I may or may not finish this in time to hand to my long-suffering printer to make into a Christmas card. Of course it’s a spoof of Washington Crossing the Delaware. I posted about this event as part of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Reading & Writing when I was trying to show the progression from printing press to literacy to political pamphlets to the American War of Independence. Washington crossed the Delaware on Christmas and attacked while the Hessians were still drinking egg nog and opening their presents.
Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Reading & Writing.
Don’t forget: I wrote another Western Civ User’s Guide! Back to the beginning of The Western Civ User’s Guide to Time & Space.
Okay, three. It’s true, I didn’t use cabinet-grade wood on this or my other cabinets. I’m trying to use up lumber that’s been laying around in my garage for years. Dig those crazy dadoes!
Here’s another of my Major Prophets of the Old Testament cheat sheets. This time it’s Daniel! You’ve seen the sketch, now you can enjoy seeing me color. First I block in the dark areas with good old Burnt Sienna, then I start coloring. First up is one of the lions whose den Daniel was made to enter!
Great galloping Agamemnon—it’s been months since I posted here!
It’s been a full summer. I’ve been busy with a variety of projects. I returned to work on my graphic novel, Gloriana. Also, I’ve been improving my kitchen—I’m almost done building a couple of wall cabinets. Here are some photos of the ‘dry assembly’ (no glue). I was as amazed as you must be that this monkey puzzle fit together.
Would all this have happened if the Phoenicians hadn’t invented the alphabet? Sure, probably—but at some point someone would have had to invent it, otherwise Gutenburg’s printing press is more trouble than it’s worth. Without the printed word, the Protestant Reformation wouldn’t have gotten off the ground, the American Revolution wouldn’t have happened, there wouldn’t have been created a constitutional republican form of government. Luckily for us, the Phoenicians did invent the alphabet, right here in good old Western Civilization. I’d say we owe all visual mass-communication, all literacy, all reading & writing to the Phoenicians. We should send them a nice thank-you note.
That’s about all I have for The Western Civ User’s Guide to Reading & Writing. Just one more maybe-not-so-tiny item: you’re reading this goofball history blog because somebody taught you how to read. You’re literate. In all the world’s history, you belong to a teensy-weensy elite group of lucky people. The links below show that education for everybody wasn’t always a thing. It’s too late to thank those Phoenicians from long ago, but we sure can thank our teachers, librarians, maybe parents or other relatives and friends who spent time teaching us the marvelous skill of literacy. Someone taught you how to read & write. Give them a kiss, call them, send a card—tell ‘em they made a difference!
I feel I may be getting too far into the weeds with modern printing technology. This little history is supposed to be about reading and writing. I’m telling you all this because as printing advanced, it became easier and less expensive to get written words out to everybody. The mechanized printing press and moveable type are what made people literate. Before Gutenburg, it took a scriptorium full of monks to hand-letter one book. Hardly anybody could afford to own a hand-lettered book, so there was hardly any point in learning to read for most folks. But, the printing press could crank out page after page in minutes instead of months. Suddenly the printed word was affordable for a humongous audience. Regular shmoes could buy a pamphlet and read it. From there we tinkered with the process of making type and reproducing it on paper. To mass-produce the printed word in ever-bigger quantities, we swapped relief printing for offset printing. The next big deal was digital printing, where letterforms are designed using pixels, and a page of type can be printed directly from your computer’s design program. All electronically! Nowadays, you can even skip using paper altogether and publish your words on the internet. You guys may well live to see the end of printed newspapers, magazines and books—just like we don’t ride horses to get around anymore.
In the olden days, artists drew images onto that flat stone surface with a china marker and paint that ink could stick to. Then along came photography.
Photography changed everything in the printing business. Photography makes images on a treated piece of paper—the paper is exposed to light (photo), it’s bathed in chemicals, and the light-exposed area turns black. Those light-exposed areas can be pictures or lettering.
My first graphic design job was paste-up artist at Fan-Sy Printing in New York City. Here’s my memory of Sy, the owner and typesetter—I think he used a Compugraphic. That little print shop printed everything: take-out menus, insurance forms and high-end programs for gala events.
