An Adventure in Victorian Printing

In August of 2024 I discovered a treasure trove of Artistic Printing from the Victorian age – the “Printers’ International Specimen Exchange” – and created a central page with every known image from it. Join me for a deeper look at the prints from that book!

Let’s start with a look at my favourite printers’ specimens:

I discovered the Printer’s International Specimen Exchange through the arts magazine “Uppercase” (issue 59). Contributor Mark E. Sackett mentioned the Exchange – saying something like “if you can ever get your hands on a copy, you have to do it!”. This sparked my curiosity. I started looking for scans of this book to see what the Exchange is about.

I didn’t like what I found.

Scan quality

Google Books has 10 volumes of the Exchange up online. At first first this sounds awesome – Google is big and good at this scanning thing, Right?

Nope… those scans are atrocious. In the same volume, Google would scan some pages in colour and some in black-and-white without any consistency. Some of the most colourful specimens, like the one from Ignaz Fuchs below, are in monochrome. So you just know the dodos at Google weren’t using their brain when they decided on which pages to scan in colour.

Google Books has a kind of terrible “lite” version of colour scanning. You can see it below. They keep a dab of colour, just enough to make you wonder if the scan is terrible or the original specimen was actually printed like that.

I have a fun conspiracy theory about these scans:
What if the scans are intentionally terrible? What if the University of Michigan only allowed Google to scan the books on condition that the public will see hobbled versions of the specimens?

Supporting Exhibit 1: some cultural organizations fight to keep scans of their collections away from the public. The Rodin Museum in Paris fought hard to keep 3D scans of its sculptures away from the very public who paid to have them made.

Other organizations, like the St. Bride print and publishing foundation, make money from charging for high-quality scans of the historical materials in their collection. If people can see high-quality images of these objects then they don’t have to visit in person and pay admission, so these organizations would miss out on revenue.

Supporting Exhibit 2: somehow Google Books can accurately find text in an absolutely indecipherable blob of a scan. For example, search in vol. 6 of PISE for the words “Cunard” and “Grant” and it’ll successfully bring up the words from this hazy mess:

What if they’re not doing OCR (Optical Character Recognition) from the low-res image you see on the site? What if their search functionality looks at a higher-quality scan that’s hidden from us?

This is a fun weird idea to think about. But, if it were true, Google Books wouldn’t be the first ones to hobble reproductions of typographic art:

Alastair M. Johnston tells the story of the mean-spirited Frederic Nelson Phillips who, in 1945, made sure to print typographers’ ornaments in an irreproducible blue colour. Just so others couldn’t copy and reuse them.

Let’s move on from scan quality to analyzing the prints themselves.

Why so ornamental?

To a modern eye, the prints in the Exchange are very busy with curlicues, flowers, cherubs and… all sorts of “extras”. But around 1880 this kind of maximalist design was popular in print, wallpaper and furniture. People just wanted more of everything. Notice the similarities between the “W. B. Witchell” print here to the furniture items below:

In addition to this busy look, a British artistic movement called “art botany” was popular in the late 1800s. Christopher Dresser’s 1876 “Studies in Design” book inspired many of the motifs you’ll see in the Exchange:

A departure from “Old Style” prints

The Exchange’s founders wanted to elevate British printing to a higher aesthetic level. But what was the terrible “old” world they were rebelling against?

The advertisement to the left is an example. Up until the 1880s, the visual compositions for all printing imitated book printing style. Centered text, stacked in a tall column with only font-size differences to enliven the page. Boring!

Book design was so dominant because moving-type printing was invented to make books – not business cards. Job Printers’ posters, flyers and other disposable prints were a recent development.

