A History of Chromolithography: Printed Colour for All (2013)

Colour printing is something we take for granted. This was not always so, and we owe it to the foundations laid by chromolithography that it now touches most aspects of our lives. Twyman’s book traces the evolution of this hand-drawn colour-printing process from its tentative beginnings in Germany in the early nineteenth century to its spread from Europe to the United States and beyond to become the major method of colour printing before the century was out.At one end of the market chromolithography met a voracious demand for colour printing in everyday life; at the other, it was applied to work of real quality: illustrations (for science, art, architecture, and design), reproductions of famous and popular paintings, maps and atlases, facsimiles of manuscripts, book covers, posters, and high-end product catalogues. All are discussed in the context of other colour processes and illustrated with examples drawn from a dozen or so countries. Chromolithography declined gradually with the rise of photographically-based printing methods, but retained a foothold in the printing trade through several specialities, particularly posters, right through to the middle of the twentieth century, by which time it had already been revived as an artistic medium.Michael Twyman has spent a lifetime studying aspects of printing, and is the first to consider chromolithography from a global standpoint. In particular, he draws attention to the movement of artists, printers, equipment, materials, products, and ideas across national boundaries, initially within Europe, but later, and more significantly, between Europe and other parts of the world, particularly the United States. All this is put in the context of the development of the lithographic trade and its organization.The book offers – for the first time since the process was in its heyday – a detailed account of how chromolithographs were made. But whereas contemporary writers focused on the methods and practices of their own time, the author traces their evolution over a period of a hundred years. Some of the methods he describes and illustrates are so extraordinary that they require readers in our digital age to suspend their disbelief. Drawing on a variety of sources – manuals, journals, correspondence, preparatory drawings, proofs, interviews with people in the trade, as well as the products themselves – he provides fascinating insights into the methods and skills of the chromolithographer.With almost 800 illustrations and an extensive index, the book should provide the first port of call for those interested in the subject.Condition: light shelf-wear to extremities of wrapper. A faint trace of spotting to top edge of text block