"Printing House and Engraving Shop" by Roger Gaskell

CITATION: Gaskell, Roger. "Printing House and Engraving Shop: A Mysterious Collaboration." Book Collector, 53 (2004), 213-54. Web.
Understanding

• Question: How can copperplate engravings in books be described with the tools of analytical bibliography?
• Answer: Records of the Oxford press adduce information about the working conditions of copperplate engravers, as do 17th C. manuals on the proper operation of the copperplate press.
• Method: Analytical bibliographical, of course. Gaskell also begins with a quirky New Historical-flavored anecdote about Oxford copperplate pornography, or "Aretino," discretely.
• Assumptions: Gaskell struggles with the possibility of a four-man copperplate press team, as opposed to a smaller team that could be more remunerative to the pressmen.
• Sententiae: 
• "Book illustrations are often discussed in the print literature, but with little acknowledgement that their production may well be different from that ofsingle leaf prints; and that their interpretation certainly must be." (214)
• "The Cambridge University Press did own a copperplate press in the late seventeenth century, but significantly it did not directly employ copperplate printers, but hired itinerant workmen. These are the excep- tions that prove the rule: copperplate printing for book work was carried on in separate workshops, by firms independent of the printing houses, and this was the rule for the whole of the hand-press period." (216)
• "In England copperplate printers were not controlled by any guild, they did not have to be members of the Stationer's company, and very little is known of their organisation. In the Pepys Library there is an invitation card for a dinner organised by the 'Loving Society of Roling-Press- Printers' in about 1685." (217-8)
• "The actual process of taking an impression from a copperplate was described for the first time by Abraham Bosse in the caption to his large plate of 1642, and in more detail in his manual of 1645. The copper plate, a few millimetres thick, is first warmed over a brazier, making it easier to work the rather stiff ink into the lines engraved on the plate. This is done with a rubber, a tight roll of old linen cloth, stippling and rubbing the ink into the lines, using the fingers as well if necessary. After this all the ink has to be wiped from the surface of the plate. Two stages of wiping with rags, the second stage rags replacing the first as they be- come soiled, are followed by wiping with the heel of the hand, the fleshy part below the little finger of the right hand. The plate is now briefly returned to the brazier before being carried to the press, the edges given a final wipe and the last traces of ink polished off the surface with some French chalk on the hand. (I'm told that traditionally copperplate printers, because of their inky palms, would greet visitors with a sort of Masonic hand-shake using only their thumb and first two fingers.) Since the surface of the plate produces the white areas of the image, the slightest smudge, or a fine scratch that holds ink, will show up." (219)
• "On wooden or common presses, speeds of up to 250 impressions an hour were quite normal. Working a ten hour day or more, output figures at the Cambridge University Press at the end of the seventeenth century were regularly between about 1500 and 3000 impressions a day, or between 750 and 1500 perfected sheets (printed on both sides). Copperplate printing is much slower, mostly because the inking of the late, and particularly the wiping, are very time-consuming and skilled operations. A few hundred impressions a day at the most could be printed, and then probably only of single illustrations, rather than the 4, 8, or 16 pages printed on a sheet for a folio, quarto or octavo book. " (220)
• "McKenzie calculated this from the fact that the printer, John Ebrall, who charged 8d. per 100 impressions, put in a bill for 15s. for three days work. If this is correct, it is a very high output compared with figures I have found for the print-trade, but it is in line with figures given much later in Berthiau and Boitard's 1837 manual, where it is stated that 400 impressions a day might be achieved with a three man crew, raised to 700 impressions with a four man crew. Thus the Cambridge University Press figures possibly suggest that a press crew or four men was being employed, in which the inking and wiping would have been shared between two or three men. McKenzie assumed that the payment of 5s. a day was for a single workman, so he was led to the conclusion that copperplate printing at 5s. a day was better paid than letterpress printing at from IS. 6d. to 3s. per day. But if my suggestion is right, then the 5s. had to be divided among four workmen, making them worse paid than the letterpress printers." (221)
• "A standard assumption is that paper accounted for half the production costs ofa book at this time, so that leaving aside composition and engraving, we can see that adding a plate to a quarto of 30 sheets (240 pages) in an edition of $00 copies is like adding three sheets, it adds 10 per cent to the machining costs or 5 per cent to overall production costs. The cost of cutting the woodblock compared with engraving a plate would in some cases be more, in some less, depending on the subject. The above figures are probably not generally applicable, but this analysis suggests the kind of approach that should be used in trying to get a sense of the cost implications of including copperplate illustrations in a book." (222)
• "The real reason that plates are printed on different paper is not that better paper is strictly necessary for everyday bookwork, but has to do with the fact that the copperplate printers were independent of the letterpress printers, and their paper was bought in a different way... I am convinced that the copperplate printer supplied his own paper." (225)
• "[T]the oblong shape of the plate is in the same orientation as the oblong shape of the full sheet of paper. The position of the plate relative to the edge of the sheet is significant because it tells us something about the planning of a book... The stub will almost invariably be seen coming out a few pages back, or further on in the book, looking as if a leafhas been cut out (alarming for the novice book collector)." (226)
• "[I]in fine work, where the binder removed the plates before beating, the most natural course would be to put them back where they came from, but with the possibility that they would go back in the wrong place. This seems to be borne out by the observation that multiple copies of seventeenth-century books in contemporary trade bindings tend to have the plates in the same places and similarly folded, but position and folding are more variable in higher class bindings." (228)
• "Could the difference between printing on cut leaves as opposed to several at once on a single sheet have had something to do with the size of the press crew? With three or four men inking and wiping plates, a pressman might be kept busy pulling impressions as the plates were pre- sented to him one at a time. On the other hand one man working alone would perhaps find it more economical to ink and wipe several plates, then lay out and print them on a single sheet of paper all at once with only one pass through the press. But this is pure speculation. There is something else very intriguing about the possibility of a three- or four-man press crew. With three men, four plates would be being printed concurrently, since one plate is warming on the brazier while the other three are being inked, wiped and printed. With a four-man team five plates would be in concurrent production. So if a book had only one or two plates, this could mean they would have been printed con- currently with the plates for another book. If we could identify the paper stock, perhaps it would be possible to identify a particular copper- plate printer working on the plates for two or more books, perhaps even doing work for two different publishers at the same time." (229)
• "Therefore copies of a book with the same title-page and text can have later impressions and states of the plates, or even different plates, and this can indeed be observed." (230)
• "Different kinds of illustration have different relationships with the text and this relationship may be revealed by the internal reference system used, or the lack of one. There are three principal ways in which text can refer to images: first the illustration is placed adjacent to the text which refers to it; second a reference system is used in the text, such as plate and figure number; third an explanatory caption, not part of the narrative of the text is attached to the plate or printed on a facing page." (232)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Well-researched, strong bibliography--though perhaps not carrying the interpretive ramifications I would like.
• Synthesis: This may be the first true bibliography that I've read in a while. Nevertheless, the mode of Gaskell's method provides a more focused approach to New Historicism than some of the flightier connections between, say, Othello and a shepherd's record of a black ram's tupping. That is, with a focus on analytical bibliography, scholars can precisely understand some of the discourses that shaped the previously privileged "literary" texts.
• Application: I would love to apply some of these interpretive tools to the copperplate illustrations in Paradise Lost.