Below is a direct “old vs. new” comparison of the same ad (from vol. 2 of the Exchange):

Matthew McLennan Young said that in this example: “Unwin Brothers provided an object lesson of the difference between then-popular ‘Old Style’ and emerging ‘Artistic’ schools of printing by submitting two circulars for a sewing thread manufacturer. The first, printed in letterpress, was described by the editors as ‘a perfect imitation of the old-style of the early part of the last century.’ The second, a lithograph, was described as ‘a first-class specimen of delicate art printing, artistically designed.’”

Note the diagonal lines, semicircles and odd “clip art” that are part of the Artistic example. Those are hallmarks of Artistic Printing. (But, um… how exactly are two birds, a fox and a flower related to the sewing thread in the ad?)

Below are two more match ups of Old and New from Robert Grayson, the foreman at PISE’s publishers “Raithby & Lawrence”.

Example one:

And example two:

Note the asymmetric composition and printers’ ornaments in “The Style of Present Day” version.

Now that we know what “Artistic Printing” style printers were aiming for, how do we tell if a print is successful?

Good vs. Bad

It’s difficult for us to tell apart a superb print from a print that’s “just passable”. We’re not letterpress printers, so how do we spot the superstar pieces?

A “good” printing example

Let’s look at a piece that David Jury, an expert on design & typography, describes as the “most remarkable contribution” to Volume 1 of the Exchange:

David writes this in the journal of the Ephemera Society of America:

The design of the card epitomizes those characteristics that would become closely associated with the artistic printing movement: letterpress printed, filled corners, strong diagonals, rules separating eight carefully mixed colors and a minimal number of words. The two typefaces used were both recent releases, Glyptic (1878) and Relievo Number 2 (1879) with its drop shadow, both by the Franklin Type Foundry. Equally important and ground-breaking for its time is the way Earhart displayed the design on the page, framed by a rough-edged field of neutral color.

So, a strong print work would include combinations of diagonal lines, 3D effects and fake perspective, the freshest fonts, curves and text-on-a-curve, as well as harmonious combinations of colours. Look out for those qualities as you evaluate the specimens in the Exchange!

“Bad” printing examples

Let’s see what weak prints looks like. The PISE contains “bad” prints because the editor intentionally included weak prints in each volume. This was the only way of getting the the weak contributor to see the strong specimens in the Exchange and to stimulate him to improve.

One thing you’ll notice about weak print jobs are the misalignments. This is where type and border elements don’t quite “match up”:

Below is another example where a decorative border isn’t lined up seamlessly. You can see the gaps between the cast-lead elements that constitute the border:

Multi-colour prints were easy to botch because you’d have pass the same page through multiple printings. You’d make a separate print impression for each colour. And you couldn’t get misaligned between runs. Here is an example of a weak colour print, where the red lines collide with the blue greek-style border:

Finally, you could make an aesthetic misstep. A composition that is out-of-balance or too hectic would draw a critical comment from the Exchange’s editor. Here are some examples:

Making images with letterpress

In the late 1800s, letterpress printers had to compete with copperplate engravers and lithographers for business.

Lithographs could have much more fluid “soft” colours than moving-type prints. And engravings made in copper (or even steel!) could have original images and free-form text that could weave in, out and around images.

In contrast, letterpress printers were constrained by the kind of pre-cast fonts and illustrations that were available from the type foundry.

For a deep-dive into the work of lithographers, engravers and letterpress printers, watch this talk by Dick Sheaff:

Lithography and engraving gave the artist total freedom to create custom fonts and 3D effects. For a job printer, paying an external engraver or lithographer for an image meant an extra expense – and a smaller profit for himself! So a letterpress printer was motivated to create artistic effects with his own tools.

The simplest way for a printer to add fancy graphics was to use “printers’ ornaments” and “combination borders”. These were pre-cast lead flourishes, borders, edges and all sorts of “clip art” that you could combine into a coherent whole.

A printer would buy these ornaments from a foundry. They could get Japanese graphics:

… pre-made ovals, and …

event these cool “torn paper” combination borders!

