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printing

Cracks in Etched Plates
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Cracks in Etched Plates

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Caroline Duroselle-Melish

Originally, I was going to do a crocodile post about the binding of this architecture book by Jacques Androuet du Cerceau: Title page of Folger NA2625 .A63 1615 Cage Photo by Caroline Duroselle-Melish But after I thought about it, it…

Uncut, unopened, untrimmed, uh-oh
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Uncut, unopened, untrimmed, uh-oh

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Author
Erin Blake

Do you despair when when you hear “decimate” used to describe a reduction of more than ten percent? Does seeing the caption “Big Ben” on a souvenir postcard showing a London clock tower rather than the largest bell within it make you cringe? If so, heed this warning: never use the phrase…

Fallen Type
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Fallen Type

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Author
Caroline Duroselle-Melish

Those of you who replied to the Crocodile post last week guessed right: what you see in this image is a piece of fallen type that was printed by accident over a page of text being printed. The height of…

Printers and authors in 1659
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Printers and authors in 1659

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Author
Heather Wolfe

John Ward’s sixteen notebooks, once they are fully transcribed for EMMO, are going to be an incredibly rich source for nearly everyone who thinks about or studies early modern England. Most people have heard about them because of John Ward’s…

Publishing Against the King: French Civil War Pamphlets
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Publishing Against the King: French Civil War Pamphlets

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Author
Caroline Duroselle-Melish

From 1648 to 1653 a civil war, known as the Fronde, raged in France, with the nobility and most of the people of France on one side, and the royal government under the child-king Louis XIV and his hated chief…

Correcting with cancel slips
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Correcting with cancel slips

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Sarah Werner

correcting 4 lines (STC 25286; sig. 1r)Thanks to my last post, when Mitch Fraas and I were looking at how different copies of the same book handled having a printer error (Judas instead of Jesus, in that case), I’ve spent the…

Mezzotint!
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Mezzotint!

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Author
Erin Blake

Simran Thadani’s wild guess for the December Crocodile Mystery, backed up by Martin Antonetti and Deborah J. Leslie, is our winner. This month’s image is a close-up of the lower right edge of a mezzotint engraving. The lines that look…

A practical look at the Practical Science of Printing
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A practical look at the Practical Science of Printing

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Author
Sarah Werner

title page for Fertel, La science pratique de l’imprimerie In 1723, a Frenchman named Martin-Dominque Fertel published a book on printing, La science pratique de l’imprimerie. It’s good to look at early printing manuals, especially when one is trying to…

It's the details thnt matter
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It's the details thnt matter

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Author
Sarah Werner

There were two odd things happening in last week’s crocodile mystery, which featured an opening from the first English edition of Nicolàs Monardes’s Joyfull newes out of the newe founde worlde (STC 18005). The first was the easier to spot, assuming you…

Proof prints, part two; or, Proofs and proofiness
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Proof prints, part two; or, Proofs and proofiness

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Author
Erin Blake

Last month’s post from me (your friendly neighborhood art historian) looked at trial proofs and progressive proofs (see Proof prints, part one). As promised, here’s a look at a third kind of proof in printmaking: proofs that aren’t really “proofs” as…

Proof prints, part one
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Proof prints, part one

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Author
Erin Blake

Last time I posted on The Collation (Two disciplines separated by a common language, 30 April 2013), I went off on a bit of a rant about vocabulary barriers between printed pictures and printed words. Guess what? There’s more! That…

Secret histories of books
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Secret histories of books

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Author
Sarah Werner

This month’s crocodile mystery was a bit more challenging than recent ones (perhaps not helped by my cryptic “suitable for April” introduction), but Aaron Pratt guessed the gist of it: the image was a detail of a page printed in…

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