History of Printing in Seven Books

In the age where artificial intelligence can generate a story for you that you can print out in a few seconds, it is hard to imagine writing an entire book by hand using a quill pen that needed to be dipped in ink every few words. However, the desire to create texts more efficiently is not new. Printing technologies took a big leap forward around the year 1450 when German inventor, Johannes Gutenberg developed a moveable type system where individual metal letters and numbers could be arranged and rearranged in infinite ways to create a wide range of texts. Perhaps surprisingly, his new technology was meant to mimic traditional handwritten texts down to the Gothic letter style.  The first book he printed was the Bible, and a page of this Bible is bound into the title, A Noble Fragment: Being a Leaf of the Gutenberg Bible, 1450-1455 in CPL’s Special Collections.

As with any successful technology, every generation adds improvements. I’ve chosen six more books from Special Collections to help tell a short history of printing. Not surprisingly, readers wanted illustrations and designs in their new printed books, and woodblock prints were the perfect solution. A woodcut is created by carving away portions of a block to leave the design or picture in relief. Making the block the same height as the type allowed the two to be conveniently printed side-by-side. By 1493, the German language version of Liber chronicarum, or Nuremberg Chronicle was filled with 1,809 illustrations. Finding artists to carve the blocks, however, was more challenging. Thus, some of the 645 wood blocks were used multiple times in the book, and many of the images stood for a “type” of person or place. It is doubtful if any kings would be pleased by being represented with a generalized depiction or how much the towns of Manuta and Ferraria had in common.

New scientific discoveries soon became an important part of book publishing. Fine, detailed illustrations were sought to showcase anatomy, engineering, or natural history knowledge through encyclopedias that would appeal to new audiences. Printers and publishers turned to intaglio (engraving and etching) printing where delicate linework could show small details. Unlike woodcuts, intaglio drawings are incised into metals, like copper.

These plates needed to be printed separately from the type, in a high-pressure press, and then collated into the book before binding. Two stunning examples are the first Encyclopedia Britannica (1771) and Mark Catesby’s The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahamas (1754).

The first uses engravings created with a tool directly into the metal. The second features etchings where the image was first drawn through a surface coating and then put into an acid bath that ate into the plate on those drawn areas. Both books continue to utilize hand-set type for the text, and Catesby’s book also uses woodcut initial letters as part of its design.

For portraits of people, in particular, there was a preference for a softer and more naturalistic rendering than engraved or etched plates could produce. We all like to look good, after all.

The History of the Indian Tribes of North America has been described as one of the grandest color plate books issued in the United States. Its 121 hand-colored lithograph prints were created from the Indian Gallery in the Department of War, where Charles Bird King was commissioned to paint portraits of indigenous leaders who came to Washington to negotiate treaties. These plates were originally published in the United States from 1836 to 1844, using lithography, a process invented in 1796. In lithography, prints are made from drawings on flat surfaces (originally a piece of limestone) that have been treated with substances to repel the ink, except where it is required for printing.

The stone lithograph images from the History of the Indian Tribes of North America suddenly became highly valuable as the only surviving records of these indigenous leaders when most of the original paintings by Charles King stored in the Smithsonian Museum (the Castle) were destroyed in 1865 in a tragic fire. Shown here is a portrait of Pottawatomi Chief Metea (or Me-te-a) who inhabited the northern regions of Indiana in the early 19^th century.

Photoengraving and photogravure were other methods used to create naturalistic portraits and art reproductions before the halftone printing process made it easy to reproduce photographs in books. In these processes, a photographic negative is transferred and etched (or engraved) into a metal plate. The Biographical Dictionary and Portrait Gallery of Representative Men of Chicago and the World’s Columbian Exposition contains numerous portraits of noted Chicagoans. Shown here is Charles H. Wacker, a champion of the 1909 Plan of Chicago and its vision to improve and beautify the city. Chicago’s Wacker Drive was named after him. Despite their exclusion in the Biographical Dictionary, portraits of women were also created this way, as seen in this plate with the photographic image of Mary Todd Lincoln.

As you might imagine, books with hand-printed or hand-colored prints were often costly and time-consuming to produce. The underlying technologies of lithographic and chromolithographic (multi-color) printing, however, soon paved the way for mechanized offset printing. This technique transfers or offsets an inked image from a flat plate to a rubber blanket and then to the printing surface. As with lithography, offset printing is based on the repulsion of oil and water where mechanized rollers transfer oil-based ink to the image areas and a water-based film to the non-image areas. These new technologies made it possible to create commercial editions of colorful and heavily illustrated books. One of my favorite examples is the 1900 edition of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, featuring the truly Chicago ensemble of author L. Frank Baum, illustrator W.W. Denslow and publisher George M. Hill Company located at 166 S. Clinton Street.  Illustrator W.W. Denslow was influenced by early printing styles, seen in his use of initial letters and a typeface that has some gothic curves.

While all of the examples in this post were taken from books, printmakers still use many of these processes to create art. Work created through many of these processes is on display in CPL’s  exhibit of the Chicago Printers Guild archive.  These texts are all available for viewing by appointment in Special Collections. Digitized versions from other institutions also exist:

1. The Gutenberg Bible
2. The Nuremberg Chronicle
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica
4. The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahamas
5. History of the Indian Tribes of North America
6. The Biographical Dictionary and Portrait Gallery of Representative Men of Chicago and the World's Columbian Exposition
7. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz