If You're Interested in Lithographic Printing You Should Read This

[steve B]

Originally Posted by FrankWakefield

American Lithograph could have bought that to use it, or to deny it to competitors.

Lithography to me means printing from a stone. Smooth, polished flat surface. Wax, fat or oil is placed where they wanted the stone to remain, and then an acid on all of it eats away the unwaxed surface, then it's all cleaned. What's left is a stone plate. I am unsure of the timing, but I think in the late 1800s they got away from stones and started using metal plates.

That sheet that depicts rollers, with faces across the middle one, has the word 'transfer' in the caption. Transfer rollers could have been getting their ink from a stone, or a metal plate.

Old school lithography is a work of beauty, it's art. Until lithography came along, anyone with art on their walls would have had original art. Currier and Ives is a name some of us recognize. That's because they got art, lithographic art, into the homes of their subscribers and patrons. They could print that horse drawn sleigh hauling a happy family across a snow covered bridge and lane and through the woods on their way to grandmother's house. All of these little cards we collect were, and ARE, works of art.

That was the original form it took, sometimes called direct lithography. Stone gets wet and inked and the paper contacts the stone directly.

There are/were some proofing presses that still do that, as well as a few places that print art.

Later flatbed presses were offset lithography, where the stone was inked, and transferred the image onto a rubber roller that transferred the image to the paper.

The stones for that needed non-reversed images.

And the way they were laid out was interesting. a smaller stone had the master image, and it was wet and inked with a very thick tarlike ink. That was printed onto basically tissue paper, making a transfer. Similar to the early 60's Topps iron on transfers.

Those transfers were applied to the stone, and then the thin paper was removed using some solvent. Once they were all down, the etching process went on as usual.

"Modern" presses were also offset, but the plates were thin aluminum coated with a limestone like surface. That had a thin wax layer that was light sensitive so they could be exposed using a photographic negative, than developed, in the etching process.

There are newer versions that computer generate the plates on the press. I've read a bit about them, but haven't seen one in person.