ABSTRACT
Printing is about copying and multiplying images, motifs and texts on the ‘marked surfaces’ of designed objects through contact with the printing matrix, which is itself a further designed object. Techniques and materials of print reflect the manufacturing practices of their time, echoing the values of surrounding technologies, from woodcuts to digital dot matrix printing. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, printed images were crafted using wood, copper, steel and limestone plates. Text types were cast from metal alloys, but the relief images that accompanied them were cut into wood (see also Chapter 3). Images in metal, on copper and steel plates, were produced separately, in the ‘intaglio’ technique whereby the desired lines of the image were cut into the metal with an engraving tool, or etched with acid. In intaglio printing, very fine lines act as channels in the metal holding the ink, and the paper surface is literally squeezed into those lines under immense pressure to pick up the image. Finally, images from stone (lithography) were produced ‘planographically’, that is, from a flat surface, using a technique that was dependent not on the surface contours of the plate but on its chemistry, exploiting the antipathy of oil and water (see also Chapter 4). All these methods were derived from wider working practices and tacit knowledge of materials.
