Serigraphy and collotype: a renaissance
- Related Topics:
- block printing
- plate
- composition
- enlarging
- registration
- On the Web:
- UCLA - HISTORY of the BOOK - The Invention and Spread of Printing (May 03, 2025)
Parallel to the evolution of the three major printing processes, letterpress, offset, and lithography, various other techniques have experienced a similar evolution, which has allowed them to survive or to establish themselves in the course of the 20th century and to preserve or win a place in printing.
The art of reproducing a design by forcing ink through the mesh of a silk screen partly blanked out with a stencil plate (serigraphy) had been practiced by the Chinese and Japanese long before the invention of letterpress. In the 19th century the textile manufacturers of Lyon adopted it for printing textiles. In the 1930s in Great Britain and the United States the most varied materials (glass, wood, plastic) and even the most varied shapes (round objects, for example) were printed by serigraphy, which from a handcraft progressed to an industrial technique, with the screen prepared by photosensitization and printing carried out by semiautomatic or automatic machines.
Another process, patented in France in 1855 under the name Photocollography, was modified in 1865 under the name Phototypy (still used in France) and in Germany in 1868 under the name Albertypy (still used in Germany). This process used photosensitive substances not as agents in making plates for printing but to serve directly as the effective surface of such plates. Known elsewhere as the collotype process, the technique was in great favour between 1880 and 1914, was then neglected, and has recently been revived and mechanized for printing posters and transparencies in black and in color.
Flexography is a letterpress process using rubber plates on the plate cylinder; it occupies a special place in printing on account of the fluidity of its inks. It was first patented in England in 1890, and it was perfected in Strassburg a few years later. Flexographic printing is particularly suited to relatively coarse surfaces (pasteboard, wrapping paper, plastic or metal film) but has also been adapted to newspaper and magazine printing. It can be carried out by sheet-fed machines but is chiefly used on powerful rotaries.
Three-dimensional printing (1960s)
In the 1960s a three-dimensional print was developed, essentially an illustration bearing two views, superimposed, of the same image taken from slightly different angles, on a transparent mount striped with a multitude of imperceptible parallel strips (Xograph process). On account of these strips, each eye, looking at the print from a different angle, sees only one image. The three-dimensional illusion is produced when this binocular vision is interpreted by the brain.
Office printing
The development of industry and commerce, in the 19th and 20th centuries, accompanied by an increase in administrative activity, created a demand for an abundance of printed information at various levels. In the field of office printing the first tool was the typewriter, perfected in 1867. Thereafter, machines appeared that would reproduce large or small numbers of copies of typewritten texts and, later, texts or illustrations of every kind. Some of these machines rely on techniques very close to those of conventional printing; others turned to original techniques that were in turn extended into modern printing. In 1881 in England appeared the stencil duplicator, basically employing the serigraphic technique. In 1900 a photocopying machine invented in France opened the way to facsimile printing. The offset printing process spread into the area of business printing with small offset duplicating machines; the simplified methods used for preparing plates for these machines eventually were adopted by industrial offset printers.
The application of the electrostatic printing process to xerocopy, perfected in 1938, has since been taken over by industry.
All the various processes of duplication and reproduction of documents make up reprography, a name bestowed during the first congress devoted to these techniques, which was organized at Cologne in 1963. Though its boundaries with conventional printing are poorly delimited, to the extent that reprography can compete with conventional printing when a medium number of copies are concerned, reprography nevertheless represents an original field. In response to the increased need for quality reprography, the typewriter has been improved since the 1950s and given the capability of providing justified composition suitable for conventional printing.
Modern printing techniques
Composition and typesetting
Mechanical composition and typesetting
In the first decades of the 20th century all type was set and composed into columns and pages by hand or by mechanical means. These methods are still widely used.
Letterpress composition by hand
The font, which constitutes a complete set of characters of a given typeface, with duplicate numbers of each letter in proportion to the frequency with which each is used, is stored in the compartments of a case; capital letters, proportionately less frequently called for, are in the upper compartments, whence their name, uppercase, and the small letters in the lower compartments, which are more easily accessible and whence their name, lowercase.
The typographer works standing in front of the case. His principal tools are the composing stick, a metal angle iron with one fixed end and a “knee” with a screw or lever for locking; the line gauge, a ruler graduated in units of typographic measurement; and tweezers.
He locks the knee of the composing stick at the justification; that is, at the length of the line to be composed. Against the inside edge of the stick he places a lead, a strip of nonprinting lead alloy that later enables him, using a second lead, to grip the finished line in order to remove it from the composing stick. Holding the composing stick in one hand, he uses the other to select the individual type characters from the case. He can tell by touching which way up they should go, thanks to a nick indicating the top or bottom of the body (the bottom in English-speaking countries and Germany; elsewhere, the top), and he places them side by side in the composing stick. Having completed the proper number of characters to fill the length of the line with a whole word or at the correct division in a word, he adds as necessary to the nonprinting pieces already in place to mark the spaces between the words until the exact justification is obtained.
Having composed and justified the line, the typographer takes it, gripped by its two leads between the thumb and forefinger of both hands, to place it in a galley, a wooden or metal tray with a raised edge on two or three of its sides.
Semimechanized composition
The Ludlow is considered a combination machine; though it automatically casts slugs, it is related to hand composition by the way the matrices are assembled. The matrices are bronze blocks bearing the letter or sign engraved in intaglio on their lower side and with two shoulders on their upper side.
The composer gathers them individually from the case, which is one of the drawers of a desk, and arranges them side by side in a special composing stick. This steel composing stick is hollowed out in the middle to receive the matrices supported on their shoulders with an adjustable stopscrew for fixing the length of the line. Justification is ensured by blank unengraved matrices in various sizes equally distributed between the words.
The caster resembles a steel workbench with a hollowed-out slot on its surface in which the composing stick is inserted with the matrices face down. A lever starts the casting process by turning on an electric motor. A mold with an opening rises and positions itself under the aligned matrices; a plunger in the melting pot containing the molten alloy forces enough alloy into the mold to cast one line; casting is completed in less than 10 seconds, the mold withdraws and releases the solidified line, and the lever, which releases the composing stick, rises automatically.
Since the body size of the font is a uniform size, the upper part of characters whose body size exceeds its measurement projects beyond each side and has to be supported, when it is being used, with leads.
Since the width of the slugs is also uniform, when shorter lines are being cast the composing stick is furnished with thick, blank matrices; once cast, the line is clipped off to the proper length. For longer lines, composing sticks are used with justifications in multiples of that of the mold. Fractions of the line are cast one after another and fit together exactly. The Ludlow is used especially for casting lines of large type for use as titles and subtitles, using typefaces varying from 12 to 144 points (one point equals 1⁄72, or 0.0138, inch).
The Ludlow caster is complemented by an Elrod caster. This automatically casts nonprinting leads and rules, narrow pieces of nonprinting alloy; both items come in various thicknesses.
Another type of mixed typecaster with manual assembly of the matrices is represented by the All-Purpose Linotype, a sort of Linotype from which only the casting part has been retained. It is used primarily in United States printing establishments. An Italian equivalent, the Nebitype, is used, though less widely, in Europe.
