Printing Colour 1700-1830

Description:

Printing Colour 1700-1830 offers a broad-ranging examination of the rich period of invention, experimentation and creativity surrounding colour printing in Europe between two critically important developments, four-colour separation printing around 1710, and chromolithography around 1830. Its 28 field-defining contributions, by 26 leading experts, expand the corpus far beyond the beautiful, already well-studied images produced in European hubs like London and Paris. The chapters unveil the explosive growth in the production and marketing of colour prints at this pivotal moment. They address the numerous scientific and technological advances that fed the burgeoning popularity for such diverse colour-printed consumer goods as clothing, textiles, wallpapers, and ceramics. They recontextualise the rise in colour-printed paper currencies, book endpapers and typography, and ephemera, including lottery tickets and advertisements. This landmark volume launches colour printing of the long 18th century as an interdisciplinary field of study, opening new avenues for research across historical and scientific fields.

Review Quotes:

Printing Colour 1700-1830: Histories, Techniques, Functions, and Receptions is a landmark volume of scholarship on color printing in the later handpress period. [...] is well designed, well printed, and richly illustrated. It contains over three-hundred full-color images, almost all of standout quality and relevance. [...] The volume is a welcome addition to bibliography. It can serve to introduce researchers unfamiliar with the material and economic conditions of color printing to the field, often correcting misbegotten parallels to single-color black printing that might be assumed. The chapters are full of gems to aid curators, librarians, and booksellers in better identifying and describing the unique color printed materials they encounter. For those who do not work with color printing, the careful scholarship of the chapters pushes us all to understand materials and processes via close examination and historical research, not only received wisdom, and to appreciate historical printing processes.