Aside from letters and ornaments, the printer had “rules” at their disposal. Rules were usually thin brass bars that you could cut or bend. The simplest way to use a rule was to cut different lengths of straight-line rules and position them to make a picture.

Another tool printers would use was a “rule bender” – these are devices that allow you to bend your rules into curves, circles and other flowing shapes. In the middle is an example of a rule that’s been bent:

Earhart’s patented “Wrinkler” was like a rule bender on steroids. It allowed printers to create bent lines that were also patterned:

Here are more examples of brass-rule images created by compositors:

The art of making letterpress pictures is still alive. Here is contemporary work from Naomi Kent, shamelessly downloaded from her letterpress Instagram:

How good could these jobbing printers get?
Fine letterpress printing could look almost like lithography:

The pinnacle of complex rule-work comes courtesy of my guides to difficulty-in-printing, Doug Clouse and Angela Voulangas, authors of The Handy Book of Artistic Printing: A Collection of Letterpress Examples. (New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 2009). It is this specimen from Boston Type Foundry in vol. 4 of the Exchange:

The composition was extremely difficult, successfully creating perspective, detailed shading, and vignetting with nested circles.

Clouse and Voulangas

The printing press graphic in the middle is made of brass segments. My understanding is that the chequered/shaded floor and diagonal lines in each corner are made of evenly-spaced rules. Click on the photo and zoom in – I suspect that the shading on the columns is also made of thin brass rules spaced closely.

Colour palette

Another way that printers showed their skill was by using a variety of colours. Artistic printers had many newly-created chemical pigments to choose from and they competed in having the most refined hues for their prints.

Here are some of my favourite colour palettes from the Exchange. Click on a part of the picture to expand the full print:

I like how calming these colours are:

Some printers even declared which pigments they used in their submissions to the PISE, as you can see here in Vol 11, page 474:

The palette is so subdued that I figured all these Victorian prints must have faded with time. After all, it’s been 130 years since they were created!

But I was wrong. These subtle shades of chartreuse, aquamarine and peach were actually the fashion in Victorian times. You can see it in the Little Greene guide to Victorian colours and the “Late Victorian” interior paint palette from Sherwin-Williams (shown on the right).

In 1881, Gilbert and Sullivan put on a comic opera called “Patience” parodying the Aesthetic Movement (which included Artistic Printing and dandies like Oscar Wilde). Patience poked fun at these greeny-yellowy hues that were beloved by aesthetes and were so common in the Exchange:

“A pallid and thin young man,
A haggard and lank young man,
A greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery,
Foot-in-the-grave young man!”

Choosing rare and unusual colours for your specimen submission was a way of showing your taste and care for craft. Influential aesthete John Ruskin advocated unique hues, and Printers tried to live up to his ideas. Printers would mix their own pigments to get one-of-a-kind hues.

No colour harmony is of high order unless it involves indescribable tints. It is the best possible sign of a colour when nobody who sees it knows what to call it, or how to give an idea of it to anyone else.

John Ruskin, Famously awful husband

Master printer John Earhart, in his 1892 book “The Color Printer” , described how to create 37 colour variations from just 6 colour plates (local archive):

But… all this was the height of a craft that was about to disappear: “The spread of color lithography, however, ultimately proved such efforts futile.” (Clouse & Voulangas)

Colourways

Once you have your print elements locked up in “formes”, you can actually copy them as cast-lead sheets (known as “stereotypes”). You can then sell them to others or reuse them yourself. And you can use different colours to print than before.

Looking at Artistic Printing works, you’ll see some of the same prints done in different colours. For example, the colourful “Japanese Fancy Fair” from H. C. Raithby in Vol. 14 of PISE is also reprinted in brown-only in “Designs & Suggestions for Job Work. Reprinted from The British Printer, vol. VI.”

And here is an example of the same business card printed in different colours:

I believe that the below is an example of the same “bones” of a print being reused and adapted by each printer (by over-printing with different text and ornaments):

Other examples of reuse are “a grand hop” and Potter & Wrightington on the Sheaff Ephemera site.

