The Girl's Own Book

Methods of Illustration

llustrations were an engaging aspect of nearly all books for young readers: cover images, frontispieces, occasional decoration, or integral parts of the story. Authors knew that they kept the reader’s attention, and publishers recognized that they increased sales. Technologies of print developed rapidly over the century that began with the 1780s, and every advance was enthusiastically adopted for juvenile literature, games, and toys.                

Prints can be divided into three basic types, depending on the surface of the image block and how the ink is conveyed to the paper. If the ink is on the raised parts of the block or plate, it produces a relief print. Woodblocks, the oldest method of printing images, have a design cut into the side of a plank of wood. Wood engravings, invented in the late eighteenth century, have the design cut into the end grain of a block of wood. Wood engraving was the most common print technology of the first half of the nineteenth century, and the rapidly produced blocks were employed in illustrated papers and magazines, as well as books. Electrotyping, invented in 1838, created longer-wearing metal duplicates of wood engravings for printing. All relief printing blocks were made the same standard height as type, and could be printed at the same time, with word and image produced simultaneously.

WOODCUT


WOOD ENGRAVING
Elliott, Mary. Useful Gossip for the Young Scholar, or, Tell-Tale Pictures. London: William Darton, 58, Holborn Hill, 1822.

Goldsmith, Oliver. The History of Little Margery. Philadelphia: Published by W. Johnson, 1835.

WOOD ENGRAVING, HAND-COLORED
Finch, Charlotte. The Gamut and Time-Table in Verse: For the Instruction of Children. London: A.K. Newman and Co., 1823.

COLOR WOOD ENGRAVING
Crane, Walter. The Sleeping Beauty. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1876.


ELECTROTYPING
Carroll, Lewis, and John Tenniel, illustrator.     Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. London: Macmillan, 1866.


In intaglio prints, ink is transferred to the paper from lines that are lower than the plate face. Engraving, with lines of varying widths cut into a copper plate, was the most commonly used intaglio technique for illustration. Intaglio plates must be printed on heavier papers and with a different press than moveable type. If engravings are used in a letterpress-printed book, they must be produced separately and bound into the other pages. The plates also wear more rapidly than relief blocks. For these reasons, books with engravings were usually expensive. In some early chapbooks, though, text and image were engraved into a single plate and printed together. Lithography, which was invented in 1796, is an example of planographic printing, where a flat surface — stone or metal — is chemically treated to hold or repel the ink that is transferred in printing.

ENGRAVING

Edgeworth, Maria. The Parent’s Assistant, or, Stories for Children: In Six Volumes. London: Printed for J. Johnson, No. 72, St. Paul’s Churchyard, 1800.

ENGRAVING, HAND-COLORED


Mallès de Beaulieu, Madame (Jeanne Sylvie). La poupée bien élevée. Paris, 1821.

LITHOGRAPH


LITHOGRAPH, HAND-COLORED
Wilson, Lucy Sarah Atkins. Stories for Little Girls: An Amusing Book for the Moral Improvement of Children. Guben, Germany: Printed by F. Fechner, 1851.

COLOR LITHOGRAPH
Aesop. The Child’s Illuminated Fablebook. London: W. Smith. c. 1850.





 

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