmer more dreamy quality. The effect produced in an offset color image was often likened to watercolor. A harsh punchy dot pattern was counterproductive when a more romantic artistic or soft focus mood was desired especially in artworks portraiture and of course certain kinds of advertising. Each side made its case in the trade journals. For example a letterpress advocate wrote this in the September 1910 issue of the Aenland printer. The claim that a half tone can be printed upon rough paper by the offset press and given the final presentation all of the beauties, lights, shades and the fine hand work of the original engraving is entirely and utterly absurd. The reproduction of any half tone process coarsens the work and takes away from it that snap definition and luster which are peculiarly the qualities of first class half tone printed in a first class manner in other words letterpress. There is no question that early offset images did look weak but the deficiencies of the process were solved one by one. In 1921 a lithographic printer with a flare for words wrote that lithography has passed from the stone age to the metal age, has clasped hands with rubber and no doubt will spread out to greater conquest as science finds new and has yet undiscovered means for printing. I think now would be a good time to compare some side by side enlargements of letterpress versus offset images so you can clearly see the differences between the so-called hard dot and the soft dot. Let's go to the image permanence lab at RIT for making the micro photographs you will see. In this first image you see the original images as they were shot straight on with the camera and maybe you can tell that there's a little bit of modeling or graininess in the letterpress image. Slightly greater magnification begins to show you the dot structure for both of these images and I think now it becomes clear that the offset image definitely has a softer dot and that does create I would say a smoother transition from tone to tone from color to color and finally my favorite slide is this one which shows the dots under high magnification I actually think both of them and these enlargements are actually quite beautiful just as art work almost but now you can clearly see that the halftone offset dot is much softer and not quite so bright and definitely kind of sort of absorbs into the background of the textured paper on which it was printed or at the very least the absorbent paper on which it was printed the uncoated paper. Well in 1929 only 25 years after the first successful demonstration of an offset press one industry expert felt confident enough to say this if we could look a few years into the future is it possible that we might see an offset press printing book forms from a roll of paper two sides at a time at the rate of five or six thousand impressions per hour such presses have been built for folder and catalog work may they not be used in future for printing the publishers big editions 1929 though the full implementation of offset printing for book publishing was some time off the industry made some remarkable advances during the interval and they too wanted to celebrate just as the photo engravers announced their achievements by lobbying a 25 pound volume onto the desks of print buyers the offset industry was ready a decade or so later to burnish its image with an equally impressive publication in 1939 litho media a demonstration of the selling power of lithography was issued if achievement was stout and packed with technical information hundreds of samples and extravagant tributes to the art of photo engraving litho media was more elegantly proportioned and more sparely furnished with text and samples organized by type of printed product from fine art reproductions to catalogs to magazines to point of purchase advertising and more each section includes an essay on that market niche accompanied by consistently stunning sense of images the general tone is polite but justly proud of the strides made by offset towards recognition as a legitimate reproduction process far from appearing weak or attenuated the printing samplers are vibrant and generally exhibit to advantage with photo engravers were quick to deride as the offset effect a certain lush softness of expression this effect is already noted its existence to have to own dots with less pronounced edges as well as to the supple, subtly textured papers that work well with offset the photographers talked up the characteristic offset look quote where a soft effect that breathes exclusive quality for a product is desired there is no substitute the technique of the artist is actually recreated the advances in lithographic technology were already beginning to blur old distinctions the development of more intensely tinctured inks and the introduction of so called deep edge lithographic plates allowed the plate to carry a greater amount of stronger inks in the depressions thereby producing richer as well as crisper colors very fine detail could be held in the highlights on smooth papers and even on textured grades litho media asked advertisers publishers and print buyers to consider numerous factors and choosing the most suitable process for their products first the nature and type of work desired by the client what kind of a printing effect are you looking for how many copies do you want what's the printing run what kind of paper do you want to print this on you want it to be a coated paper a soft paper absorbent, textured and so on how much time do you have to get this printed does it have to be done immediately or can you wait while it takes time to produce those heavy letterpress plates and if it is letterpress you have to consider the cost of the original cuts and then the electro types that are made from those cuts what about storage space for plates and type and finally what about the duplication of forms for long runs or if you're intending to do reprints if there is any hint of evangelism it comes in this statement toward the end of the book though through effective use of color ability to reflect life faithfully production economy and adaptability to so many diverse treatments the world has become acquainted with products that afford us all the advantages of 20th century living so greater work necessitates modernization not only of the printing process but of printing equipment geared to the tempo of the times most of the market in 1939 was specialized and the following examples will show how effectively it could be used for example fine art reproductions an offset carried on the tradition of 19th century chromolithographic art reproductions postcards could be quickly prepared for publication and printed by the way am I right is this monument or statue in San Francisco is it still there oh okay guide books to near and exotic places benefited from the lush romantic appearance of lithography and this is a guide book to the 1939 New York World's Fair in fact during World War II offset was critical to the rapid production of maps and help to increase its integration into the printing industry what about promotional literature for example this case of an elaborate brochure for the Pan American Airlines Clippership it exuded comfort and safety and could be produced economically in small numbers children's books in offset showed off watercolor illustrations with great effect book jackets with modern watercolor and airbrush work were equally suited to lithography magazine covers could be printed in pleasing colors in detail on cheaper pages and also with that soft effect were quite flattering to models and movie stars and then liquor promotion in this case on a textured menu cover as well as similar products enticed the palette and invited smooth enjoyment of other things in life well maybe you're wondering what about the type how did text get printed in a lithographically produced ad or book unfortunately there was no easy way to incorporate type for the simple reason that photo optical principles which had so effectively been applied to plate making and imagery production had not yet been successfully incorporated into a rapid type composition system not for lack of effort already early in the century and in the decades following some very promising prototype photo compositors had been developed but none that were suited for book composition in fact nothing came close to matching the speed of a typical journeyman hand compositor working with metal types much less the speed of a keyboard sitting at a line of type or monotype machine as a consequence when a lithographically printed book it had to be composed in metal proofed, corrected and proofed again on a special precision proof press or hand lettered the proof was then assembled into a layout, photographed and processed with a lithographic plate that carried the black ink interestingly enough the monotype corporation recognizing the growing popularity of offset began to manufacture imposition plate coating and camera equipment specifically designed to speed up the type from metal to film in fact the entire text of litho media was composed in Janssen type on a monotype machine and repro proofed for lithography using monotype camera and imposition equipment knowing that type composition was likely to be expensive offset lithographers suggested an interesting alternative to prospective clients the typewriter the royal typewriter company for example manufactured a special version of its machine for offset and offered more than 50 type face styles though the procurement of new text composition introduced extra steps into the production process for new books reprints of out-of-print editions were perfect opportunities for offset shops unless the original letter press printer had saved the heavy cumbersome plates from the first edition it was much more economical to photograph the pages of a surviving copy of lithographic plates for a new edition than it was to reset the type other portions of the book market were also captured by lithographers including children's books as we've already seen with minimal text certain kinds of art books reprints of foreign editions and cloth covers for bindings one of the most interesting sections in litho media is a series of color illustrations prepared by T.M. Cleveland for an essay on the advantages of offset lithography as if to demonstrate the versatility of the lithographic process and to pay homage to its origins Cleveland worked directly on the plates he made mechanical separations of the artwork in six colors and made separate drawings with black lithographic crayon on prepared zinc plates the final result could only be attained by skillful calculations of the gradations and values required on each of the six plates when all the hand prepared plates each with a separate color were printed together and register the final full color image was revealed in a way this brought the process of lithography full circle even as it was capable of taking advantage of 20th century advances in technology metallurgy photomechanical principles and the science of color halftones lithography and for that matter letterpress were still at heart processes capable of direct manipulation by the artist just as they had been in Centipelder's day or Durer's I'm worried that I perhaps overwhelmed you with too many images and condensed too many technical explanations the history of photomechanical color reproduction in the 20th century is very complicated I barely touched on the evolution of camera equipment or the development of fast pan chromatic films that eased the burden on the process of the photographers who struggled in the early days to make tone and color corrections using their own trained judgment by 1950 letterpress and offset lithography had reached a kind of equilibrium each process had its own merits markets and champions then came the introduction of the first commercially successful phototype machines led by the monofoto in 1952 and the photon machine introduced in 1953 the last barrier that kept offset from competing for the trade book and long text markets had been breached but that's a story for another day in the meantime thank you for your attention I hope you enjoy this last delightful image of a Remington typewriter ad published in 1911 showing that even type written text was fair game for the modern world of color and reproductive arts thank you yes certainly they were instructions that that was a proof from the stone plate or it might have been a metal plate at that stage in chromolithographic history that was kept a master record of the final images that was printed from all the individual plate showing the color balance and in fact the colors that the inks needed to be mixed to in order to be able to reprint that image so those numbers have indicated a certain formula exactly the numbers that accompany those colors exactly just for consideration number one the competitiveness of the machine basically little industries coming out strictly one color machines whereas lead presses already moved into multi-color machines and a multi-color little presses really didn't show up until the late 40s and early 50s so that was one thing that kind of held them behind and the other thing you mentioned quite frequently would be the photo in great virtue there's a consideration of them calling head to head and they're not made with photographers or lithographic artists basically they would not coexist so we have some issues going on there and then of course there's just the whole thing that's very interesting about the timeliness of this for instance you put up that image of the litho trade book 1939 well we all know what happened right at that time we basically scuttled any advancements in commercial color work vinnies so I recall as a kid growing up and seeing in the 1950s and 1960s basically color work was spotty at best lead press or litho and they were both pretty much comparable and then it wasn't until really the 1970s mid 1970s that the introduction of wool color showed up and by then the lead press industry was pretty much gone for a number of reasons that you pointed out well I have a couple comments about that I agree that a lot of really serious work on four color press building did not begin to appear until the 1940s in the offset industry but I do know for a fact that the first four color offset press web press actually I don't know if it was a web press it might have been a sheet vet press first four color