A final note about colour: often when you see a garish yellow or a thick brown on a scan, the printer actually used an airy gold or a rich copper. These colours don’t come through in scans. With that in mind, take a second look at prints above – the brown “Louis C. Hesse, Printer” and the yellow “Artistic Printing & Engraving Co.” Do you see it?

Textures

The PISE specimens show a variety of texture effects. Here are some of my favourites:

Certain textures, like the example below, were made with busy-looking printers’ ornaments (like the ones shown after it). The printer used a beige background with a slighly-darker beige ornament pattern overtop:

Other effects like this one from Walter Iles (vol. 11) are harder to figure out:

I believe that the above texture was made by electroplating a sheet of leather. Printers got very creative when experimenting with different textures and Earhart’s The Color Printer has a variety of tricks for producing different effects:

Earhart gets even more creative when it comes to texture, using bundles of needles on wood, electroplated emery paper, and printing with the ringed end-cuts of woodblocks:

The most striking kind of textures are the organic / bubbly / marble effects, like these ones from Vol. 8 of the Exchange:

And this one from Vol. 4:

These were produced using techniques named Selenotype, Owl-Type and Earhart’s patented Chaostype. Fortunately we know quite a lot about these techniques, and St. Bride’s Foundation published a couple of videos about Chaostype. Here is a short one where they make a lead block of chaostype and print with it:

The best “how to” resource for producing all 3 types of texture – Owltype, Chaostype and Selenotype – is “Artistic Printing” by John Southward (1892). And there is also a “basic” method for making chaostype, from the Inland Printer vol. 8, Issue 5.

The Printers’ International Specimen Exchange holds lots of mysteries. According to Clouse and Voulangas, we still don’t know how William J. Taylor created this marble effect. Can you figure it out?

Guilloche

While there are a many textures that imitate natural materials in the PISE, you’ll also find strange artificial textures like these:

The method of making these engravings is called Guilloche (pronounced guee-yoshe ) and it is done with a special machine. You can learn more about guilloche from this article in Europa Star.

Bonus: take a close look at the vertical print specimen above. Notice the 3D lady’s profile in the middle.

It is made with another mechanical technique called Anaglyptography. It involves an engraving arm that traces a physical medal and copies it onto an engraver’s plate.

Very basic printing

In contrast to guilloche patterns and intricate rule-work, I was surprised to see some very basic prints in the Exchange:

These “old style” prints that harken to woodcuts are in a style that’s intentionally different from Artistic Printing. They take inspiration from William Morris and his ideas of returning to a pre-machine handcrafted look. Morris’ work sparked more interest in Euro-Medieval style and a decline in focus on Asia & Egypt.

This old-looking style is called Chapbook Style.

Clouse and Voulangas say: “it imitated printing practices of the fifteenth century to the eighteenth century. Employing rough paper, few colors, crude-looking typefaces, and deliberately anachronistic spellings. One of its most prominent exponents was Andrew Tuer’s Ye Leadenhall Press. Samples of antique printing, striking in their contrast to the examples of artistic printing, are scattered throughout the pages of the Printers’ International Specimen Exchange, which Tuer oversaw from 1880 to 1997.”

Eventually, William Morris’ Kelmscott Press became the 300 pound gorilla in the printing room. His aesthetic and philosophy was so powerful that it would become the next graphic trend and would herald Art Nouveau. I mean, just look at this thing:

Funny stuff

I’d like to share a couple of funny prints I came across during my dive into Artistic Printing. Overall, it looks like printers generally had a good sense of humour.

Outside the Exchange, Earhart’s “The Color Printer” has a funny illustration of clashing type that you should avoid:

Finally, here’s an odd skewed lady’s face from Volume 2 of the Exchange. Remember that in 1881 it must’ve been technically challenging to stretch, skew, shrink and colour-invert an image like this.

