Printing House and Engraving Shop, Part II Further thoughts on ‘Printing House and Engraving Shop: A Mysterious Collaboration.’
roger gaskell
The mystery of the collaboration between book printers and cop- perplate printers has become less mysterious since the publication in 2008 of Bowen and Imhof’s meticulous work on the Plantin archives. Another mystery has been resolved by the appearance of a copy of a lost work, known previously only from secondary sources, An essay on engraving and copper-plate printing. To which is added, Albumazar, or the professors of the black art, a vision . By J. Hanckwitz, copper-plate printer (London, 1732). It is a short poem in heroic couplets on the art of engraving, the appended ‘vision’ being a riveting dream sequence in tetrameters. The purpose of this note is to draw attention to work which has been done on the his- tory of intaglio printing, as it relates to book illustration, since my 2004 article for the book collector ; to introduce an overlooked source for the economics of the printing trades; to describe the Essay on engraving ; to report on the installation of a replica rolling press at Rare Book School, University of Virginia and to provide a few corrections to the article. In ‘Printing House and Engraving Shop’ I explained the process of printing copper plates on the rolling press and how engravings were printed for inclusion in books, whether as inserted leaves of plates or integrated in the text, processes on which neither letter- press nor intaglio manuals give any information. The main purpose of my article was to draw attention to the fact that, in marked con- trast to the printing of verbal texts, we know very little about the origination, production and printing of images in books and have only limited ways of describing the finished products. The rapidly expanding body of research on scientific and other genres of book
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