offset press was installed by Harris right here in San Francisco at the Trong lithographic company which had of course before been very much involved in direct lithography techniques and as for world war two it certainly impeded the progress in color reproduction to a great degree but it presented an opportunity for the offset industry because there were so many maps required in the field by soldiers and they had a set up field installations of presses and it was much easier to do it with an offset press a small offset press and it was to carry around heavy letter press machines much less try to make a difference and then the issue about the spottingness and the unequal quality of color well into the 1970s I couldn't agree with you more and I think part of that is due to the fact that this whole idea that it was that to be a photo engraver a plate maker whether you're working in the offset industry or the business industry required this kind of artistic sensibility this craft training was all well and good and we like to see craft in printing but it's very hard to systematically and consistently train people to be able to get good results when you're encouraging them to make so many changes at the plate stage and there's always been I think this battle and you in particular people that I've worked with at RIT spent many years trying to show that really color reproduction has to be more of a science it has to be applied in ways that assure you of getting consistent color on every press run every job so that you don't have to go through all of this guesswork well in particular there even the plates themselves were either coated on a worlder by the guys in the house that were no commercial pre-coated plates other than some Piazzo which just really weren't very good and I think that's one of the reasons the photo engravers and letter press actually had an advantage is the Kodak had some pre-coated meta plates that were very consistent but it lived of inconsistency was in the work. Is that really true? Yes. All of the images where they all from the Kerry collection yes they were and also from the general collections at RIT it's amazing what wonderful things you can find by going through any large publicly accessible university or public library there's a lot of great stuff out there and in fact I've always thought that it would be very fun to gather a personal collection of early color half-tone illustrated books from the late 1890s up to about 1910 because there are so many interesting images that were produced then as letter press printers and lithographers were trying to figure out how to solve the color problems. Yes. Can you comment on the problems with the offset and longer runs with the plate? Could I comment on that? I could lie to you and tell you that I know a lot about that but I'm not an offset plate expert. There is however a gentleman and a scholar from Cal Poly by the name of Gary Field colleague of yours who has just completed a manuscript on what he calls the color revolution in the 20th century and he gets into a lot of those details, dichro plates by bimetallic plates all of which were designed to carry ink much more effectively without scumming up on the press making sure that you didn't have to fine-tune the water ink balances the fountain solution balances so carefully as was typically the case on an earlier offset press where you were always running into problems with scumming and ink getting on the non-image areas of the plates and so on but I don't know technically that much about those later plates. Yes. The answer to that is actually from your printing touched upon because as soon as you were offset up into the 70s, 20,000 was not as much as you can get of a decent plate that you wanted yourself for you however you would print immediately adding grade of complete copper cylinder which was fortunate it took a couple of days but then you had the entire process which actually meant you had almost continuous color on one cylinder. Exactly. The real color illustration is certainly what today said I don't know which ones are printed in America but in Europe some of the large run say 250,000 to 2 million print runs a week are printed from this. It takes a little longer to make but the color is incredible. Color is incredible and the tonality that you see in the image is really spectacular. That would be a great lecture for next year's Lieberman lecture I think on the history of the industry. Commercial reviewers. Exactly. How much time do you want to spend here today? I'm just giving you the next year's lecture. Exactly. Exactly. How about a center for the books six months from now? I'm a letter press guy. I could read up on it. I have a lot of books. Right. It's true. And Graviure is kind of suffering these days in the U.S. because the printing has been distributed so much because of mailing costs and so now smaller offset plants are being set up to handle regional distribution and printing. That's right. Exactly. Today in the United States color is black. So it's a lot of Yeah. It's a rubber plate or well I don't know if they're all rubber they're not all rubber plates at this point but it's definitely true. A lot of flexo printing. It's a very interesting process because it can print on so many different substrates. Any more questions? Yeah. As I understand it the bound books the Wizard of Oz books were a step forward putting around them and the text was over it. Was that true? Was that a big innovation and did it help itself? You know I don't know about it. Yes. We have our Wizard of Oz expert. Okay Peter. It was an imitation of certain Japanese print techniques that Deniso was introducing. So we do have other examples of books from that same period that were doing over printing on stands in color. Was that letter press? Yes it was all letter press. So the color was letter press and then it was over printed with the with the text type. Right. Yeah. You have to support one of your jokes David. The picture of asparagus was actually white asparagus. It was a good image of white asparagus. Was that a good image of white asparagus? Okay. What was that yellow stuff dripping over the top of it? It was all red. It was all red. All right. I'm glad to know that. The funny thing is in Europe we eat white asparagus until the 24th of June which is St. John's Day where we celebrate Gutenberg's not birthday but his sort of man. So there. Well, then then I'll have to say something different about that slide. Any others? One or two more? Yes. Was there much work done about color separation or photo not of artists but like doing with the camera and focus and so on with more than four colors? Yes. Sometimes not so much by letter press printers but lithographers who were already very accustomed to printing lots of different colors would sometimes do six color half tone images. And in fact I think I noted it that one Kodak camera club ad or camera magazine ad was a six color a six color half tone offset lithographic image. But you know the more the more colors you add the more difficult it is to print them well especially if you don't get the screen angles correct and I didn't want to get too much into screen angles and all of that. But yes, it did happen. Lisa.