Rare Book School 2009 Day 4 in C'ville

Another great day in C'ville. Today started with another great breakfast at the Inn (the peppered bacon is possibly the best I've had). Walked up with Chris Lowenstein with the usual stop at Para Coffee on the way to class.

Wrapped up steel engraving this morning (basically, steel plates are engraving with either mezzotint or stipple). The most interesting element is that the ability to engrave steel has effectively been lost as a craft...far easier to work in copper and then coat with (one molecule) of steel. Far easier and longer lasting... Work by Sartain is remarkable. Must find myself a copy of The Ironworker.

Mattoir-A very cool tool used for stippling.

"MEGO"-My Eyes Glaze Over.

RBS moto: "You can read it, can't you?"

Moved on to Lithography. "Mother stones" are used to "save" images (often broken large stones used). Daughter stones used for printing. Very uncommon to find daughter stones with retained image as they are easily cleaned and reused...those that remain tend to remain by accident or serendipity. We were given Necco wafers to "wear" until they split as a means to understand wear and death of daughter stones....

First lithos began circe 1805...common by 1820...started seeing using in the US in the late teens. Intaglio and lithography fight it out for a while (text still dominantly letterpress)...tipping point around 1870 (pre=engraving; post=lithography).

Spent our afternoon lab etching plates. I'll post the results later. Shockingly, it actually worked and the output was not shockingly horrible (admittedly, nor was it good ). Hard to fail to understand the complexities of a process when you actually give it a try (even at a very simple level. We etched zinc plates in nitric acid at a rather high concentration with dip and rinse. A steel plate might take dozens (and dozens) of cycles...amazing craft.

Then moved on to COLOR. Saw an amazing example of "art" color litho...with separation that required 22 unique stones to create the final image. Amazing. More on color tomorrow...

Spent the evening finishing up the detail work on my linocut for tomorrows lab. I really can't recommend this program highly enough...both Suz and I have had a great time, learned a great deal and had great fun with our classmates.