"1. Machine papers can be printed in thin colours only, which means a thin, loose colour effect.
"2. In machine papers the whole of the various colours are printed at one operation, one on the top of another. In hand-printed papers, no colours touch each other until dry, and so each colour remains pure.
"3. Large surfaces, such as big leaves, large flat flowers, broad stripes that have to be printed in one colour, are never successful in machines, wanting solidity of colour. Hand-printed papers run no such risk.
"4. The machine limits the variety of papers to the flat kind; to flat surfaces supplied by the paper mills in reels.
"5. Flaws, irregularities, and so on, when occurring in machine goods, run through many yards, owing to the necessary rapidity of printing, and the difficulty of stopping the machine; whilst every block repeat of pattern in the hand-printed goods is at once visible to the printer, who rectifies any defect before printing another impression, and so controls every yard.
"6. The hand-printed papers, being printed from wood blocks (only dots and thin lines subject to injury being inserted in brass) show more softness in the printing than papers printed from machine rollers that have to be made in brass.
"7. The preparation of getting the machine colours in position, and setting the machine ready for printing, necessitates the turning out of at least a ream, or a half ream (five hundred or two hundred and fifty rolls) at once; whilst the equivalent in hand-printing is fifty to sixty rolls. It often happens that the design of a machine paper is approved of, whilst the colourings it is printed in are unsuited to the scheme. By the hand process, room quantities of even ten to fifteen pieces can be printed specially at from 15 per cent. to 20 per cent. advance in price, while the increase in cost for such a small quantity in machine paper would send up the price to ridiculous proportions."
The use of brass pins in the wood blocks is also a revival of the old method, as you will see from this interesting paragraph from a recent volume—Lewis F. Day's Ornament and Its Application:
"Full and crowded pattern has its uses. The comparatively fussy detail, which demeans a fine material, helps to redeem a mean one.
"Printed wall-paper, for example, or common calico, wants detail to give it a richness which, in itself, it has not. In printed cotton, flat colours look dead and lifeless. The old cotton printers had what they called a 'pruning roller,' a wooden roller (for hand-printing) into which brass pins or wires were driven. The dots printed from this roller relieved the flatness of the printed colours, and gave 'texture' to it. William Morris adopted this idea of dotting in his cretonne and wall-paper design with admirable effect. It became, in his hands, an admirable convention, in place of natural shading. The interest of a pattern is enhanced by the occurrence at intervals of appropriate figures; but with every recurrence of the same figure, human or animal, its charm is lessened until, at last, the obvious iteration becomes, in most cases, exasperating.