Science Spin July 2007

Making a good impression: In wood

By Tom Kennedy

Before photographs could be reproduced in print, illustrations had to be engraved on plates of metal or blocks of wood, and as we can see in old books, the results were often so good that many deserve framing as works of graphic art.

Engraving was a highly skilled occupation, and until the arrival of photo-mechanical technology, blocks had to be cut by hand. As in all skilled trades, some engravers were better than others, but the prevailing standard was high, and driven by the huge rise in demand for illustrated books and magazines, quality reached a peak in the mid to late 19th century.

Then, of course, came the sudden decline. Once line drawings and photographs could be rendered photo-mechanically the engravers were out of a job. Almost overnight an army of skilled engravers were cast out onto the scrapheap, unwanted, and with just a few exceptions, forgotten. In general, the new generation of illustrations were crude, coarse grained, and dismally grey. They may have been inferior, but they were a lot cheaper to produce.

In the same way that offices throw out their old computers, out-of-date at five years old, and totally antiquated at ten, printers and publishers began dumping the old blocks. Scientific institutions may have been a bit slower to do this because blocks were often reused for different publications, and this was the case with the Geological Survey of Ireland (GSI). However, even the GSI had to move with the times, and whenever an illustration had to be reused, the printers simply reproduced the hard-copy original.

Fortunately, the GSI did not throw out their blocks, at least not in Ireland, and after they had been packed away in ammunition boxes they ended up in a corridor between the National Museum of Ireland and Leinster House. In 1923, following Partition, all the blocks relating to Northern Ireland were sent off to the Ulster Museum, and in 1924 the rest were evicted, to make room for the post Civil War government. After some shifting around, the boxes ended up in the basement of the GSI at Beggar's Bush, the contents not so much abandoned as undisturbed.

At the GSI, some of the staff realised that the blocks were well worth preserving, so a project to restore and catalogue the entire collection was launched. Matthew Parkes found that his interest in the blocks was shared by Padraig Connaughton, and Petra Coffey. Petra had been researching the life and work of George Victor Du Noyer, one of the 19th century surveyors responsibe for producing some of the best illustrations. Not only was Du Noyer a talented artist, producing fine watercolour studies, but he had mastered the craft of engraving. Some of the blocks in the collection had been cut by Du Noyer.

By a fortunate coincidence, the GSI is next door to the National Print Museum, where, conveniently, there is a collection of old presses.

The blocks had been packed simply to get them out of the way, so many had their inked faces up against each other, and of course, storage conditions had not been ideal. At one stage of being shifted around, they had been kept in a former biscuit factory. Even so, except for some warping and splitting, the blocks were well preserved, and when Padraig Connaughton had them cleaned with dilute spirits, they were ready for a new lease of life.

One of the reasons why the Print Museum had been set up in the first place was to preserve not just the machinery, but the craft of printing. After blocks and fonts for text were assembled and locked into position, the surface was inked, and an impression made on paper. That might seem simple, but it took a great deal of skill to get the best results. Not only had the blocks and fonts to be set up correctly, and perfectly in alignment, but the inking had to be precise, and the quality of the paper could make a big difference. A good printer could not only deal with those difficulties, but could turn them to advantage, and that is why so many old books are a pleasure to read.

For the Print Museum, the blocks presented a welcome challenge, and as work got underway on making fresh impressions, Petra Coffey started cataloguing the collection. Many of the labels, identifying subjects and places, had suffered, so relabelling became part of restoration, and as Petra worked through the blocks, she entered the details into a database. To make the database complete details were also collected about the blocks stored in the Ulster Museum.

The blocks themselves now lie on a 3mm layer of polyethylene foam in metal drawers in an environmentally controlled and fireproof National Archives of Ireland room.

Steady hands

As described previously (Science Spin, Issue 22) the GSI began mapping the rocks of Ireland in 1846. The 201 six-inch maps covering the entire island were accompanied by descriptive memoirs, and these were where many of the old illustrations appear.

The engraving process required a lot of skill, good eyesight, and a steady hand. The illustration was first drawn onto the smooth face of the block, which was then passed on to the engraver. Engraving was a fairly big business, and while many blocks were cut for publishers in London, at least some of the engravers for the GSI were based in Dublin. One of the names appearing on blocks is Booth, and Petra Coffey has traced this back to a family business. During the mid 19th century, the Booths had a timber store, and ran, what was described as an "artists' warehouse".

Mapping continued until 1890, and by that time photo-mechanical production of plates had begun to displace hand engraving. Printers had discovered that illustrations could be photographed onto extremely high contrast film, so that the lines in a drawing stood out strongly. As a photographic process, the original images could be reduced or enlarged, and of course, the big negative, after development, could be worked over with a fine blade or brush dipped in opaque ink. By placing the film over a metal plate coated with photo-sensitive chemicals, this negative image could then be transferred by exposure to light. Films are rendered sensitive to light by coating them with silver halide chemicals. Exposure to light creates a change, but this remains latent until the film is immersed in a developing solution containing hydroquinine. This acts as a reducer on the exposed silver salts. Where light has fallen, the silver is reduced to its metallic form, often referred to as the grain.

At this stage, films are still sensitive to light, so to stop any further development, the film is dipped in a slightly acid bath to change the pH, or simply washed. Then it is fixed in a solution of sodium thiosulphate. The sodium thiosulphate, usually known simply as 'hypo' dissolves away any of the silver that has not been reduced to its metallic state, so the exposed parts of the image remain as the negative, insensitive to light, and, after washing to remove the hypo, about as permanent as anything can be in this world.

