NINETEENTH-CENTURY PRINTING PRACTICES AND THE IRON HANDPRESS

With Selected Readings: Volumes One & Two. Readings from printers' manuals provide insight on printing techniques from the late 17th through the 19th century. In two hefty volumes, Rummonds, author of the classic Printing on the Iron Handpress (1998), introduces chapters on topics including the printing office (1825 Hansard); the Pressroom 1882; Electrical Power 1894; Elevators 1894; and its personnel like the compositor and pressmen, machine men, overseers, book and paper warehousemen and apprentices; setting up and maintaining the iron handpress like Brooke's, Ramage and Stanhope, Cogger, Columbian, Ruthven, Dr Church's, the Russel, the Washington, the Imperial, the Britannia and Eagle printing presses; composition and correcting; paper; inks and inking apparatus; printing in gold, bronzing, and embossing; printing wood engravings and other relief illustrations; stereotype and electrotype printing; fine presswork. Details how to keep the press clean, oiling, rags and lubrications, covering the tympans and the frisket. Then we move on to moveable-type printing with an extract from Hansard 1825, the composing room with observations from Harpel 1870, Lord Stanhope's explanation, composing-sticks, the quality of type, type metal, copper-faced type, wood type, storing wood letters, spacing, leads, clumps, reglets, labour-saving rules, space lines, the scale of sizes, composing, tying up pages, fast composition, the copy-holder, galleys and letter boards, before looking at Imposing, Making Margins, Locking Up Forms, Proofs, reading and correcting, correcting in the metal, making ready the form, making register, paper and dampening paper. And that is just volume one. Volume two covers black ink, coloured ink, balls, rollers and inking apparatus, presswork, printing multiple colours, wood engravings and other relief illustrations, stereotype and electrotype printing, fine printing and the business of printing. With appendices and bibliographies, it is truly an encyclopaedic examination of printing techniques which uses selected readings from printers' manuals beginning with Joseph Moxon's Mechanick Exercises of 1683 and culminating with John Southward's Practical Printing of 1900. Rummonds has distilled over 200 years of printers' wisdom into a very readable and important text. With almost 500 rare and scarce woodcuts, engravings and photographs. Two volumes, both paperback, 482 pages and the second running to a total of 1051 pages both together. First edition 2004. 20 x 28cm.