At 04:18 PM 3/30/00 -0800, Edward Ripley-Duggan wrote:
I cannot answer Mr. Smeltzer's question
regarding references to this matter in the literature (I am unaware of
any)
There are brief mentions of Pine's _Horace_ in the general histories of
the book (eg Norma Levarie: pp 245-6, with illustration).
but I would say that there is no
substantial economic advantage to copperplate over type in the matter of
paper, as he surmises. The principal advantage, at least potentially,
would be that the use of copper plates would avoid type being held in
forme between printings (or if redistributed, reset for new editions).
I completely agree with Ted. The expense of resetting the relatively
short Horace text in letterpress would have been far, far less than the
expense of the copper plates and their engraving.
However, absent any information on the
economics of seventeenth century engraving -- how much per plate would a
publisher have to pay the engraver, and how does that compare to setting
the same page in type? -- this is a difficult, if interesting question.
A considerable body of information is available on both matters. For
detailed information about the economics of c17 platemaking and
publishing, see "Stent's Business," pp 26 ff, in
Alexander Globe's _Peter Stent, c 1642-1665: London printseller_ (1985).
For detailed background information on printmaking and printselling in
the period (not only in England but also on the Continent and esp. in the
Low Countries), start with
Griffiths, Antony. _The print in Stuart Britain, 1603-1689 (British
Museum Publications, 1998)
and
Clayton, Timothy. _The English print, 1688-1802_ (Paul Mellon Centre/Yale
University Press, 1997).
My guess, and it is no more than that, is that
copperplate engraving might well have proven _more_ expensive than
setting the same text in type (all printers set type -- only a few know
how to print from copper, and they undoubtedly charged a premium), and
that the advantage is substantially aesthetic, as, for example, in the
Moreau books of hours or Pine's work.
There is no *economic* advantage in printing intaglio rather than
letterpress, though there may be an *artistic* one. Rolling-press
printing is much slower than printing on the common press, and the cost
of engraving text plates enormously more expensive than setting moveable
type (with the further difficulty that the run of an engraved edition
would have to have been numbered at most in the hundreds, whereas there
is almost no theoretical maximum to the number of letterpress copies
obtainable from a single setting of type).
Pine and others generally engraved their texts so that they could print
text and intaglio illustrations together: their choices were
governed by aesthetic considerations.
Generally, book
historians emphasize the visual appeal of such books.
So did their makers.
However,
perhaps text in copperplate should be considered as a
printing-on-demand scheme, not requiring the printer to make a
large
initial investment in paper or carry a large inventory of printed
sheets, but rather just storing the copperplates for occasional
print
On-demand intaglio printing was certainly common in the c17 and c18 for
*single plates*, but it is unlikely that a publisher would choose to keep
up the hundreds of plates necessary for running eg a copy of Pine's
_Horace_ (by no means the longest of c18 books with engraved texts) on
demand. There are instances where more than one impression was
taken from a set of engraved copper text plates, but the usual
circumstance is surely a single printing, after which the valuable copper
plates were recycled.
Terry Belanger : University Professor
: University of Virginia
Book Arts Press : 114 Alderman Library : Charlottesville, VA
22903