If you look at an ordinary negative closely, edge on, in oblique light, it is possible to see a faint impression of the image as a positive. This is because the silver image has depth, very slight, but enough to make it stand out in relief.

In transferring the negative image to the metal plate, the photographic process was much the same, but an extremely high contrast developer was used, and instead of producing almost extremely shallow depth, the fixing and finishing was much more aggressive. The developed lines acted as a mask so that chemical etching could continue until the the lines in an illustration ended up standing out in high relief. Like the wood engravings, these metal blocks could be set up with the type for printing.

With the emergence of this new technology, some of the original illustrations were copied, resized, and occasionally altered. In one case the original illustration of a limestone cave by the Lower Lake, Killarney, was not just resized, but the figure of a person was removed. In many of the memoirs towards the end of the series, the illustrations were produced from a mix of wood and metal blocks. Blocks, once made, could be re-used, and often were. Authors and publishers frequently borrowed blocks, but there was a limit to how many impressions could be made. Eventually blocks wore out, and when lines started to blur, it was time to discard or cut a replacement.

Metal blocks started to make their appearance in the GSI collection in 1885, but they were not necessarily greeted as an improvement. The Director-General of the GSI in 1892, Archibald Geikie, remarked distainfully that the photo-mechanical method was far removed from engraving on wood. As always, however, cost eventually won that argument.

Among the illustrators, one man stands out as an exceptional artist. George Victor Du Noyer, born in 1817, not only produced some of the best illustrations, but he also engraved some of the best blocks. Du Noyer was a man of many talents, and he worked as a surveyor first with the Ordnance Survey, and then with the Geological Survey. George's skill in drawing and his ability to observe the landscape owed a great deal to his early training by the celebrated antiquarian, George Petrie.

Du Noyer was keen to engrave some of his own work, but as a letter from one of his colleagues in 1836 to Petrie indicates, he had to acquire the skill. His initial attempts were described as "barbarous."

Ten years later, Du Noyer, who was being described as an exceptional draftsman, seems to have made considerable progress in mastering the skills of etching, perhaps just as well, as he was accused of making too many demands on the professional engravers. One of the engravers, Mr Grey, whose initials can be seen on many illustrations, told the Geological Survey that he would have to charge a higher rate because Du Noyer's minute shading required so much extra time and work.

In a letter to Du Noyer, J B Jukes of the GSI noted that, "I have consulted with Mr Grey, the engraver, concerning our sketches and he tells me that he could not engrave some of them for less than £3 a piece." Du Noyer was told to keep his sketches bold and simple, and no doubt this encouraged him to do more of his own engraving.

Du Noyer did not just confine his attention to engraving on wood. One of the best techniques for printing is to draw onto a block of extremely fine grained stone. This is the original lithographic process, in which the clear areas around a drawing repel ink. By carefully inking the stone, the wet image can be transferred by contact to a sheet of absorbent paper. Like wood cuts, lith transfer produces results of great beauty and character, and it ranks as one of the best in an array of amazingly high quality printing techniques being applied in the 19th century.

Among the hundreds of wood blocks, now being kept under controlled conditions of temperature and humidity, are some lithographic stones, some, much to heavy for one person to lift. By contrast, the wood blocks are small and dainty, and as Petra Coffey expl;ained, they are quite unique.

Similar blocks were used to illustrate surveys in Britain, but they appear to have been dumped, possibly when the Geological Survey there ran out of space in 1900.

Different circumstances, and a lot of luck, favoured the Irish.

Long line

Printing from woodblocks originated in the Far East, where a tradition of drawing in line goes back over a thousand years. Fine print making, with colours often added from multiple blocks, was greatly admired by collectors in China and Japan. The techniques of printing from woodblocks eventually reached Europe, where it quickly became popular as a way to illustrate books. Many of the earlier woodcuts, have simple, bold black lines, often following the grain of the wood, but by the 16th century artists, such as Mattioli and Albrecht Dürer, reached a peak of refinement in producing prints of exceptional quality.
Using woodcuts to illustrate books, popular song sheets, and pamphlets continued into the 19th century, when there was a marked increase in detail and realistic accuracy, matching technical improvements in printing. Popular papers, such as the Dublin Penny Journal, were illustrated with woodcuts, and the engravers were kept busy until photo-mechanical methods of reproduction and photography made them redundant.

At first, it was discovered that black lines, as in drawings could be reproduced, and then it was found that the continuous tones of a photograph could be copied simply by breaking the picture down into a 'half-tone' screen of black dots. The quality of those early half tones was really poor, and for a time around the turn of the 19th century, many publishers, for quality reasons, choose to continue rendering photographs as hand-made engravings. The skill in matching photographic realism in magazines such as The Graphic, Illustrated London News, or The Strand, has never been matched since, but that must have been cold comfort to all the engravers who, having reached a peak in perfection, suddenly found themselves redundant.

Buxus

For fine detail, engravings were made on dense, hard woods, such as box, cherry or hornbeam. Box, the slow growing small leaved shrub, Buxus sempervirens, was one of the most popular species, and it was planted extensively for this purpose. In Surrey, Box Hill gets its name from a time when Buxus was grown commercially.

Buxus, familiar to many in the small low hedges in older gardens, grows slowly, and it never becomes large, so when large illustrations had to be engraved, blocks were spliced together, and sometimes the joints show up as flaws in the printed pictures.