Keywords
Citation
Rogerson, I. (2002), "Breaking the Mould: The First Hundred Years of Lithography", Library Review, Vol. 51 No. 7, pp. 383-383. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2002.51.7.383.5
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Michael Twyman, former Professor of Typography and Graphic Communication at the University of Reading, is the foremost authority on the history of lithographic printing and has written extensively on the subject. This well‐produced record of his Panizzi Lectures 2000 is an exhaustive survey of the discovery and growth of the process, an in‐depth examination of the successive technical developments which gave rise to books and other artefacts of outstanding beauty and an account of the products of the process and their various uses.
Twyman is adept at exploring avenues which, at first sight, might appear to be academic fussiness, but on close examination, are highly relevant to European social history. In dealing with the spread of the process, he shows how the industry eventually gravitated towards its markets. In London, for example, firms moved from west to east as the City, with its finance houses and law firms, increasingly became a huge consumer.
“Making the marks”, the second lecture, is the title aptly used “to describe the range of activities concerned with giving form to pictures, diagrams and decoration, and also to words and numbers”. And it is here that Twyman excels. No other work encountered by the reviewer had dealt with technical processes in such a detailed yet lucid manner. There is no jargon to confuse and there is no reason why any reader should fail to understand fully what might appear to be the most complex of all printing processes.
The illustrations, in both colour and black and white, have been carefully chosen to inform the well‐printed text. The lectures are extensively referenced and the whole forms a substantial contribution to the literature of the history of printing. It is hoped that, sometime in the future, Professor Twyman turns his attention to the twentieth‐century revival of lithography as a creative artistic endeavour and the subsequent rise of offset lithography in the computer age.