For instance, printing music from the stone has a decided advantage over zinc plates, both because of smaller cost and greater beauty. It is easier to produce all kinds of script on stone, both with fatty inks and with the engraving needle. Therefore lithography serves excellently for charts and similar work, which can be done at least three times faster on stone than on copper.
If copper-printing is to reach a high degree of perfection, the printing itself must be done by very excellent workmen. Indeed, some persons allege that the very best German copper-plate printers do not yet equal the Parisians. Printing from stone is not so difficult, and only a few particular methods demand especial care or unusual knowledge. Because of the greater ease of inking, the speed of stone-printing may be assumed to be at least five times as great, often ten times, and especially so when large plates are to be printed. Besides, it is much easier to make corrections on stone than on copper and zinc.
From all this it appears that lithography makes it much easier to write and design and then to print swiftly and produce any desired number of impressions, of all those works that heretofore could be produced only on copper or zinc, providing they do not demand the very greatest degree of delicacy, strength, and sharpness obtainable with copper; in a word, so long as it is not vital to attain the utmost possible artistic beauty. Further, most of these works done on stone, by only average artists and printers, usually are more beautiful than if they had been done by the same men in copper or zinc.
This property alone gives lithography a preëminent value, the more so as no great expense is incurred in establishing a plant. But in addition to this, there are several art methods peculiar to it, which cannot be imitated by book-printing or copper-print, and which make it possible for almost every writer or artist to manifold his works without any especial skill.
I will mention now only the crayon process, which enables every artist or painter to make several thousand impressions of his original drawings; also the transfer method, by means of which all that is written or drawn with fatty ink on ordinary paper can be transferred to the stone, giving countless faithful impressions. This latter process is particularly useful for government bureaus, and is being used already with great profit.
All this I believe that I can claim for lithography with fullest confidence, and I hope that everybody who becomes sufficiently conversant with it will share my belief. Thus, besides the properties of the art, we have stated its uses, and I proceed to the real instructions, through which I hope to make good artists and printers on stone.