MUKDEKOUS BOOKS

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 118, 14 November 1929, Page 24

MUKDEKOUS BOOKS

"NATURAL" PROCESS PRINTING

A remarkable chapter in the history of colour-printing concerns books, printed by what is called the "natural" process, says "T.P.'s Weekly," one by which the object to be illustrated usually a leaf, seaweed, flower, or insect—is itself sacrificed, so that it may leave an impression of its form on lead or on prepared paper.

The story of this freakish kind of printing is told by Mr. Martin Hardie (an expert whose name is associated with the Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum) in "English Colour Books," tracing the natural printing back to the mid-days of the eighteenth century, when a Continental work —"Botaniea in Originati"—was issued with twelve hundred plates of botanical subjects, directly impressed on pi-int-ers' ink.

"Ths Discovery of the Natural Printing Process" was the title of a pamphlet published in Vienna in 1853 by Alois Aver, illustrated by plates of ferns, leaves, and seaweeds produced directly from the originals, which were pressed in the .first place on to lead plates.

Henry Bradbury, son of the head of the firm which printed "Punch," published a set of nature-printed plates. In his steps followed a Danish goldsmith, Khyle, who produced natureprinted plates of leaves, bits of lace, bird feathers, fish scales, and snake skins.

In Bradbury's system the impression on the plate is a deep intaglio, and the wonder of it was that the lead should receive a perfect imprint of such a delicate organism as a fern-seed at the moment when tho object itself was squashed to a pulp. In 1855 the "Punch" publishers issued the first English book for which this process was employed, having fifty plates of ferns. A later book was on seaweeds, and two hundred plates showed the tangled intricacies of every species of seaweed, in all their variety of tones, as printed from life.

It was left to the Americans to bring natural-printing to absolute perfection. This was accomplished in an extraordinary book published in Boston in 1900, with the catchy title, "As Nature Shows Them," a work on the moths and butterflies of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains, having fifty-six nature prints, transfers from the insects directly to the paper. The scales of the wings shine on the plates in their natural beauty, the bodies being coloured by hand. Fifty thousand transfers of the moths and butterflies were made for the plates. All the slaughtered insects yielded magnificent impressions, with the perfection and beauty of life, so that on the plates the glint and sheen of the wings is shown with ever-changing effects of iridescent colours. It may fairly be described as a murderous book, but Mr. Martin Hardie has declared: "In the history of colour illustration I know nothing more wonderful."