Pictures in Books It wasn't until the 1460s that woodcuts were included in printing books. Printing type mater and woodcuts side by side in the printing press was initially a difficult feat to master. Printing in more than one color, a distinguishing feature of the to editions of the Mainz Psalter from 1457 and 1459, was discarded, as rhe process proved too time-consuming. The Psalter is nevertheless an aesthetic highlight of the early years of printing - as is the Gutenberg Bible.

Copper Engraving and Etching In the course of the 16th century, copper engravings gradually replaced woodcuts in books as the main for of illustration. Looking at the depictions of workshop and at the chisels and other tools, it is easy to imagine how laborious the work of the copper engraver must have been. For printing these engravings, a special press was needed.

19th Century During the 19th century, the progressing industrialization and mechanization of the world of work spread to the book and printing industry. Jobs carried out by hand became easier. This lead to an immense increase in production which in turn caused the public to exhibit a greater need for information.

The Age of the Iron Printing Presses Initially,19th-centur engineers tried to use manpower more effectively by improving material. In c. 1780 Wilhelm Haas from Switzerland replaced the wood of the printing press with metal, in 1800 English engineer Walter was the first to construct a hand press made entirely of cast iron. This new type of printing press, named after its initiator and benefactor, Lord Charles Stanhope from England, allowed the flat platen to be doubled in size. This meant that with relatively little force yet with significantly increased printing pressure large formats could be printed with one single pull of bar. The use of iron enabled more complex, more efficient lever systems to be built for printing presses, something not possible with wood.

An elegant and decorative example of a hand-lever press is George Clymer's Columbia Press. Originally made in America, the Columbia was also manufactured in Europe from 1817 onwards.

Despite their improved, more robust construction iron printing presses were still based on the principle Gutenberg used in printing, namely that of a flat printing for combined with a flat, platen counter-pressure surface.

Machine for Quicker Printing The first printing machines were built not long after the invention of the iron hand press. In 1811 Friedrich Konig and Andreas Bauer, to engineers from Germany, had their steam-driven, automatic cylinder/flat-bed press patented in England, were the addition and application of the ink to the flat printing form had been completely mechanised.

The press was first put in use in 1812.

Later, Konig and Bauer added a second cylinder to their contraption and in November 1814 used it to print an entire issue of the newspaper "The Times" in one night Another Konig and Bauer machine, an automatic perfecting press built as early as 1816, was capable of printing both sides of a sheet of paper in one operation, using a special system which automatically turned the paper over. Larger numbers of impressions could now be printed within a short space of time, making the automatic cylinder press ideal for producing newspapers, magazines or even encyclopaedias.

Casting Machines The process of producing type mater was accelerated from 1822 onwards with the fabrication of the hand-worked type casting-pump and the first casting-machines. In 1862 the first automatic type casters were able to spit out up to 40 000 single, press-ready characters per day (10 times the number produced by a hand caster), which did not even have to be laboriously finished by hand.

The Big Challenge:Typesetting Machine The time-consuming cast of the typesetter, working by hand, was a process which stubbornly resisted all attempts at the mechanisation. It was not until the end of the 19th century (1886) that Otmar Mergenthaler came up with a practical and - most importantly - financially viable solution in the for of his Linotype machine ( = a line of type, combined line composing and casting machine) .

Paper from the Roll The enormous amount of printed mater produced around the middle of the 19th century required progress to be made in paper manufactured to match the new

technology of printing industry. In 1799 Nicolaus Louis Robert from France produced an endless wire paper-making machine which in principle could produce an endless roll of paper but which still used pulp extracted from linen rags, only available in limited quantities.

It was Friedrich Gottlob Keller’s discovery of wood pulp in 1840 and the manufacture of paper from cellulose by Hugo Burges and Charles Watt in England in 1851 which offered practicable alternative materials, promising to meet the printing industry’s high demand for paper.

New Methods of IllustrationNew technologies also infiltrated book and magazine illustration during the course of the 19th century. The woodcut, engraved on the hand, end-grain wood of the box tree, could be printed with the type matter using a letterpress techniques. Lithography, a flat-bed printing method invented by Alois Senefelder in 1798, was of great significance for printed music and art prints as it could duplicate the original with an extremely high degree of accuracy. Yet for large editions a robust printing from was needed with a high load capacity. Steel engraving, developed in c. 1800 to make forgery proof bank notes, proved itself a suitable medium for reproduction; from 1820 onwards it began to be used in book illustration, in particular to print views of towns and works of art.