RELIEF PRINTING
I N order that illustrations may be incorporated in the text, the blocks used must be in relief the same as the type; a mixture of intaglio and relief is impossible, for the whole surface must be level in order to be inked by the rollers, which deposit the pigment evenly, so that only one tone of colour—that of the ink—is possible.
Up to quite recent times wood cuts and engravings were the only means available for text-illustrations, so that this method may next be considered.*
*See Treviranus, C.L.: Die Anwendung des Holtzschnitts zur bildlichen Darstellung von Pflanzen. Leipzig, 1855.
WOOD CUTS AND ENGRAVINGS. The invention of illustrating by means of wood blocks followed closely on the heels of the use of moveable types for printing. The Chinese were the first, as far as is known, to use these methods of printing and illustration; in the western world the first wood blocks date from the beginning of the fifteenth century.
All the earlier cuts were made, commonly on pear wood, on the longitudinal face of the wood, in technical language "on the plank," and seemingly, in many instances, were made from drawings in ink. By cutting on the plank, the craftsmen were enabled to make large blocks, but were prohibited from doing anything more than relatively simple and straightforward work. Such blocks are known as wood cuts; wood engravings were not made until the possibilities of a hard wood like box carved upon the transverse section were discovered at a much later date. This is, strictly speaking, wood engraving, an art which almost entirely, if not quite, superseded the older craft, on account of its great possibilities; indeed, wood engravers imitated metal engraving so closely as to deceive many. But such work was enormously laborious; for instance, in the case of a fishing net, if the string were to be printed black, the engraver would have to cut out hundreds of small diamond-shaped pieces of wood in order that the string of the net should be in relief. But few artists would do this of their own free will, and generally such laborious work will only be found in wood-engravings which were intended for the reproduction of ink drawings or other kinds of pictures where the lines, shading, etc., had to be faithfully copied. This point may be illustrated by the accompanying cut (Fig. 2), which was made by my friend Mr. Geoffrey Oliver, who at the time was totally uninstructed in the art and knew nothing of its literature. It will be seen that he, quite unconsciously, treated his wood in the same way as an engraver would his metal; the result, of course, is just the opposite to metal engraving since the printing of the wood block is the reverse to intaglio.