The image on the right is what you get when you open the Vol. 2 of the Exchange as a PDF file and try to copy the page as an image. Notice that 3 of the ladies disappear. If you’re a technical reader who knows why copying this 1 page image leaves behind 3 of the faces, then please tell me!

Does Artistic Printing matter in modern times?

There are a few useful things we can take away from the PISE.

First, we should recognize how successful The Printers’ International Specimen Exchange was at meeting its goal of elevating the art of printing. There’s a practical lesson here for us: the PISE’s editors elevated a profession by showing printers what others in their field are doing. Imagine how difficult it must’ve been for a printer in a small town to know what printers around the world are doing, before the Internet.

Through natural friendly competition everyone’s performance improved. This is a time-tested way of improving an industry. It’s the idea behind agricultural fairs (breed bigger veggies), sheep shearing competitions (find ways to process more wool in the region), behind archery competitions (be able to field a massive corps of longbowmen) and… beautiful baby contests?

The second thing we should recognise is that the Artistic Printing can still serve as an inspiration for contemporary designers. Take a look at the many stationery creations submitted by readers on the Anna Griffin blog. They have a similar style to the specimens in the PISE:

Another modern artist with a Victorian aesthetic is signpainter David A. Smith.

Finally, the Exchange marks a unique point in time. It is the transition between the Jobbing Printers from “unthinking imitators of book-printers” to someone who has taste and opinions on style. The PISE encouraged printers to really consciously think about their craft: what makes for aesthetic colour combinations, balance in layout and why choose one font over another.

As the 1890s turned into the 1900s printers began transitioning into “unthinking doers” again. Their initiative was taken away by a new professional on the scene: the Graphic Designer.

Think about it: when you go down to get a poster printed, do you collaborate it together with the people down at the print shop? Probably not. Their job is usually to just print what you hand to them without too much interaction. This is the legacy of separating the “thinking” from the “doing” instead of having the same person perform both.

This is a trend that played out in many professions, and is something that connects us today to jobbing printers from 1880:

• Weavers: they were once artisans, and became simple factory labourers. Nowadays we have a few designers creating the patterns, and unskilled manual labourers operating the machines in the weaving mill.
• Businesspeople: there’s an artificial division between “strategic thinkers” and “tactical executors”. This a made up division and creates a class of magical “thinkers” who claim they deserve higher salaries.
• Programmers: the division between Software Architect and Programmer is another instance where thinking is separated from doing. This separation creates (from the Architect side) lofty plans that are unworkable in reality, and (from the Programmer side) buggy code built without an awareness of the context it operates in.

This separation of design and execution (i.e. “specialization”) might be an inevitable result of higher volumes and variety of printing.

For better or for worse, the Printers’ Interational Specimen Exchange created an opening for some printers to become “pure” designers. PISE participant George W. Jones was a prominent example:

Jones is a key figure in the early development of British graphic design. Just a year after he created his 1887 submission to the eighth volume of the PISE, his employers at the Co-operative Printing Company of Edinburgh ‘happily relieved’ him of the labour of printing so that he could devote his attention to ‘sketching designs for others to follow, and superintending their productions’. This move away from the shop floor and the labour of printing signals one of the earliest instances of the separation of designing from
printing in Britain. Although he identified as a printer to the end of his life, Jones’s work carved a space for designers within the letterpress profession…

Jamie Horrocks (2022) The grammar of typography: The Printers’
International Specimen Exchange and Victorian letterpress design reform, Early Popular Visual
Culture, 20:4, 339-367, DOI: 10.1080/17460654.2022.2067206

For more information about this era of “graphic design before Graphic Designers”, listen to this talk by David Jury:

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I’d love to hear your thoughts about the Printers’ International Specimen Exchange, and any ideas forcorrections or collaborations that you have. Email me at “jacob” at this site!

…and if you haven’t looked at the big repository of images from the PISE, then that should be your next stop!