When photo-typesetters composed a paragraph of type, they selected letters on a diatype machine and a projector shot light through a disc of plastic onto photographic paper. The disc was black except for the letters which were clear. So each letter got light shot through it. The paper was bathed in chemicals and the letters appeared as a headline or paragraph. The paper type and other images were assembled on illustration board—a kind of high-end cardboard with a smooth white surface—by paste-up artists. The boards were called mechanicals or paste-ups. Everything on the mechanical was black or white. Then a dark-room guy would photograph the mechanical to get a negative. The negative was used to make a plate—a flexible sheet of lightweight aluminum. All the type and images on the plate accepted oil-based printing ink. No more relief printing. The flexible plate was attached to a cylinder on the printing press. Water kept it wet. As it turned, it picked up ink from a reservoir and transfered its image onto a rubber blanket wrapped around another cylinder. The blanket printed the image onto paper.
A paste-up artist’s work station had a drawing board with T-square, triangle, ruling pens, razor blades and a jar of rubber cement.
There’s a reason I’m telling you about lithography. Of course you knew there’d be a reason. Last post we talked about lithography. Before that, we talked about relief-printing with a cylindrical plate, rather than a flat one like on a Gutenburg press.
Now, we can talk about lithography using a cylindrical plate! It’s called offset lithography. Instead of a stone, our image is on a flexible piece of metal. The same rules apply: oil-based ink sticks to the image on the plate; water keeps the ink from sticking to the rest of the plate. What the heck does ‘offset’ mean? That’s an excellent question. As the cylinders on the press go round and round, the image is transfered onto a rubber cylinder which then transfers onto the paper. The image is ‘offset’ from one to the other.
“C’mon, Manders!” you exclaim, “What could possibly be the point of having that extra step?”
Well, the rubber cylinder, or blanket, easily conforms to the surface of the paper—more than metal does. Every bit of the offset image makes it onto the paper. Plus, that rubber cylinder is soft, flexible, forgiving, so the original image on the metal cylinder lasts longer. If you’re printing the evening edition of the Daily Planet, you’ll be able to print squadrillions of copies onto a roll (a really big roll) of newsprint and every copy will look good.
People want their news in a hurry, so as quickly as those pages are printed they get cut into newspaper-sized pages. In old black and white movies, sometimes they show this kind of press (called a web press) cranking out front pages at lightning speed.
A problem with relief printing is that the relief wears down after awhile. Type metal is softer than most metals. It doesn’t take much to ding it.
But wait! There’s another way to transfer an inky image onto paper! It’s called lithography—from Latin root words: litho for stone, graph for mark or printed image.
How does it work? Here’s the no-frills-stripped-down explanation: you get an absolutely flat piece of limestone and draw an image on it with a grease pencil. Wet the flat surface with water. The greasy image resists water; water doesn’t stick to the image. Roll on oil-based ink. The ink sticks to the image but not the rest of the stone, which is wet. Put a piece of paper on top and apply pressure. The grease-pencil image transfers to the paper. You can pull gazillions of prints this way and the image won’t wear down.
Lithography stone
Lithography was invented around 1796 by Alois Senefelder. Artists of the 1800s seized on lithography because you can get shading—light or dark tones—that you can’t easily get from relief printing.
You unravel the rolled-up paper to expose the stick of waxy, greasy marker.
My last post about this project (link below) was from a couple of years ago. As you can see in these newer photos, I rebuilt the base cabinet to fit my lovely old porcelain sink. The front corners of the cabinet had to mimic the chamfered front of the sink. This sink I got through FaceBook Market for a song—a song! It fits right in my old farmhouse kitchen.
Also, I’d threatened to make my own new cabinet doors in that last post (one photo below shows the 1970s-era masonite doors). Instead, I got smart and just ordered some new doors from Home Depot. The price I paid made it more than worth-while to skip the hours of building doors from scratch.
I kept the big old base cabinet that came with the house and I’m redesigning it as an island. My sister donated a brace of newel posts that will become columns holding up the cantilevered counter. I reused all the hardware and bought new drawer-pulls and knobs to mimic the original stuff. Everything gets painted with Rustoleum oil-based gloss.
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