printing house and engraving shop, part ii
method of registering engravings in printed sheets since it would be straightforward to position the coppers face down in the spaces left in the letterpress sheets. At the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam I asked Tim Verberk to try face down printing on the replica rolling press constructed from the designs published by Bosse in the first edition of his treatise (1645) with one of the copies of Rembrandt etching plates used for the daily demonstrations of intaglio print- ing. 7 A perfectly satisfactory print was obtained. More rigorous experiments have since been conducted by Peter Freeth for Antony Gri Y ths, though Freeth did not follow Bosse’s directions in placing blankets on the bed of the press as directed by Bosse. 8 Gri Y ths now believes that it is impossible to print multiple plates face up on a full sheet of letterpress and that the plates must have been printed face down. 9 In my article I speculated that the 5s a day paid to a rolling press printer, John Ebrall, at the Cambridge University Press at the end of the seventeenth century, might not have been his own wages, but the wages for a press crew, and so not more, but possibly less per man than the 1s 6d to 3s a day that the letterpress printers earned. 10 A source which I do not believe has been utilised by book bibliog- & d’imprimer en Taille-douce … Nouvelle edition revue, corrigée & augmentée du double (Paris: Chez Charles-Antoine Jombert, 1745) p. 150. 7 . H. DenOtter, ‘De houtenestpers in het Rembrandthuis’, Kroniek van het Rembrandthuis 63 (2009), 36–49. 8 . ‘Only I will tell you, that there are certain necessities, where they lay the Cloaths first of all on the Table of the Press, and over them a bluring Paper, and the Paper, Pasteboard, Satin, or other thing you Print upon; and turn the Engraved side of the Plate downwards, then two or three Clothes over it to prevent the bending of the Plate, as also that it spoil not the Roller when they turn the Handle, and all pass and print as before. This is done so when necessity requires it, as in the Impression of Satin Prints, which were the occasion of a Fancy of mine to do what I shall tell you afterwards.’ Bosse 1645, translated by William Faithorne as The art of graving and etching…The second edition. To which is added, the way of printing copper-plates, and how to make the Press (London: printed for A. Roper, 1702), p. 68. Bosse’s ‘fancy’ was to print a plate face down on an impression from an outline plate which had been coloured by hand (pp. 69–70). Also, in his list of articles necessary for the copperplate printer, Bosse in- cludes ‘Cloths to put upon the Plates, and sometimes under, in Printing them.’ (p. 60). 9 . Gri Y ths pp. 183–3; and p. 520 n. 8; Antony Gri Y ths, ‘Upside-down printing’, Print Quarterly, XXXI (2014), 324. 10 . The figures are from D. F. McKenzie, The Cambridge University Press 1696–1712 (Cambridge, 1966), i, p. 93.
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