printing house and engraving shop, part ii
rolling press still stands. 15 This is surprising considering not just the quantity of engraved book illustration but the vast size of the print trade in the eighteenth century. A number of replica wooden typo- graphic presses have been built and used for research and teaching, but when I wrote my article, no equivalent wooden rolling press was in use. The only experience most bibliographers had of intaglio printing depended on the use of nineteenth and twentieth-century iron presses. Replica rolling presses have indeed been built, like the Rembrandt House Press, which is used to demonstrate the printing of ‘Rembrandt’ etchings rather than its relevance to book illustra- tion. In university departments teaching bibliography there were no wooden rolling presses and in fact very few iron rolling presses, even then not always appropriate examples. The Historical Printing Room in Cambridge University Library does have an iron rolling press, but one designed not for printing on paper but for printing silk hat bands. The issue, of course, is that, starting with ‘The Bibliographic Press’ set up at Yale University Library in 1927, the aim of these presses, as of bibliography, was to further literary studies – texts in which images were considered of little or no importance. Philip Gaskell wrote that: ‘By a “bibliographical press” is meant a workshop or laboratory which is carried on chiefly for the purpose of demonstrating and investigating the printing techniques of the past by means of setting type by hand, and of printing from it on a simple press.’ 16 The point of my article was to argue that bibliography must now move beyond typographic printing of text and in addition take account of the technologies and workshop practices of picture printing and specifically the complexities of intaglio printing. I 15 . Alan May, ‘A new census of wooden presses in Great Britain, Journal of the Printing Historical Society , New Series 24 (2016) 63–89; Ad Stijnman, De ontwikkeling van de houtenetspers, 1460–1850 , Kroniek van het Rembrandthuis 50 (1996), 2–40; I have not made a systematic attempt to locate further wooden rolling presses and I am sure more will come to light. 16 . Philip Gaskell, ‘The bibliographical press movement’, Journal of the Printing Historical Society 1 (1965) 1–13 on p. 1. See also Steven Escar Smith, ‘A Clear and Lively Comprehension’: the History and Influence of the Bibliographical Laboratory’, in Ann R. Hawkins, ed., Teaching Bibliography, Textual Criticism, and Book History (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2006) 32–37.
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